„My Grandmother’s Hands“ by Resmaa Menakem
Recently I read „My Grandmother’s Hands“ by Resmaa Menakem - the first self-discovery book to examine white body supremacy in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. I enjoyed this book so much that I’m not even going to write a review, but just the best moments from each chapter. I have, however, lessened the American-centeredness in these quotes, to connect to myself and others as European readers and thinkers. All in all, I believe we should write and read so much more about this topic from trauma-awareness. Only then, after becoming more aware, are we able to do the work.
Ending white supremacy starts with traumawork. As an Alexander Technique teacher I am passionate to find meaning in our self-development work with wider outcomes in cultural change - not just posture and personal wellbeing. However, books like that can’t really give you the how it’s going to work, so hopefully you will find your own Alexander Technique teacher or any other body-therapist to start settling your nervous system and do the practical work.
Menakem has a way to say white and Black bodies, not people. See how it sounds to you. The article is devided into chapters of the book.
1. Your Body and Blood
· Ending white supremacy doesn’t begin with social and political action, but trauma healing.
· The conflict has been festering for centuries. Now it must be faced. If not, the racialized trauma that wounds so many American bodies will continue to mutate into insanity and create even more brutality and genocide.
· We need to begin not with guilt or blame, but with our bodies.
· Our bodies exist in the present. To your thinking brain, there is past, present and future, but to a traumatized body there is only now. That now is the home of intense survival energy.
· Not hurting is no longer an option. Hurt, but build tolerance to pain, metabolize it and become more resilient. Grow up in order to change the ways that don’t work.
· Our policing stragedies haven’t worked. It’s not that we’ve been lazy or insincere. But we’ve focused our efforts in the wrong direction. We’ve tried to teach our brains to think better about race.
· Our lizard brain only understands survival and protection. At any given moment, it can issue one of a handful of survival commands: rest, fight, flee, or freeze.
· Our lizard brain cannot think. It is reflexively protective, and it is strong.
· All our sensory input has to pass through the reptilian part of our brain before it even reaches the cortex, where we think and reason.
· Our very bodies house that unhealed dissonance and trauma of our ancestors.
· We can all create more room, and more opportunities for growth, in our nervous systems.
· We do this primarily through what our bodies experience and do - not through what we think or realize or cognitively figure out.
· Healing requires building a tolerance for bodily and emotional discomfort and learning to stay present with - rather than trying to flee - that discomfort.
· Clean pain hurts like hell. But it enables our bodies to grow through our difficulties, develop nuanced skills, and mend our trauma. In this process, the body metabolizes clean pain. The body can then settle; more room for growth is created in its nervous system; and the self becomes freer and more capable, because it now has access to energy that was previously protected, bound, and constricted.
· Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others.
· It's easy to imagine that 21st century society is somehow fundamentally different from any other time and place in history. That isn’t so.
· Oppression, enslavement, and fear of the other are as old, and as widespread, as human civilization.
2. Black, White, Blue and You
· The white body sees itself as fragile and vulnerable, and it looks to police bodies for its protection and safety.
· “Blacks have been undertreated for pain for decades” Dr. David Rosenbloom 2016 study published in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”. 58% of the laypeople, 40% first-year medical students and 42% of second-year medical students believed that Black skin is literally thicker than white skin. They believed that Black people have less sensitive nerve endings than white people. That they have stronger immune systems than white bodies, that their blood coagulates more quickly. (David Love’s “Study: White Medical Students Hold Outrageous Theories about Black Biology, Ecplaining Why Black Patients Are Under-Treated for Pain”)
3. Body to Body, Generation to Generation
· Trauma also routinely spreads between bodies, like a contagious disease.
· Traumatized person tries to soothe his trauma by blowing it through another person – using violence, rage, coercion, deception, betrayal, or emotional abuse.
· This never heals but carries on the trauma.
· It also provokes reflexively defensive or agressive response in that other person’s body.
· Mostly it happens spontaneously and unexpectedly: something triggers a person’s trauma; his or her lizard brain instantly launches a fight response; and the person physically or emotionally harms whomever nearby.
· Victims of trauma pass the trauma response to their children as standard operating procedure. Roles can switch and the oppressed may become the oppressors.
· Children are highly susceptible to this because their young nervous systems are easily overwhelmed by things that older, more experienced nervous systems are able to override.
· The result is a soul wound or intergenerational trauma.
· When the trauma continues for generation after generation, it is called historical trauma.
· After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone’s personality.
· The family norm transmitted to multiple families and generations can start to look like culture.
· Recent work in genetics has revealed that trauma can change the expression of the DNA in our cells, and these changes can be passed from parent to child.
· We also have evidence that memories connected to painful events also get passed down from parent to child – and to that child’s child. What’s more, these experiences appear to be held, passed on, and inherited in the body, not just in the thinking brain. (2014 study with mice by Kerry Ressler and Brian Dias „Parental Olfactory Experience Influences Behaviour and Neural Structure in Subsequent Generations“)
· Most people experience trauma if an experience they have:
-is unexpected (collapse of a bridge)
-involves death of many people, especially children (Tulsa race riot of 1921)
-lasts a long time or repeats itself multiple times (hurricane Katrina and its aftermath)
-has unknown causes (when your partner suddenly disappears)
-is deeply poignant or meaningful (killing of 27 people in Sandy Hook Elementary School)
-impacts a large area and/or many people (an earthquake, a plague, a terrorist attack, persecution or enslavement)
· Resilience manifests in a form that’s more about being than doing. It’s not a thing, but a flow.
4. European Trauma nad The Invention of Whiteness
· Torture and public execution were such common practices in Medieval England. No wonder the oppressed ones flew to America, looking for better life.
· Fleeing is a survival response, of course.
· After the great Plague 1665-66, many tried to flee from starvation, poverty and overcrowding.
· Pilgrims and Puritans were not explorers. They were refugees fleeing imprisonment, torture and mutilation.
· Over ten centuries of medieval brutality (from white bodies to white bodies) started to look like culture in America.
· This culture was designed to blow the trauma through millions of Black bodies.
· It was only in the late 17th century that white Americans began in earnest to formalize a culture of white-body supremacy.
· The concepts of whiteness, blackness, and race were invented then.
5. Assaulting the Black Heart
· Conceptual divide – the Great Othering, was needed after creating the concept of race.
· This was a deliberate strategy devised to create changes in attitudes.
· Institutionalizing whiteness in law appears in 1691.
· The powershift happened from landowners vs workers to white people vs black people. Today we would describe it as a work of evil genius.
· Poor white people were convinced to fight against their own interests.
· The poor white were still second-class Americans, but now they had third-class Americans to beat down, look down upon, and collectively blow their own trauma through.
· The dynamic of victimized becoming the victimizers continues today. This offers only temporary relief from dirty pain.
· We can desegregate but the wealthy white always stays. Talking about race doesn’t soothe the centuries-old dissonance that still exists between poor white bodies and powerful white ones.
6. Violating the Black Body
· White supremacist groups’ concepts around blacks are not beliefs, ideas or philosophies. They are far simpler and far more primitive. They are nonverbal sensations felt by white bodies, along with fear, hate, and constriction.
· Most forms of dialogue, diversity training, and other cognitive interventions are going to have little effect on this reflexive fear response.
· White bodies that see a Black body in distress, but do little or nothing to help – and may not even notice or care about their distress - is also a trauma response.
· When two or more unfamiliar bodies first encounter one another, each body tends to either relax in recognition or constrict in self-protection. This happens quickly, automatically, and often unconsciously.
7. The False Fragility of The White Body
· The myth of white fragility provided white bodies with the necessary justification to act on their strongly felt need to dominate, control, and brutalize Black ones. White bodies felt that maintaining these power dynamics was essential to their survival.
· The myth of white fragility offers an excuse for the harm to black bodies, under the guise of providing safety for white bodies.
· The deadliest manifestation of white fragility is its reflexive confusion of fear with danger and comfort with safety.
· White body experiences discomfort as a lack of safety and reacts with violence.
· Whenever white body is challenged on the race subject, it responds with immediate strong defence.
· Racial privilege builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress.
· White-body supremacy comes at a great cost to white people.
· There is the moral injury, which creates shame, and ever more trauma, in white bodies.
8. White-Body Supremacy and The Police Body
· Many police live with the biochemicals of chronic stress in their bloodstreams.
· Some try to soothe or manage this energy by drinking, drugs, isolation or a combination of things.
· So often the dysregulated nervous system gets triggered in a highly stressful situation, killing reflexively many innocent Black bodies.
· They say the Black person caused the situation to occur and therefore is guilty. He made the officer feel „scared out of his mind“. The officer needed to use the gun for his self-defence.
· Police officers need to deliberately settle their bodies as part of their job.
9. Changing the World Begins With Your Body
· For many people trauma has led to a variety of physical problems.
· For past several decades, we’ve tried to address this one body at a time, primarily through medication, exercise programs, lifestyle changes, stress maangement, and other such strategies. They have had only limited success.
· We need to address the trauma that fuels health issues.
· If any real change is to occur, trauma that is related to health and social problems needs to be addressed.
· The place to begin the all-important healing of trauma is with the body.
10. Your Soul Nerve
· Most human behavior involves a part of the body that many people don’t know about – the vagus nerve (the soul nerve).
· The largest part of the vagus nerve goes through your gut, which has about 100 million neurons, more than your spinal cord. This is why it’s called our „second brain“.
· The vagus nerve reaches into most of your body, including your throat, lungs, heart, stomach, liver, spleen, pancrea, kidney, and gut. It is the largest organ in your body’s autonomic nervous system, which regulates all of your body’s basic functions.
· One of the organs the vagus nerve does not connect to, however, is your thinking brain. It connect’s directly to your brainstem – the lizard brain.
· Vagus nerve was not identified until 1921. We are only beginning to understand how it works.
· When your body has an emotional response, such as when your stomach clenches, your voice catches, your pulse races, your shoulders tighten, your breathing quickens, your body braces for impact, or you have a sense that danger is lurking – that’s your vagus nerve at work.
· When your body feels relaxed, open, settled and in sync with other bodies, that’s also your vagus nerve functioning.
· The vagus nerve, like your lizard brain, has zero capacity to think.
· It tells most of the muscles in your body when to constrict, when to release, when to move, and when to relax and settle.
11. Settling and Safeguarding Your Body
· Few skills are more essential than the ability to settle your body.
· If you can settle your body, you are more likely to be calm, alert, and fully present, no matter what is going on around you.
· Unsettle a large group of bodies and you get a mob or riot.
· Bring a large group of settled bodies together and you have a potential movement – and a potential force for tremendous good in the world.
· Settled NS is a result of training, education, experience and long-standing mindful self-care.
· Being more settled helps you to be less resentful or reactive. You will lose your cool less often, and stressful situations will be less likely to trigger a fight, flee, or freeze response.
· Settling is not the same as healing, but an all-important foundation for healing.
· Soothing the body with hiking, meditation, prayer and so on, isn’t the same as settling.
· Sometimes the body needs to activate, rather than settle. But we need to be able to do either one on demand, based on the needs of the moment. If only activation is available, you will be in trouble.
12. The Wisdom of Clean Pain
· Clean pain is about choosing integrity over fear. This healing does not happen in your brain, but in your body.
13. Reaching Out to Other Bodies
· Events don’t just happen. We experience them in our bodies - which means we need to metabolize them in our bodies as well.
· Healing doesn't happen in the present only. It also moves backward and forward in time. When you heal a soul wound, you heal the people who came before you.
14. Harmonizing With Other Bodies
· The first step in changing the dynamic in our world is settling our own bodies, one by one. The next step is bringing that settling out into the world and getting our bodies in sync with others.
· Our bodies guide and follow other bodies; a settled nervous system encourages other nervous systems to settle. This is why a calm and settled presence can create room for a multitude of possibilities and become the foundation for changing the world.
15. Mending the Black Heart and Body
· All adults need to learn how to soothe and anchor themselves, rather than expect or demand that others soothe them. All adults need to heal and grow up.
16. Mending the White Heart and Body
„There’s a perception that whiteness is working for white people. It’s not. White people must join the world in fighting the pernicious ideas that created their category.“ Quinn Norton
· White body supremacy’s side effect is that it allows (and sometimes encourages) white people to choose not to grow up.
17. Mending the Police Heart and Body
„There is a big difference between learning about trauma and learning a practice. There is a big difference between learning a practice and actually making that practice become a practice.“ Autumn Brown
18. Body-Centered Activism
· Before you show up to any social action – make sure you settle your body and nervous system first.
· For some people, intense activism is actually a dodge - a way to try to avoid some of their own pain or personal trauma.
19. Creating Culture
„Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.“ Angel Kyodo Williams
· Because culture lives in our bodies, it usually trumps all things cognitive: ideas, philosophies, convictions, principles, and laws. In many cases, it even supersedes human desires and needs.
· We humans want to belong. We experience it in our bodies. When we belong, we feel that our life has some value and meaning.
· The creation, telling, and passing on of new stories is crucial. The stories should be narratives of resilience, compassion, achievement, and transformation.
· The most effective leaders lead by example and model the way for others. The most effective followers also model the way for others.
· Cultural change takes hold through consistency and repetition. When enough people do the same thing, in the same way, over and over, eventually those actions become culture.
· Our bodies help us have fewer and less intense reflexive responses.
· You already know what needs to be at the centre of all these efforts: an individual and collective willingness to be in our bodies, accept and metabolize clean pain, and heal.
20. Cultural Healing for African Americans
· Some of the great leaders: DeRay Mckesson, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Congressman John Lewis, Toni Morrison etc. James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X etc. Notice their settled bodies, not just words. Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Medgar Evers, Ella Baker, Cornel West, Alicia Garza.
· Practise and teach the art of disruptive healing. Genuine healing is a temporarily disruptive process. this is true not only for individual bodies, but for the collective body as well. Just as the human body creates inflammation to heal, social activism creates the social and cultural disruptions needed to help a culture heal and grow up. These disruptions might also be called compassionate agitation.
21. Whiteness Without Supremacy
„Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.“ Fannie Lou Hamer
„To sit back and do nothing is to cooperate with the oppressor.“ Jane Elliott
· Growing up is exactly what all of us - individually and collectively - need to do.
· I can't grow you up. You can't grow me up. Attitude can't be outsourced. Each of us needs to do it on our own - by accepting and moving through clean pain. Everyone has to do it willingly.
· Tim Wise, Robin DiAngelo, Peggy McIntosh, Jim Wallis. White leaders who do the work.
· Healing Roots, The Tree and The Well etc.
· Whiteness can mean taking responsibility.
23. Healing Is In Our Hands
„I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma... In so doing, we will significantly increase our ability to achieve both our individual and collective dreams.“ Peter Levine
· At some point we will need to deal with hate and anger.
· We will also need to deal with global shock.
· Trauma is all about speed and reflexivity. Slow yourself down and pay attention to your body.
· Love and trust are not concepts or tactics. They are ways of being with someone, ways of being in the world, and ways of being in your body. These feelings are visceral, not cognitive.
24. The Reckoning
„Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.“ Nikki Giovanni
· Much of our current culture - and most of our current cultural divides - are built around trauma.
· “There is a route to the trauma tree, and what we see now is the fruit,” an African American elder.
· Today we are at a reckoning. We have an opportunity and an obligation to recognize the trauma in our bodies.
· Possibilities are freed and we discover each other. If we don't, we will likely tear each other and our countries into pieces. This second path - the path of destruction - is the one we are currently walking together.
· We have reached a point of peril and possibility. We will either grow up or grow smaller. This trauma will either burst forth in an explosion of dirty pain, or provide the necessary energy and heat for white people to move through clean pain and heal. Only the second outcome will provide us with genuine safety.
· Not hurting is no longer an option. We must face and feel soul-stirring pain. We can choose the restorative one.
· For your own safety, sanity, and health, slow down and pay attention. Refuse to tolerate bullshit.
Some more literature on the topic of African-American trauma:
· “Killing The Black Body” Dorothy Roberts
· “Black Bodies, White Gazes” George Yancy
· “Stand Your Ground” Kelly Brown Douglas
· “The Black Body” Meri Nana-Ama Danquah
· “Between the World and Me” Ta-Nehisi Coates
· James Baldwin, Richard Wright, bell hooks, Teju Cole etc
· “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” Dr. Joy DeGruy
· “Just Walk On By: Black Men and Public Space” Brent Staples
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