The Smart Brown Girl Briefing
History. Patterns. What I’m Paying Attention To This Week.
Welcome back to The Smart Brown Girl Briefing.
Each week, I share what I’m reading, the historical patterns I’m noticing, the questions I’m asking, and the connections that help us see beyond individual events. History is a collection of decisions, systems, incentives, and narratives that continue to shape the world around us.
Let’s begin.
📚 What I’m Reading
This week I finished Kin by Tayari Jones.
What stood out:
It was… okay.
I struggled with this book because I finished it still wondering what, exactly, the central point was supposed to be. Maybe it was about the idea that we get to choose our own kin. Maybe it was simply a coming-of-age story about friendship, family, identity, and the people we decide belong to us. Either way, I couldn’t quite tell.
That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad book. Sometimes a story doesn’t need to hand you a neat thesis at the end. Still, I wanted something more concrete to hold onto when I finished, and I never really got there.
It was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, which surprised me a little. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t have, because the last book I read from the list wasn’t particularly good either. So perhaps Oprah and I simply need to accept that our taste in books isn’t always aligned.
My next read will probably be strictly for pleasure. No historical analysis. No systems. No looking for patterns. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Why I think it matters:
One thing Kin did leave me thinking about is how we define family. Blood establishes relationships, but it doesn’t necessarily determine who shows up for us, protects us, understands us, or becomes home. Maybe that’s the point I was looking for all along.
The bigger question:
How much of family is inherited, and how much of it do we build for ourselves?
🏛️ The Historical Pattern I’m Watching
Pattern: Justice, Institutional Power, and Whose Questions Get Answered
I’m watching Mississippi again. I keep coming back to the same thing. Nolan Wells didn’t drown.
The autopsy findings reportedly don’t support drowning as his cause of death, which makes the questions surrounding what happened to him even harder to dismiss. Yet a grand jury declined to indict anyone in connection with his death. That’s the part I’m struggling with.
How can there be this many questions surrounding the death of a young man and the response still be that there isn’t enough here to warrant a trial where evidence can be examined more fully?
A grand jury declining to indict doesn’t necessarily answer the public’s questions about what happened. It means the legal process reached a particular threshold decision about whether criminal charges should move forward.
I can only imagine how unbearable this has been for his family. This isn’t surprising to me, but it’s deeply disheartening. I keep thinking about how often Black families have had to fight not only for justice, but simply for their questions to be treated as legitimate. How often families have had to insist that something doesn’t make sense, that the official explanation isn’t enough, that somebody knows something. I just want justice for our children. For us.
So many times, we are passed over for justice, and it’s exhausting to watch another family have to carry unanswered questions while the institutions capable of demanding answers decide there isn’t enough to move forward. I feel so sorry for Nolan’s parents.
As for the people who were with him, I’ll say this carefully because we don’t know exactly what happened. Either someone knows more than they have said, or there are still significant unanswered questions about the circumstances surrounding Nolan’s death. I hope the truth, whatever it is, eventually comes out. His family deserves answers.
This week’s connection:
The historical pattern I’m watching is what happens when institutional closure arrives before public questions have been resolved. Black Americans have a long history of confronting that gap. A case can be considered closed by an institution while remaining profoundly unresolved for the family and community living with the consequences. Legal processes determine whether the state will act. They don’t automatically determine whether every relevant question has been answered.
So this week, I’m asking:
· What has actually been established by the evidence?
· What questions remain unanswered?
· Who gets to decide when there are enough answers?
· What happens when an institution considers a matter resolved, but the people most affected don’t?
· How much power does a family really have once the legal system decides not to move forward?
🧠 The Historical Lens
One of the most useful questions we can ask when studying history is:
What happens when the institution responsible for delivering justice decides there is nothing left to investigate?
We tend to think of justice as an outcome. Someone does something wrong, evidence is gathered, a case is presented, and eventually the truth comes out. History tells us it’s rarely that simple. Institutions determine which evidence receives attention, which witnesses are considered credible, whether charges are appropriate, whether a case moves forward, and ultimately how much of the story ever reaches a courtroom.
That doesn’t mean every unexplained death is evidence of institutional wrongdoing, and it doesn’t mean an indictment should occur simply because the public has questions. It does mean institutional decisions deserve scrutiny. When you’re examining a case from the past or one unfolding right now, don’t stop at asking whether justice happened. Ask who had the authority to decide what justice required in the first place. That question often tells us much more.
📜 From the Smart Brown Girl Archive
If you’ve been following Smart Brown Girl for a while, you know Nolan Wells’ story isn’t something I started paying attention to this week.
I’ve been asking questions about this case, about Mississippi, and about whose stories receive sustained attention for months.
This piece is about something larger than one headline or one case. It’s about what it means to repeatedly watch Black families ask institutions for accountability, recognition, and justice while also carrying the emotional burden of proving that their pain deserves attention.
Mississippi’s history matters here. This series looks beyond individual incidents and examines the institutions, laws, political choices, and historical structures that shaped the state. If we want to understand the present, we have to understand what was deliberately built before it.
I previously wrote about Nolan’s case through the lens of visibility. Why do some missing persons cases and suspicious deaths become national stories while others struggle for attention? Media attention doesn’t determine whose life matters, but it can influence which cases receive sustained public pressure.
That title feels even more relevant now. Because they didn’t. New developments may change what we know, but they don’t automatically resolve everything we still don’t know. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is keep track of the unanswered questions rather than allowing institutional closure to convince us those questions disappeared.
🧩 The Question I’m Sitting With
Every week, I want to leave you with a question that has stayed with me.
When the legal process ends, but the questions remain, what does justice look like?
I’ve been sitting with this because we often talk about justice as though it’s synonymous with prosecution or conviction. Those things matter, but justice is also tied to truth, accountability, transparency, and whether families are able to understand what happened to someone they loved. Sometimes the system reaches the end of its process before a family reaches anything resembling an answer. What are people supposed to do with that?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Reply and tell me how you’re thinking about it.
📖 A Quote Worth Considering
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
— Nelson Mandela
I keep coming back to this idea because hatred doesn’t appear out of nowhere. People learn who they’re supposed to fear, who they’re supposed to distrust, whose pain they’re supposed to take seriously, and whose pain they’re allowed to ignore. Those lessons don’t only come from individual people. They can be reinforced through the stories we’re told, the history we’re taught, the institutions we interact with, and even the cases that receive our collective attention versus those that barely register outside of a community.
That feels relevant to me this week as I think about Nolan Wells and Mississippi. When we talk about justice, we’re also talking about whose life is treated as worthy of questions. Whose family gets answers. Whose death demands scrutiny. Whose story becomes national news, and whose family has to keep pushing simply to make people pay attention.
Mandela’s words also remind us that none of these ideas are inevitable. If societies can teach people whose humanity matters less, they can teach something different. History gives us plenty of evidence of both.
📚 New From Smart Brown Girl
I also published something new this week that I’m really proud of: What Reconstruction Really Meant: The Struggle to Build Freedom, Power, and Democracy After Slavery.
Reconstruction is often taught as the period when slavery ended and the country tried to put itself back together. This guide starts with a different question: What did freedom actually require?
Emancipation removed the legal status of slavery, but freedom required much more. It required education, land, wages, political representation, physical safety, legal protection, and institutions that could make those rights meaningful in everyday life.
The guide follows that struggle from the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction Amendments to Black political power, institution-building, the fight over land, and the backlash that followed. One of the ideas running throughout the book is something we talk about often at Smart Brown Girl: changing the law isn’t necessarily the same thing as changing the institution. The Reconstruction Amendments dramatically expanded constitutional rights, while the fight over whether those rights would actually be protected continued at the state and local level.
If you’ve ever wondered what Reconstruction accomplished, why it was met with such intense resistance, and why that period still matters for understanding American institutions today, I created this guide for you.
Until Next Week
Thank you for spending part of your Sunday with me.
This week’s briefing feels heavier than most. I wish I could end it with some profound lesson about justice eventually prevailing, but I don’t think that’s where I am right now. Sometimes the questions remain unanswered. Sometimes families don’t get the accountability they deserve. Sometimes the institutions we’ve been taught to trust leave us with more questions than answers. That’s part of why I keep doing this work.
At Smart Brown Girl, we study history not because every historical pattern gives us a neat answer, but because recognizing those patterns helps us ask better questions about what we’re seeing now. It helps us notice when something that feels isolated is actually connected to something much larger. If this made you think, share it with someone who might want to think through these questions with us.
If you enjoy The Smart Brown Girl Briefing, you can keep reading with me on Patreon. Every other week, I share a new Briefing where we look at what I’m reading, the historical patterns I’m watching, the questions I’m sitting with, and the connections between history and what’s happening around us now. It’s a space to slow down, look beyond the headline, and ask what the bigger story might be. Join us on Patreon and get the next Smart Brown Girl Briefing delivered every other week.
Until next Sunday,
Smart Brown Girl
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