Let's talk about 'skinfolk' and 'kinfolk' in publishing and academia

This may surprise you, but, Brené Brown gave me a little clarity.

Photo by Francis Odeyemi on Unsplash

I have long been critical of Brené Brown’s work. I have shared in a few places on social media (like Twitter when it was a thing) that I generally find Brown’s work unappealing and irrelevant to my own experiences. Her inability to fully sit with her own whiteness and reflect on the ways it intersects with her notions of vulnerability and shame was always very off-putting to me. But, this past weekend, while attending my first Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Los Angeles, I decided to start reading her 2012 NYT best-seller, Daring Greatly. Surprisingly, I realized that her books may not help me understand my own experiences but they help to provide insight on the ways that people move from shame, fear, and self-protection around me.

Let me explain.

As a Black, queer, trans, neurodivergent and disabled working-class person who has attended elite, predominantly white universities for most of my educational career, I have always marveled at the ways that perception and assumption shape so much of the world around me. Growing up, I always understood that there were community outsiders seeking to place me and my kinfolk in boxes, citing “broken windows” logics to police our communities, and relying on tired stereotypes about Black folks to justify counting us out and reducing us to objects. But, when I arrived at the University of Southern California for my undergraduate education 23 years ago, I was not prepared for the ways that other Black people would opt-in to these processes and systems as well.

Okay, let’s go back further.

One thing I have learned from having narcissistic parents is that, because they feel such immense shame, they want you to feel it, too. Or, they at least want you to feel responsible for it so they won’t have to. As a child, this looked like being guilted for not conforming to gender standards and my mom saying things to me like, “no matter what you do, never weigh more than 185 pounds.” This arbitrary number made sense to her standing at five foot five inches tall. Yet, there I was, already looking her eye-to-eye at nine years old. Every year after that, when I grew taller than six feet and the scale started to read above 200 pounds, I felt a deep sense of dread, guilt, and failure. Now that I was over 185 pounds, was I worthless?

Yes, I know, very weird reaction. But, I was a teenager, one that was secretly gay and trans, standing head and shoulders above all of my friends since elementary school, and constantly having to remind everyone that I was a child (especially grown ass men). Because my mom felt shame about her own body, she transferred and cultivated that same shame (and fatphobia) in me. I didn’t even have the same body type or make-up (or gender) as her but she was able to place her shame deep in my belly nonetheless. I struggle with my weight dysphoria and shame about my body to this very day.

Even with experiences like these in my childhood, I didn’t understand how other people’s feelings about themselves would affect so many of my social interactions. Because I have always had a deep sense of self-worth (a trait cultivated by grandmothers who were North Stars in my life), I have rarely treated people from a place of ill-will, malice, coldness, and vengeance. When I think about the few times I did engage in those behaviors, I am reminded that I was a) very young and still finding my way, and b) either unhoused, navigating the effects sexual assault, and hungering for the love and affection of two deeply-flawed, deeply hurtful, incredibly beautiful parents.

But, that doesn’t mean other people haven’t meant me ill. Quite the contrary, in fact, I have always been the one getting kicked out, banned, blocked, removed, and quietly escorted out of something. Catholic school, social groups, romantic relationships, all of it.

For most of my life, I assumed it was just me. That I was so annoying, so ugly, so awful and disgusting that nobody wanted to be around me. It wasn’t until I met my spouse in college, someone who cared for me immediately, saw who I was at my core, and honored every part of me, not just the ones that made him comfortable, that I realized I could ever be treated that well. Then, I started making genuine friends. Friends who didn’t subtly insult me, who never intentionally humiliated and embarrassed me, wouldn’t ask me to shrink to make them feel big, and who were entirely happy with the person I was. I started feeling a love from them that healed so much of the harm I had encountered.

Now, at 40, I understand that the experiences of harm from strangers, fair-weather friends, and bitter internet haters were always about their feelings about themselves. They actually never had anything to do with me at all. This is where Brené Brown comes in. Go with me.

Brown has a lot of books. But, at their core, they are all about authenticity, vulnerability, and shame. The truth is, she’s right: shame is a central feature of society. She’s not identifying anything new by writing this. And, her efforts to connect shame to scarcity have long been discussed, analyzed, and explored in Black Feminist literature. However, what Brown helps with is understanding why today’s culture, a culture where people care more about “likes” on Instagram than having meaningful personal connections, has become such a welcoming place for self-obsession, narcissistic behaviors, and individual fame and superstardom rather than an orientation to collective uplift.

Brown’s work revealed to me how these feelings and behaviors in others have created minefields in spaces that pretend to be safe. In social movement organizations, radical writing spaces, and even within friend groups, shame leaves many people feeling as though they aren’t good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, or whatever enough. And, rather than looking inward to heal those wounds, they often look laterally at others, pointing the finger, and placing blame.

This matters for a lot of reasons. It matters because sometimes, when people project their shame on us, they also reshape the world around us all. They make narratives real, close others off from viable professional opportunities, and punish others for loving themselves in ways that they are still struggling with. I get this. I hated myself for most of my life. I’m sure I was projecting all over the place back then, too. Maybe that’s why, of all of Brown’s work, this one about shame has been so resonant for me. When we feel shame, all we want is for everyone else to feel it, too. I get it. I really do.

In my professional life, I navigate complicated publishing and academic environments. These environments bring strangers together and assume we will all be friends. It’s like kindergarten all over again except people are concerned about beating someone else out for a book deal instead of a snack cup at recess. Academic departments, and academia in general, reward the lions who see everyone else as prey. They value men who speak over women (often because they feel inferior intellectually) and the women who “lean in” (often because they are too insecure to be vulnerable and emotional lest they be considered stupid and out of their depth). Publishing is no better. In fact, I would suggest it’s worse. It’s worse because there are no clear pathways to success. Books sell for nebulous reasons. Celebrity is a form of currency here. And, everyone wants to be able to call themselves “award winning.”

All of these conditions breed violence and harm. These mushy and unclear standards instigate feelings of fear and isolation. They make friends turn against one another and people with political commitments abandon themselves to get a leg up. I have always understood these realities, but it has taken until this year, my 40th year, to put it all together.

This weekend, while at AWP, a lightbulb went off for me. As I met up with Black women writers I adore, caught up with mentors, and introduced myself to new Black women writer friends, I reflected on two confrontations I have had in the past year (sadly, with other Black women in publishing). The first, an older Black woman whose work I admire overreacted when I reached out attempting to check on her. In her swift reactions, she transformed a simple one line question, “Sis, may I ask, why are you posting about Donald Trump so much?” into a direct attack and an attempt to silence and bully her. She took to her social media, immediately making herself a victim, igniting flames and shifting the focus away from her willingness to threaten me with physical violence (telling me she is from “SWATS”) and accusing me of policing her. To this day, I believe that interaction was a simple miscommunication, but for someone deeply ashamed of themself and unhealthily attached to their social media appearance, I imagine my mere questioning of the behavior felt like an assault.

For people who move from a place of shame, scarcity, and fear, they will always see disagreement, questions, and pushback as a fight rather than a conversation.

I learned this again at the end of 2024 when another Black woman (who I knew little about and was not aware was Black) accused me of picking fights with Black women when I mentioned that an end of year booklist from her podcast made me really want to see more Black women, queer authors, and first-time authors featured on those lists. I mentioned that many podcasts are gatekept and that it is surprising how they rarely feature marginalized writers. Oddly, after accusing me of picking a fight with her, she retreated. She never responded. She never replied. Instead, she threw a rock that came from her own shame about her distance from Blackness, her insecurities about other folks’ concerns about her increasingly elitist and male orientation on her podcast, and her fears that I, a darker-skinned, thick-bodied, tattooed, queer Black woman from Oakland, was trying to harm her just because I was angry at Black women.

What struck me about this one was that, while I immediately recognized her words as misogynoiristic and rooted in her own identity trouble, I expected other folks in publishing to have my back. And, see, that’s where I fucked up. These people are not my friends. They are my colleagues. And, some of them are colonizers.

When I reflected on the ways that so many people move from shame, fear, despondency, and scarcity, I gained clarity about why I had them so fucked up. They were moving from shame, too. They were concerned about the editors and agents who called them bad writers and declined their submissions. They were afraid of losing the flimsy connections they relied on for approval and feelings of belonging. Those people, my Black, queer, disabled, and trans writing colleagues, had no real issue cavorting with colonizers because, for them, their shame was much more important than cultivating and protecting their relationship with me.

I’m not new to this. My whole graduate school department turned against me when a man locked me in a computer lab (he would say that he didn’t lock it, it just locks from the inside and he closed the door, keeping me in the room without my consent, or something like that…) and yelled at me about an article I wrote in our school newspaper. The article made him look anti-Black and misogynistic and, I guess locking me in a room until I cried and demanded that he open the door would fix that.

Even other Black students justified his actions. I’m sure their own shame of never wanting to seem like an “angry Black” played a part in that. And, I know some of them felt that it was just easier to keep their heads down than fight on behalf of this big bodied, queer gendered, overtly Black person causing a raucous in their elite university environment.

When I was a freshman at USC, my RA called a meeting on our all-Black student floor to gang up on me for saying that people on my floor were fake, without substance, and anti-Black. Rather than listening and engaging with the ways that I, a young queer Black woman from a lower class than the rest them, felt isolated among these elite Blacks, with their luxury cars, refusal to go to the “hood,” and commitments to wearing designer clothing to the most regular events on campus, they worked together to pacify and punish me into the same shame that shaped them.

I’ve had to learn how to accept and expect this.

To be clear: all of this is not to paint myself as the perpetual victim. I struggle with frequent emotional and mental disregulation. Sometimes, I overreact to mistreatment, a byproduct of years growing up in a place where you had to be big and masculine to fend off unwanted sexual advances and prove you were not to be fucked with. I misunderstand people’s intentions. I speak before I think. All of these things are true. However, they do not give anyone the right to treat me like I am disposable or like my feelings and responses to harm are unjustified or made up.

This is why I named this piece after Zora Neale Hurston’s iconic phrase that “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” While I have used this saying many times, I have never sat with why it is true. It’s true because skin tells us nothing about pain, shame, struggle, fear, and isolation. It tells us nothing about the burdens people carry with them and how those burdens sometimes keep them from moving with integrity and honesty among potential colleagues.

What I have learned is that “kinfolk” show up in particular ways. They are the people we never have to bend or break for. They don’t ask or expect us to change. Kinfolk don’t want us to apologize for who we are and how we show up. They speak lovingly about us even when we are not in the room. They do not find our feelings overwhelming or unnecessary. They listen. They show up. And, they do all of this from the beginning. They don’t require that we beg for it or earn it.

I’ve spent my whole life begging skinfolk to become kinfolk, hoping they would wake up and see me, love me. But, now, I have figured out that being seen by people who cannot see themselves feels like resting in the gaze of a ghost. Empty. Cold. Unnatural.

With this wisdom, I have begun to lean into the places where people are excited about me and my work. Places where people invite me without me asking or begging. I’ve discovered how beautiful it is when someone cares because they choose to not because they are too ashamed not to.

Is this discernment? Sure. It is also me standing upright and believing that I deserve dignity, regard, respect, love. And, I don’t have to do anything to prove that to anyone. My mere existence is enough. Maybe one day, all my skinfolk will know they are, too.