50 pages • 1-hour read
You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
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Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Dirty Business: The Messy Affair of Rejecting Shame by Tanya Denise Fields”
Tanya Denise Fields carried shame throughout her life. She was ashamed of her appearance and the darkness of her skin. She felt shame for having six children with four fathers and for living with a man who physically, emotionally, and verbally abused her. Shame manifested in her body, but her body was also a source of her shame. After almost being murdered in front of her children by her partner, Fields embraces her own worthiness, packing up her children and moving to the PATH Homeless Assessment Shelter.
The four months she spends in the care of the Department of Homeless Services are brutal, and she worries that she made the wrong decision. However, she persists in confronting her shame by speaking out about her experiences on social media. Fields begins to understand that shame was her inheritance, passed on to her by white supremacy. The more she shares her story, the more other women speak up, too. After four months at the domestic violence shelter, Fields moves her family into an apartment with enough room for everyone, and she begins to embrace joy. Confronting The Nature of Shame was difficult work, but Fields grew comfortable with being uncomfortable. She finally feels that she and her children could simply be.
Chapter 4 Summary: “My Head Is a Part of My Body and Other Notes on Crazy by Kiese Makeba Laymon”
Kiese Makeba Laymon opens his essay with a bold statement: “I do not want to be killed by a white doctor in America. I think I will be killed by a white doctor in America” (33). After having his symptoms repeatedly dismissed by doctors, Laymon learned that he was having panic attacks. His doctors never address his mental health.
Laymon put up with hip pain for 10 years before seeing a doctor. After x-rays, the doctor dismissed Laymon’s desire to have hip surgery and insisted that he try shots first. Because Laymon did not want to rely on the help of a medical professional that he did not trust, he did not call to have the prescription refilled. During the pandemic, Laymon began to write apologies to people he had hurt. As difficult as this was, he found it even more challenging when he began to write apologies to the body parts he had neglected. When he apologized to his brain, he began to see how he allowed a system that did not care for Black people to inhibit the care he gave to himself.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Wisdom of Process by Prentis Hemphill”
Prentis Hemphill, a therapist and somatics teacher, describes their personal process of engaging with healing. Hemphill explains that Black individuals carry ancestral trauma and have learned to hide that trauma, often in the body. As a child, Hemphill’s household was one of love and violence, and no one could say what might flip the switch. While attending a school outside of their neighborhood, Hemphill felt ashamed of the state of their house and of their difference from the white children at their school, so they learned to pretend. When they could not pretend, they learned to push people away. Hemphill learned to keep all their pain inside, and that internalized trauma turned into shame. Hemphill struggled to process this shame, and was therefore unable to identify how their personal history was affecting their present.
In such circumstances, denial can feel like an easy solution, but Hemphill explains that denial is temporary, and the emotions and feelings that are caused by trauma wait under the surface. According to Hemphill, Black people have a unique relationship with trauma, as it is a culmination of ancestral trauma:
“[A] concentration of generations of these experiences, experiences that overwhelm not only the individual but the community, enforced and enacted through policies that have displaced us and criminalized our cultural practices that help us heal (51).
A true process of healing understands trauma in this political and social context.
Chapters 3-5 Analysis
Each of these three chapters emphasizes the relationship between the body and trauma. For Tanya Denise Fields, whose husband was physically abusive, her body is the space where others forced vulnerability upon her. Fields believed her body to be synonymous with her shame, writing, “It has not only lived in my body, it has been because of my body, and everything else has rippled out from there” (23). She believed that others saw her through the lens of racial stereotypes, and this contributed to her shame. The Trauma of Racism and White Supremacy controlled how she saw herself, and her self-worth was tied to a false narrative perpetuated by hatred. Fields describes this shame as something inherited and nurtured by a society that projects violence and criticism on Black women’s bodies. Reclaiming her life required confronting The Nature of Shame and recognizing her body for what it is: healthy, beautiful, and strong.
Kiese Makeba Laymon furthers this idea by exploring how a predominantly white medical practice demeans and undermines the experiences of Black patients. Laymon uses his personal experiences to highlight the discrimination Black patients face in the American healthcare system. The word “crazy” is used to emphasize Laymon’s experiences with mental illness, as well as the radical disparity between Black and white individuals’ medical experiences. When experiencing panic attacks, doctors were dismissive and did not consider mental illness as a contributing factor to Laymon’s symptoms. Continuing the thematic relationship of mental and physical health to The Trauma of Racism and White Supremacy, Hemphill’s essay, “The Wisdom of Process,” reflects their background in therapy. Hemphill is a proponent of somatics, a field of therapeutic work that focuses on how trauma manifests in the body, and they assert that the impacts of white supremacist oppression live in the body in the form of shame, and that Black people thus have a unique relationship with body-based shame.
All three writers in this section challenge the power white supremacy has over the way they view themselves, addressing the Nature of Shame and denouncing it for the lie that it is. White supremacy has a history of controlling Black bodies. Slavery served as a form of total control, and its abolishment created pathways for new forms of dominance. The persistence of white supremacy means the invention of new means of hegemony, and these writers address the impact of these new vectors of power. Fields reclaims her narrative and engages in self-love. Laymon learns to appreciate his body for what it is and to apologize for his neglect of it. Hemphill identifies the way trauma lives in their body and, instead of feeling shame, begins to unpack the political and social contexts that influenced their sense of self-worth.
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