In Brother Epistles, Shanda McManus, a family medicine physician, pens a memoir that encapsulates the Black lived experience across an array of topics, including residential segregation, the prison-industrial complex, environmental injustice, and health disparities, among others, laying bare the personal consequences of systemic inequity. McManus also unpacks how black guilt takes shape for those, like herself, who have experienced socioeconomic mobility or made it out of the hood. She invites the reader to explore her innermost thoughts, illuminating the raw emotions she felt during pivotal moments from childhood to adulthood. McManus organizes her memoir through letters addressed to her late brother, Monir Hall, who was tragically murdered in North Philadelphia (North Philly), via a drive-by shooting, in 1992. Thus, her brother’s death lies at the crux of her memoir, where she reflects upon their upbringing in North Philly, provides life updates, delves into her ongoing grief, and reimagines an alternate reality where her brother circumvented premature death. The letters place her in conversation not only with her brother’s spirit, but also with the ongoing injustice faced by the Black community.
Furthermore, McManus’s yearning to escape the trappings of North Philly provides an opportunity to discuss the hidden costs of socioeconomic mobility through a public health lens. Her description of North Philly hints at how residents who reside in impoverished Black communities across the country are set up for failure rather than success. She noted that North Philly had an “invisible cloak of hopelessness that seemed to smother everything good.”[1] Hope, in this respect, becomes a privilege. It is for this reason that philosopher Cornel West warned of “Black Nihilism,” where Black Americans confront a “life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness,” resulting in a “numbing detachment from others” along with a “self-destructive disposition toward the world.”[2] While McManus does not engage in a philosophical analysis of Black Nihilism, the hopelessness she sensed within her childhood environment nudges the reader to ponder its long-term impact.
Nevertheless, McManus shares how she succeeded at fleeing that cloak of hopelessness, though her socioeconomic mobility did not exempt her from racial and gender bias. Her encounters with racism and sexism inflicted what public health researcher Arline Geronimus has coined “weathering.”[3] Graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson Medical College, marrying a white man, having two biracial children, and living in an affluent community in New Jersey came with a new set of challenges. McManus’s struggle with imposter syndrome and patients questioning whether she was a doctor seemed to take its toll. In addition, the bias of others, who mistook her identity as a mother and homeowner, illuminates how weathering manifests, relegating her to a “perpetual state of self-consciousness.”[4] Consequently, McManus concludes that “This is the payment due for low crime, good schools, and a walkable neighborhood.”[5] Still, one cannot help but wonder how these circumstances contribute to weathering.
Overall, Brother Epistles is a sobering memoir that prompts readers to engage the cumulative effects of being Black in America. Shanda McManus’s tactical introspection reveals how systemic inequity affects Black people who, unfortunately, become another statistic or exceed expectations and become exceptions to the rule. One issue to keep in mind while reading her memoir is weathering. Her intentionality behind formatting her project as letters was a courageous feat that exposed the intimate details of the Black lived experience, underscoring the biological toll of racial subjectivity.[6]
Footnotes
[1] Shanda McManus, Brother Epistles (Ralston: Split/Lip Press, 2026), 9.
[2] Cornel West, “The Deeper Threat to Black America,” Education Week, April 14, 1993, https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-the-deeper-threat-to-black-america/1993/04
[3] See Arline T. Geronimus, The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023).
[4] McManus, 86.
[5] Ibid.
[6] See Karida L. Brown, “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theorization of Racialized Subjectivity,” in The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois, eds. Aldon D. Morris, Michael Schwartz, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Walter R. Allen, Marcus Anthony Hunter, Karida L. Brown, and Dan S. Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).
