My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem (MSW, LICSW) was published in 2017. Psychology Today describes Menakem as “a healer, therapist, trainer, and speaker.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/resmaa-menakem-msw-licsw)
Unlike most writings on racism, his work focuses on the embodiment of trauma experienced both historically and in the present by both blacks and whites in a white supremacist world. Instead of seeking understanding of systemic racism as a social phenomenon (though he does that) he addresses the way our bodies have retained racial trauma from the past and continue to suffer from such bodily trauma. Instead of leaving us in a dark place, however, he offers practical therapeutic aids for healing ourselves as a way of contributing to healthier bodies, hearts, and minds, and, ultimately, to a healthier society. Even more unusual, he includes traumatized police bodies as part of the psychological and social mix that we often see manifested in racialized violence.
It was not surprising to see attention paid to the traumatic effects of racism on black bodies. What was new to me was the idea that white bodies, like mine, also have been and are traumatized by white supremacy. How can this be? Part of it has to do with our encultured and socialized fear of black bodies. Are they going to rob us, attack us, rape us? Are they going to take their own racialized trauma out on us? Another dimension is our own history. Menakem points out that in the U.S. whites learned how to oppress those of other races from white people. In Europe, before the mass migration to the Americas, whites were victims of each other. Whites brutalized whites through class and gender oppression.
“The 1500s and 1600s in England were anything but gentle times. People were routinely burned at the stake for heresy, a practice that began in the twelfth century and continued through 1612. Torture was an official instrument of the English government until 1640. The famous Tower of London was, in part, a huge torture chamber…the rack was used stretch human bodies and pull them apart.”
Menakem cites Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: “The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city’s walls.” Even if one were not a direct victim, the experience of being exposed to these horrors on a daily basis had to be traumatizing.
No wonder so many sought escape to the colonies.
When I read these descriptions of white brutalization of other whites, I wondered, “How did we manage to survive?” But Manaken reminds us of our resilience, our ability, not only to survive, but to overcome the effects of our inherited and continuing experience of trauma.
Unfortunately, however, white colonists brought their trauma with them, turning around and using similar brutality against each other, as well as against indigenous populations, slaves, and non-white immigrants. Such methods of dealing with trauma simply inflict that trauma onto others and can hardly be justified. Just as European whites managed to survive, at the expense of others, those oppressed “others” have also managed to survive, but at what a price.
As we know, whiteness was invented and used to establish dominance over non-whites. White supremacy became the ruling ideology and practice from our earliest history. To what extent was such oppression a manifestation of traumatized white bodies venting their own pain onto others?
It is obvious that racialized oppression would traumatize the oppressed, but less obvious how the oppressors (including police) might be suffering from their own trauma. It is also obvious that, insofar as this is true, it is no excuse for mistreating, harming, and dominating others. It is no excuse for creating a system of white supremacy by which one group can perpetuate such injustice.
How do we break out of this continuing cycle of injustice toward a world of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Social action is necessary and important, but Menakem says the healing starts with our bodies. We are so often unconscious of our bodily sensations. We may recognize when we are scared, angry, or otherwise upset, but in order to prevent those feelings from leading to harmful words or actions, we need to learn to back up and settle our bodies before we react. He offers embodied practices to help with this, not in lieu of social action but in conjunction with it. We have resilience, yes, but we need to learn how to direct that resilience toward ourselves, learning to address our own trauma in a healthy way. White people have a responsibility to heal themselves so they can contribute to dismantling white supremacy.
As a white person I have addressed the parts of Menakem’s book that focuses on my history and my body. Black, indigenous, brown people and police will identify with the parts that address their bodily trauma and healing. In any case, such embodied experience is a dimension of white supremacy culture that was revelatory to me, and I highly recommend both Menakem’s diagnosis of racialized trauma and his healing practices.
