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

The introduction serves as an interview between Brené Brown and Tarana Burke. Burke approached Brown after a social media event in 2020. Tarana was grappling with the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by law enforcement and the subsequent public unrest. Burke felt empowered by Brown’s work, but also felt Black voices had been left out of conversations about shame and vulnerability. Brown, who was eager to make her work more inclusive, suggested co-creation as a way to expand the discussion.

Watching her friends and family, Burke noticed two things: the stifling and dangerous presence of shame, and a powerful resistance to it. Brown hopes that compiling the stories in the anthology will help others to identify and name this resistance. Brown and Burke discuss the habits they want to develop as they move through the project. Burke highlights how her experiences with shame and vulnerability as a Black woman are different from Brown’s. She explains that the world needs antiracism, but antiracism cannot exist without a practice of vulnerability.

Both women acknowledge that the stories in the collection can be overwhelming.