50 pages • 1 hour read
Brené Brown, Tarana BurkeYou Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary: “A Conversation”
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. Brown explains that the essays helped her to understand the role of lovelessness in white supremacy and the courage it takes to respond to lovelessness with love. They also helped her examine how intergenerational trauma traps individuals in a harmful cycle. Burke appreciates how the stories show the emotionality of Black experiences rather than only tackling issues from an intellectual or academic point of view.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Between Us: A Reckoning with My Mother by Jason Reynolds”
When Jason Reynolds was 13, he drove nine hours to South Carolina with his mother to care for Jason’s grandfather, who had recently had his leg amputated. Jason’s grandfather died shortly after, never leaving the hospital. Reynolds’s mother grew up on a large farm owned and operated by her great-great-grandfather, who acquired the land after being emancipated. Reynolds’s great-great-grandfather had a son who adopted Reynolds’s grandfather. Although the family moved to Washington, DC, to find a better life, Reynolds’s grandfather and his wife returned to South Carolina after their children were grown. Reynolds recalls the car ride with his mother to South Carolina, how they listened to music and talked about what it means to live a meaningful life.
When Jason turned 17, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Reynolds had to grow up fast and care for his mother. After he graduates high school, he moves to New York City to become a writer. Just as he is about to secure a literary agent, he discovers that his mother has been admitted to the hospital for scar tissue complications. The day of her surgery, Reynolds travels to New York to sign his contract; for years following, he feels immense guilt. His mother, who is now 75, encouraged her son to forgive himself: “Why be ashamed of what you’ve atoned for?” (12). Reynolds realizes he could let go of his shame.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Joy I Have by Austin Channing Brown”
Austin Channing Brown and her husband collect horror DVDs. Channing Brown recognizes that horror films play off a basic human tendency to expect tragedy, with each film opening with calm and merriment, before danger cuts through the joyful scene. Channing Brown experiences this feeling in her daily life as she interacts with those she loves. When she talks with her grandmother, she worries that her grandmother might not live for much longer. When she spends time with her son, she worries that he might be taken from her. She looks at his face framed by the hood of his jacket and thinks how he looks like Trayvon Martin, a teenage boy who was killed by a police officer in 2012. Channing Brown talks to other women of color in her book club who share her fear and feel unable to accept joy or pursue the activities they love. One woman shares that she enjoys walking around her neighborhood, but worries that someone may call the police when they see her. Another explains that she has difficulty allowing her children to play outside.
Foreboding joy is something all humans experience, but Channing Brown asserts that people of color have a unique relationship to foreboding joy. Their anxiety for what might happen is born from reality: “For Black people, and other people of color, there is a level of apprehension that isn’t wrought from an uneasy feeling of undeservedness but from the knowledge that racism is the silent stalker always willing to wring joy from our lives” (15). While speaking with other Black mothers, Channing Brown finds that they experience this same sense of foreboding joy. Many of them alter or avoid their favorite activities out of fear of what might happen. Channing Brown argues that Black communities have often used joy as an act of resilience, and that choosing to be joyful is courageous in the face of adversity. Channing Brown encourages others to make choices that might help lower the risk of tragedy while maintaining their sense of joy.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
Burke and Brené Brown select Jason Reynolds’s essay to open their exploration of shame and vulnerability within Black communities. Reynolds’s grandfather carried the weight of his family’s history, and his farm represented resistance to shame; his grandfather had been enslaved and reclaimed his life in a spectacular way. Although Reynolds’s grandfather tried to leave the farm, he felt pulled back toward it, and Reynolds’s mother, too, felt the pull, which demonstrates The Vulnerability of Resistance. Reynolds and her grandfather made themselves vulnerable through their devotion to each other and to the farm.
Reynold’s mother models two values that Reynolds feels are impactful: she puts family first, and she encourages her son to follow his dreams and find his purpose. As Reynolds grapples with leaving his mother during her surgery, he feels the familiar tug of the family first value competing with the lessons his mother taught him about making his place in the world. Reynolds’s mother encourages him to stop admonishing himself for something he has already atoned for—building the theme of The Nature of Shame. Reynolds’s story demonstrates several important points in Burke and Brené Brown’s introduction, both the lasting effects of generational trauma and how internalized shame and guilt undervalues one’s accomplishments and sense of self-worth.
In Chapter 2, Austin Channing Brown addresses vulnerability and foreboding joy. She shows how people of color in the United States have a special relationship with foreboding joy, rooted in the effects of white supremacy, and she shares conversations she has with other women of color to demonstrate this fear. In Daring Greatly (2012), Brené Brown explains that foreboding joy leaves individuals with a sense of unworthiness. Fear and a sense of unworthiness function as outcomes of The Trauma of Racism and White Supremacy. Channing Brown explains that white supremacy is never about deservedness, but it leaves individuals with a feeling that they do not warrant joy. Channing Brown argues that joy, an open defiance to white supremacy, is an act of resistance.
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