You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience

Jessica J. Williams writes about learning to surrender. While writing, she learned to surrender to the words on the page; sometimes she did not even know how she felt until she read what she had written. When Williams was sexually assaulted in graduate school, she had even more learn to about surrender. She was angry and frustrated that her story had been hijacked by someone else, and she did not know where to begin to heal. Everyone around her wanted her to stop talking about her experience, to “get over it.” But therapy and valuable relationships with others taught Williams to value and acknowledge her experience and to surrender to the process.

Williams’s journey with trauma leads her to change her approach as an educator. She works with students of color to seek justice against faculty and administration who had mistreated them, and she gives herself time off to care for her mental health. Williams was ultimately asked to resign, and she recognizes that she was challenging the racist structures of higher education. Surrendering to the process and honoring her experiences gave Williams the strength she needed to keep moving forward and to produce beauty and knowledge.

Aiko D. Bethea attended an all-white gifted school as a young girl, and she was keenly aware how everyone saw her: poor and Black. Bethea explains that to be Black and a woman means that others will always inflict specific ideologies upon her identity: “When you’re seen, you’re seen as everything that a white supremacist society associates with being a Black woman: poor, uneducated, promiscuous, unattractive, sassy, loud. You walk into every room at a deficit” (180). Bethea suggests that people have four specific responses to these outside perceptions: assimilation, fighting by wielding shame as a weapon, hiding, and living wholeheartedly. The first three responses are examples of using armor for protection.

Marginalized people may react to their unacceptance within white culture by seeking to fit into that culture through academic and professional credentials, beauty, etc. Therefore, worthiness is associated with who can be the most white-like. Another reaction is through toughness and nonconformity which utilize anger and judgment. Reacting by hiding isolates the individual from their own strength and worth. Bethea promotes shame resilience and living wholeheartedly as a reaction that empowers and heals. She identifies tools of shame resilience, like creativity, naming, community, learner mindset, and connection.

Imani Perry draws attention to the ways Black people have vulnerability forced upon them, leaving them exposed to greater risk. This forced vulnerability, often physical, differs from emotional vulnerability. Perry suggests that Black mothers face unique challenges with forced vulnerability. Because empathy is often controlled by white supremacy, the humanity of Black mothers is ignored. Black women work extremely hard to maintain their own success while caring for their children; when one of these elements of their lives suffers, they are made to feel ashamed for not being enough.

Perry argues that Black women are subject to contradictory messages. They are told to break structural and oppressive cycles with their children while repeatedly being told that they must be strong and not vulnerable. They are criticized for how well they care for others while given no space or time to care for themselves. Their experiences are separated from context. Perry shows how vulnerability can help women, but she acknowledges that vulnerability is continual work.

Tarana Burke writes the final essay in the anthology, and she structures it as a letter to her younger self, which functions as an extension of empathy to herself. When she was younger, Burke tried to adhere to the expectations of white supremacist culture: she was the good girl and smart girl. But the burden of living up to others’ ideas of who she was became too heavy to carry. Burke looks at her child self with compassion. When staying at a friend’s house, her friend’s father asked her for a goodnight kiss, igniting a trauma response. By middle school, she learned to stuff down her emotions and experiences. She also learned to speak negatively toward herself. Each new strategy revealed the same problem. She could not contain all she was bottling up inside.

Burke kept pushing away her needs and emotions, even while helping others. She promised herself that she would seek treatment for anxiety but never did. She believed that her ability to hide her struggles was indicative of her strength. In her letter, Burke reminds herself of the hard work she did to unpack the trauma that she worked so hard to tuck away. She then acknowledges the work that still must be done. Burke, who has devoted her life to the liberation and healing of others, reminds herself that she must also bring liberation and healing to herself.