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

“I realized that perhaps I’ve scratched at the emotional laceration of shame, of selfishness. But if my mother is right, the itching isn’t coming from infection anymore, it’s coming from the fact I’ve never removed the dressing from the wound.”

In his essay, Reynolds learns what it means to confront his shame, realizing he has spent his adulthood trying to atone for leaving his mother during her surgery. In his essay, Reynolds shows how his tendency to carry shame with him was set in place at birth. The trips with his mother to visit Reynolds’s ailing grandfather instilled a value of putting family first, and Reynolds saw his action as a betrayal of that principle. 

“For me, and many Black people, the data revealed by systemic racism isn’t a vague notion but a real enemy that may turn and come after me, at the moment when I’m too joyful to pay attention.”

In this passage, Austin Channing Brown describes her confrontation with foreboding joy. The Trauma of Racism and White Supremacy activated her sense that joy was something to be viewed with suspicion. Her experiences taught her that there was no point in engaging with joy in the moment; around the corner, a danger always lurked. Channing Brown’s understanding of foreboding joy comes from Brené Brown.

“But our community has learned that even the darkest depths of human evil cannot stuff out our experience of joy.”

This quotation represents Austin Channing Brown’s reclamation of joy. She asserts that white supremacy cannot and should not stifle joy. This connects to the theme of Vulnerability as Resistance. Vulnerability, also known as emotional risk, is synonymous with joy.