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504 reviews for:
You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
Tarana Burke, Brené Brown
4.56 AVERAGE
504 reviews for:
You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience
Tarana Burke, Brené Brown
4.56 AVERAGE
Compiled and edited by Tarana Burke and Brene Brown, this is a great collection of essays from a diverse group of Black voices on their lived experiences with being vulnerable, dealing with systemic racism and the traumas that has caused them. Highly recommend. I especially enjoyed the essays by disability activist, Keah Brown and actor Laverne Cox.
Favorite quotes:
"We've created a culture in which it's unsafe for you to be vulnerability."
"We need to live in an antiracist society and people need to learn to be antiracist and practice antiracism but I do not believe your antiracism work if you have not engaged with Black humanity."
"If you don't see the heart and the love and the humanity and the joy of the Black experience, of Black community, then the antiracism work is bankrupt."
"If we don't talk about trauma, if we don't talk about shame and do the work to begin to heal, to develop shame and trauma resilience, we can't fully come together. The community of us is in so much pain, so much hurt. What I've been trying to show is that that pain, that hurt is intergenerational, it's historical and it's collective, hurt people hurt people."
Favorite quotes:
"We've created a culture in which it's unsafe for you to be vulnerability."
"We need to live in an antiracist society and people need to learn to be antiracist and practice antiracism but I do not believe your antiracism work if you have not engaged with Black humanity."
"If you don't see the heart and the love and the humanity and the joy of the Black experience, of Black community, then the antiracism work is bankrupt."
"If we don't talk about trauma, if we don't talk about shame and do the work to begin to heal, to develop shame and trauma resilience, we can't fully come together. The community of us is in so much pain, so much hurt. What I've been trying to show is that that pain, that hurt is intergenerational, it's historical and it's collective, hurt people hurt people."
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
This was a hard read, but an important read. All of the contributors to this essay collection had valuable contributions, but some essays were stronger than others. For that reason, I was planning on giving this book three stars instead of four, but the final two essays brought this collection home in a very powerful way. I believe this book has something that everyone can resonate with or gain understanding from. I hope this is the just the start of a conversation about the intersection of race, vulnerability, and shame.
I am sad that it took me so long to finish this book but I am so glad I did. So many great contributors and stories that need to be heard and known by everyone.
You Are the Best Thing is a collection of essays written by different Black authors about their experience with shame. In the introduction the questions got asked, What is the Black experience with shame resilience? Because white supremacy has added another layer to the kind of shame we have to deal with, and the kind of resilience we have to build, and the kind of vulnerability that we are constantly subjected to whether we choose it or not.
I think overall the collection could have been a lot more cohesive, it did not feel like one overall theme. I did however felt like the essays that were strong were STRONG and the ones that were weak were very meh. I absolutely loved Tanya Denise Fields' Dirty Business Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts Love Lifted Me and Sonya Renee Taylor's Running out of Gas .
I am happy that this collection exists and Black people are able to write freely about shame and examining generational trauma.
I think overall the collection could have been a lot more cohesive, it did not feel like one overall theme. I did however felt like the essays that were strong were STRONG and the ones that were weak were very meh. I absolutely loved Tanya Denise Fields' Dirty Business Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts Love Lifted Me and Sonya Renee Taylor's Running out of Gas .
I am happy that this collection exists and Black people are able to write freely about shame and examining generational trauma.
After listening to this I've come to the realization that this is one I need to own. Amazing book and one I anticipate I will want to reread. I also look forward to learning more about the people that contributed.