After graduating high school, Brown attends North Park University, a private Christian college in Chicago, Illinois. Her freshman year, she and her classmates embark on Sankofa, a three-day bus tour of the American South that pairs Black and White students. On the first stop, the students tour a Louisiana plantation led by guides who downplay the brutalities of slavery and romanticize plantation life. Afterwards, when the Black students express their anger at the guides’ historical revisionism, the White students respond defensively. They cite the Holocaust and the Irish potato famine as tragedies suffered by White people, effectively minimizing the atrocities of slavery.

Next, the students visit a museum devoted entirely to the history of lynching. Genuinely shaken by the images of White families celebrating amid burnt and mutilated Black bodies, the White students nevertheless react even more defensively, as if to distance themselves from these unforgivable crimes. In a break from the social conventions of respectability politics, one Black student says, “I think I’ve just been convinced that white people are innately evil. You can’t help it. You steal and kill, you enslave and lynch. You are just evil” (57). The words that most impact Brown, however, come from a White student, who says, “Doing nothing is no longer an option for me” (58).