My Grandmother's Hands

 

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.

 

 

 

 

"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

In honor of Independence Day this year, 237 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to reread Frederick Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” delivered on July 5, 1852.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin would be announced before I got my blog post done.

My original thought was to write about the speech as an under-appreciated rhetorical achievement in the history of American letters, but the death of Trayvon Martin and the court case against George Zimmerman dramatizes the continuing relevance of Douglass’ core argument.  And that may be more important than the brilliance of Douglass’ rhetoric.

First, let me say that I harbor no ill will toward the jury in the Zimmerman case.  As I watched the trial unfold on TV these last few weeks, I kept thinking how glad I was that I was not on the jury.  Though I felt that Zimmerman should be held accountable for profiling and stalking Martin while carrying a concealed weapon, I was not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the actual killing rose to the level of murder, or even manslaughter, given the Florida self-defense law. 

Correct verdict under the law or not, though, it does not seem to rise to the level of justice either.  It seems like yet another example of an African American citizen being denied full equality in a nation that just weeks before the verdict had celebrated its promise of individual rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” of equality under the law, and of “liberty and justice for all.” 

Douglass was invited to deliver his oration at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, to celebrate our nation’s founding as a free and independent state, guaranteeing liberty and justice to its people.  It was a ceremonial occasion and, in some ways, Douglass meets expectations by praising the nation’s founders and the high ideals inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  But Douglass takes the opportunity to turn the speech into a political one, focusing on the inconsistency of a slaveholding society espousing the values of equality and liberty and calling for the abolition of slavery.  After excoriating his audience for the hypocrisy of celebrating the 4^th of July while allowing the injustices and cruelties of slavery to exist, Douglass ends by holding out hope that our nation will someday uphold the values and ideals embedded in our founding documents.

A similar argument could be made today.  How do we celebrate our nation’s founding and its highest civic values on one day and on another day in the same month watch as lawyers in our “justice” system defend their client by justifying racial profiling and the killing of an unarmed black teenager on grounds of self-defense when that client had deliberately stalked that innocent teenager walking home in the rain?  Yes, we can hold out hope that Zimmerman will be held accountable in a wrongful death suit and that someday our nation and its citizens will truly live up to the ideals they espouse and celebrate, but that is cold comfort to those who mourn the loss of Trayvon Martin, who will never again  walk home.

Even though Frederick Douglass had been invited by the white civic leaders of Rochester, New York, to deliver this ceremonial speech, he knew full well that their deference to him was only for superficial show.  That is why in his opening words he presents himself as a modest, self-deprecating public speaker and why he goes on to position himself as an outsider, who, like all African Americans, slave or free, cannot enjoy the full benefits of “your” 4^th of July, “your” Declaration of Independence, or “your” heritage of equality and freedom.  And that is also why he presents himself as an educated, well-spoken, eloquent speaker whose performance belies his modesty and indirectly argues for his full equality with those privileged white civic leaders.  Douglass references the nation’s founding documents, the words of its forefathers, the Bible, as well as his own educated white contemporaries and in so doing establishes his literacy, his education, his credibility, and his humanity, despite having been born into slavery.

Repeating a common trope of African American rhetoric, he compares his people to the Biblical Hebrews who suffered under slavery in Egypt and were delivered to freedom in the Promised Land.  He lifts up the suffering of American slaves, drawing on powerful emotional imagery to dramatize their plight: 

“…I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder.  There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, the caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men.  My soul sickens at the sight.”

               Throughout, both directly and indirectly, he holds up the mirror of hypocrisy to those who would celebrate their national Independence Day:

 “            "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”

How many “free” African Americans today join in our 4^th of July celebrations with conflicted hearts,

remembering the injustices of the past along with the promises of our founders, smarting from their

own experiences of prejudice and racism, and questioning, like Douglass, whether this 4^th of July

celebration includes them?

Although Douglass is speaking of American slavery, he himself was free, though under the Fugitive Slave Law he could be returned to his owner at any time should that owner be identified, and while he had escaped the slavery of the South, he lived with the racism of the North, the very racism of those who had the temerity to invite an escaped slave to deliver their 4^th of July oration, as if he were one of them.  Only the blind arrogance of misplaced self-righteousness could expect the victims of racism to praise their oppressors’ history and values.

Yet Douglass concludes with faith in the Constitution, and while that may undercut his verbal assault on American hypocrisy, it nonetheless saves him and us from despair.  His call to action would fail did he not leave his audience with hope of abolishing slavery and racism.

Similarly, may the realization of our own contemporary failures in overcoming color prejudice and racism leave us not in despair but with renewed conviction that our anti-racist words and actions are not in vain and that the dream of people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King for full equality and justice for all may someday be achieved in our country.  (See also previous blog post on Frederick Douglass *Narrative of an American Slave,* December 2009.)

A Raisin in the Sun

The other day I attended a meeting where people of color talked about problems they face living in the local community. They told stories of their experiences with individual and stystemic racism in the schools, the job market, and the criminal justice system; limited access to public transportation; lack of adequate and affordable housing; and barriers in the health care system.

Having grown up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement and having seen significant progress in race relations during my lifetime, I found it extremely disheartening to hear these stories of racial prejudice, cultural ignorance, and institutional norms that continue to favor whites over people of color. It almost felt like we were living in an unofficial and informal system of apartheid. It was hard to believe that one year ago we were celebrating the inauguration of our first US President of color.

The 1957 play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry seems a lot less dated to me after hearing these stories. When it opened in 1959, it was the first play by a black woman ever produced on Broadway. Its dramatization of an African American family struggling with economic deprivation and aspiration, racial discrimination, cultural pride, and black manhood "sometime between WWII" and the late 1950's seems painfully similar to stories I heard from people of color a few days ago in 2010.

For all the progress I have seen in the last fifty years, it seems there has been just as much persistence of the same old patterns.

The title of Hansberry's play comes from a poem by Langston Hughes published in 1951:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Americans love the redemptive narrative and will prefer the stories of emancipation from slavery, of civil rights victories, and of the achievement of the American dream by such as Barak Obama, but the tragic stories of dreams deferred are just as much a part of our history and culture. We just don't want to hear them.

A Raisin in the Sun is itself a redemptive narrative. We could no doubt never have made the progress we have on racial issues without hope and faith on the part of people of color, but all Americans need to remember that for every triumphant story there are hundreds of tragic ones; for every American success story there are hundreds of unsung stories of American failure.