My Grandmother's Hands. Resmaa Menakem
The traumas that live in white bodies, and the bodies of public safety professionals of all races, are also deep and persistent. However, their origins and nature are quite different. The expression of these traumas is often an immediate, seemingly out-of-the-blue fight, flee, or freeze response, a response that may be reflexively triggered by the mere presence of a Black body—or, sometimes, by the mere mention of race or the term white supremacy or white-body supremacy.
Many English words are loaded or slippery, especially when it comes to race. So let me define some terms.
When I say the Black body or the African American body, it’s shorthand for the bodies of people of African descent who live in America, who have largely shaped its culture, and who have adapted to it. If you’re a Kenyan citizen who has never been to the United States, or a new arrival in America from Cameroon or Haiti or Argentina, some of this book may not apply to you—at least not obviously. Aside from your (perhaps) dark skin, you may not recognize yourself in these pages. (I’m not suggesting that non-Americans without white skin aren’t routinely affected by the global reach of white-body supremacy, only that some of these folks have been fortunate enough to have little or no personal experience with America’s version of racialized trauma. Others have strong resiliency factors that have mitigated some of the effects of white-body supremacy in their lives.)
When I say the white body, it’s shorthand for the bodies of people of European descent who live in America, who have largely shaped and adapted to its culture, and who don’t have dark skin. The term white body lacks precision, but it’s short and simple. If you’re a member of this group, you’ll recognize it when I talk about the white body’s experience.
When I say police bodies, it’s shorthand for the bodies of law enforcement professionals, regardless of their skin color. These professionals include beat cops, police detectives, mall security guards, members of SWAT teams, and the police chiefs of big cities, suburbs, and small towns.
These categories provide ways of communicating, not boxes for anyone to be forced into. It’s possible that none of them fits you. Or maybe you fit into more than one. Don’t try to squeeze yourself into one in particular. Instead, adapt everything you read in this book as your body instructs you to. It will tell you what matches its experience and how to work with its energy and wordless stories.
Maybe you’re an African American whose body, for whatever reason, is entirely free of racialized trauma. Or maybe you’re a white American or police officer whose body doesn’t constrict in the presence of Black bodies, and who can stay settled and present in your own discomfort when the subject of race arises. Either way, I encourage you to try out the body-centered activities in this book. Whether or not you yourself are personally wounded by white-body supremacy, working with these exercises and letting them sink into you will help you build your self-awareness, deepen your capacity for empathy, and create more room for growth in your nervous system.
I’m not the first to recognize the key role of the destruction, restriction, and abuse of the Black body in American history. In Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts wrote of centuries-long efforts by white people to control the wombs of African American women. A decade later, in Black Bodies, White Gazes, George Yancy explored the confiscation of Black bodies by white culture. In Stand Your Ground, Kelly Brown Douglas examined many social and theological issues related to the African American body. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s The Black Body collected thirty writers’ reflections on the role of the Black body in America. James Baldwin, Richard Wright, bell hooks, Teju Cole, and others have written eloquently on the subject of African American bodies. As I worked on this book, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, an examination of the systematic destruction of the Black body in America, reached the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
All these writers are wise, loving, and profoundly observant. I’m deeply grateful for their contributions, which have helped to create the foundation on which this book is built. But I come at the subject from a different direction.
Some of these writers—Yancy, Roberts, hooks, Douglas—are academics and philosophers, while others—Coates, Baldwin, Wright, Danquah, Cole—are literary authors. With piercing insight and eloquence, they reveal what white-body supremacy tries to keep hidden, and lay bare what many of us habitually overlook or cover up. In this book, I accept with gratitude the baton that these wise writers have handed to me.
My Grandmother’s Hands is a book of healing. I’m a healer and trauma therapist, not a philosopher or literary stylist. My earlier book, Rock the Boat: How to Use Conflict to Heal and Deepen Your Relationship (Hazelden, 2015), is a practical guide for couples. In that book, as well as in this one, my focus is on mending psyches, souls, bodies, and relationships—and, whenever possible, families, neighborhoods, and communities.
In Part I, you’ll see how white-body supremacy gets systematically (if often unconsciously or unwittingly) embedded in our American bodies even before we are born, creating ongoing trauma and a legacy of suffering for virtually all of us.
This racialized trauma appears in three different forms—one in the bodies of white Americans, another in those of African Americans, and yet another in the bodies of police officers. The trauma in white bodies has been passed down from parent to child for perhaps a thousand years, long before the creation of the United States. The trauma in African American bodies is often (and understandably) more severe but, in historical terms, also more recent. However, each individual body has its own unique trauma response, and each body needs (and deserves) to heal.
In Part II, you’ll experience and absorb dozens of activities designed to help you mend your own trauma around white-body supremacy and create more room and opportunities for growth in your own nervous system. The opening chapters of Part II are for everyone, while later chapters focus on specific groups: African Americans, white Americans, and American police.
The chapters for African American readers grew, in part, out of my Soul Medic and Cultural Somatics workshops. I began offering these several years ago, along with workshops on psychological first aid. These provide body-centered experiences meant to help Black Americans experience their bodies, begin to recognize and release trauma, and bring some of that healing and room into the communal body.
The chapters for white readers draw partly from what I’ve learned from conducting similar workshops for white allies co-led with Margaret Baumgartner, Fen Jeffries, and Ariella Tilsen—white facilitators, conflict resolvers, and healing practitioners. The material on the community aspects of mending white bodies is supported by work I’ve done in collaboration with Susan Raffo of the People’s Movement Center and Janice Barbee of Healing Roots, both in Minneapolis.
The chapters for law enforcement officers draw from the trainings I’ve led for police officers on trauma, self-care, white-body supremacy, and creating some healing infrastructure in their departments and precincts.
Part III will give you the tools to take your healing, and your newfound knowledge and awareness, into your community. It provides some simple, structured activities for helping other people you encounter release the trauma of white-body supremacy—in your family, neighborhood, workplace, and elsewhere. Because all of us, separately and together, can be healers, I begin with tools and strategies that anyone can apply, and follow them with specific chapters for African Americans, white Americans, and police.
As every therapist will tell you, healing involves discomfort—but so does refusing to heal. And, over time, refusing to heal is always more painful.
In my therapy office, I tell clients there are two kinds of pain: clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth.9 It’s the pain you experience when you know, exactly, what