My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts

The white body sees itself as fragile and in need of police bodies for safety and protection. The white body views Black bodies in a complex and paradoxical manner. On the one hand, it views Black bodies as impervious to pain and needing to be controlled. On the other hand, it sees Black bodies as sources of comfort and service. Indeed, Black bodies have historically served white bodies, notably during slavery, when white people built a massive agricultural economy with enslaved Black labor. White people used murder, rape, mutilation, and other forms of trauma to maintain power. Laws, social norms, and deep-seated beliefs also supported the system.

The Black body views white bodies as privileged, controlling, and dangerous. It is conflicted about police bodies, which are at once sources of protection and danger. Individual police officers signal safety, while groups of officers are seen as an occupying force.

The police body views Black bodies as impervious to pain. It seeks to control and subdue Black bodies by any means, including force. According to Menakem, racialized views of the other are embedded in every body. Breaking free of them also begins with the body.

Menakem closes the chapter with exercises that focus on grounding the body. He asks readers to find a quiet, comfortable, private place to practice. One exercise involves deep breathing and humming. Another focuses on visualization: Readers are asked to create a circle with a piece of string, stand in the middle of the circle, and visualize sharing the space first with a supportive person and then with someone who is not supportive. Menakem recommends paying close attention to the body’s reactions during each exercise: “Notice what images, sensations, emotions, impulses, and thoughts arise in you. Don’t do anything about those images—simply take note of them” (33).

Chapter 3 focuses on two issues: The spread of trauma between bodies and intergenerational trauma. The former happens when people deliberately inflict pain on others, or when something triggers a person’s trauma, thereby activating the lizard brain and causing that person to physically or emotionally harm whoever is nearby. The latter happens when victims of oppression pass on their trauma to their children. Studies show that trauma can impact the cellular expression of DNA and that these changes can be passed from parent to child, primarily through hormones. Memories linked to trauma can also be passed from parents to their children. These effects seem especially prevalent among Black people, Jews, and Native Americans, three groups that experienced acute historical trauma. Mass historical trauma is most often associated with unexpected experiences, involve many deaths, last a long time, have unknown causes, are deeply meaningful, and impact many people.

Repetitive trauma contributes to a variety of ailments. Studies point to a link between persistent trauma and heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, chronic lung disease, alcoholism, and depression, as well as sexually transmitted diseases and drug use. They also show a connection between trauma and poor academic performance, teenage pregnancy, and attempted suicide. Trauma not only impacts victims, their descendants, and witnesses but also those who inflict harm. Police officers who inflict harm dissociate from their trauma, which results in profound shame or moral injury. Officers return to duty with unhealed moral injuries, impacting other officers and the communities they police. Healing trauma is thus critical to healing society. Building resilience is an important component of healing. Body practice focusing on processing ancestral pain can help heal historical trauma.

The history of racial trauma in the US is typically described as beginning in 1619 when the first Africans were brought to America. As Menakem observes, however, the roots of this trauma go back further. Humans have been murdering, oppressing, and colonizing one another for thousands of years. For example, as England was colonizing America in the 1600s, the English back home routinely burned heretics at the stake and tortured people for punishment while disease wiped out large swathes of the population. Colonizers traumatized by these events passed their trauma to their descendants.

Race is a social construct invented in the 17th century. Before this period, people were grouped by nationality or tribe. The first known uses of the adjective white to mean a racial category date to the 1680s. Only in the late-17th century did white Americans start to formalize a culture of white-body supremacy. The concept of “the Negro” emerged to help white Americans cope with their own brutal history and that of their ancestors, who themselves experienced trauma at the hands of more powerful white bodies. The idea of race was designed to blow centuries of trauma through millions of Black bodies and to colonize the minds of all people.

Trauma lives in everyone. To end white-body supremacy, white people must imagine themselves in Black, Red, and Brown bodies, and in the bodies of their white ancestors. In short, white people must address their historical trauma to stop passing it down to their children. Menakem guides readers through body practice exercises that focus on ancestral pain, aiming to heal historical trauma for people of all colors.

Chapter 5 focuses on institutional racism and its impact on the Black psyche. It opens by reiterating that race is a myth propagated by white bodies to exercise control over non-white bodies. Institutions, structures, narratives, and practices support the myth that race is unchangeable. Yet definitions of whiteness have shifted over time: Immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and Italy, for example, were not always considered white; in fact, American laws, regulations, and policies officially designated them non-white. The invention of race, then, required not only dominating Black and Red bodies but also othering some white bodies and not others.

Menakem provides a body-centered historical overview. This somatic timeline begins in the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500), when Europeans committed atrocities against each other. The European Colony Era (c. 1500-1610) was a period characterized by the influx of Europeans to the Americas and the subsequent loss of Indigenous lives to warfare and disease. The Enslavement Era (1629-1865) saw the importation of enslaved Africans to America, the creation of whiteness, the dehumanization of Black bodies, and the creation of institutionally supported white-body supremacy. The Jim Crow Era (1877-1965) enacted laws that created and enforced segregation. Although the Neo-Crow Era (1966-present) made segregation illegal and promoted civil rights, easing dissonance between Black and white bodies, reversals began in the 1980s because of the War on Drugs, which led to the mass incarceration of Black men.

Today, de facto segregation persists in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Moreover, Black bodies continue to be harmed by daily microaggressions, resulting in pervasive self-hatred in Black communities. Many Black people berate themselves and others for being Black, being too Black, or being not Black enough. These negative feelings and behaviors are deeply rooted. However, trauma is not a destiny.

Menakem guides readers through a series of exercises aimed at healing pervasive violations, large and small, describing body practice aimed at helping Black people heal from microaggressions. He asks Black readers to recall an incident when they were the target of a microaggression, to replay the incident in their minds from beginning to end, and to replay it again while focusing on their bodily reactions. These reactions might include pain and discomfort, constriction, activation, and release. Healing from trauma and building resilience benefits individuals today and in the next generation.

When Menakem learned about the killing of 13-year-old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland police officer, he was acutely aware that his son could meet a similar fate. The officer who killed Rice was never charged with a crime.

White supremacy promotes concepts about the Black body that justify this kind of violence. White-body supremacy sees the Black body as dangerous, impervious to pain, superhumanly strong, hypersexual, dirty, unattractive, and needing to be controlled. Most white people do not articulate these concepts; rather, they feel them in the form of fear, hatred, and constriction. White bodies experience discomfort in the presence of Black bodies and this lack of safety drives their behavior: Black people are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated at much higher rates than white people, even for nonviolent crimes. When unfamiliar bodies encounter one another, the lizard part of their brains either relaxes in recognition or constricts in self-protection. Menakem guides readers through body practice exercises designed to make white readers more attentive to their bodily reactions to unknown Black bodies.

White fragility is the antithesis of Black invulnerability. The myth that white bodies are weak and vulnerable to Black bodies helped destroy the solidarity between Black and white laborers in the 17th century, created bonds between wealthy white landowners and poor white workers, and reinforced the social order. The myth of white fragility emboldened generations of white bodies to harm Black ones. Maintaining the power imbalance was seen as necessary for white survival.

Society has partially dismantled overt racist structures, yet the myth of white fragility remains. In its deadliest manifestation, it confuses fear with danger and comfort with safety. The lizard brain prompts white bodies to fear Black bodies, even when no danger exists. The myth also elicits strong defensive responses whenever white bodies are challenged about race and equity. Victim blaming, crying, incredulity, and verbally or physically assaulting challengers are common defensive responses. White fragility is a classic form of dirty pain.

Black people routinely protect and soothe white bodies to remain safe. For instance, they dress, speak, and act in non-threatening ways, reject natural hairstyles, and avoid topics that trigger defensiveness. But it should not be up to Black people to make white people feel safe. Doing so enables white fragility and white-body supremacy. White Americans must confront and heal the source of their fragility—their trauma. While white-body supremacy benefits white people, it also diminishes their ability to recognize their own strengths and abilities.

Menakem ends this chapter with body practice exercises focusing on strength, resilience, and resourcefulness related to white fragility and Black collusion. Menakem asks white readers to think about a recent incident when they expected a Black person to comfort or protect them. He then asks white readers to pay attention to their bodies while considering the following points:

1. When they first felt the need to make the request;

2. When they made the request;

3. When the person said yes or no to the request;

4. When he or she fulfilled (or failed to fulfill) the request.

The exercise ends with ten deep breaths, an assessment of whether the request for comfort or protection was necessary, and a return to the present.

Menakem received a call from Bryan, a white combat veteran from Florida who is deeply shaken after an encounter with the police. Bryan was pulled over, even though he was driving at the speed limit. The situation devolved when the officer noticed Bryan’s registered handgun on the passenger seat: “GUN! GUN! HE’S ARMED!” the cop shouted, raising his own weapon and pressing it against Bryan’s temple (112). The officer proceeded to restrain Bryan, slam his face against the car, and scream at him. The incident ended when the officer’s partner checked out Bryan’s driver’s license and gun permit. The cops drove away without so much as an apology. Menakem uses this anecdote to explain white privilege. Bryan recognizes that, on this occasion, being white saved his life: “Because I’m white, I’m still alive. I have no doubt at all that if I were Black, my body would be in the morgue right now” (113).

In addition to living with intergenerational trauma, law enforcement officials witness trauma at work. Thus, they regularly experience secondary trauma. Most law enforcement officers are not trained to address their trauma, nor do they have institutional support to heal. Many live with chronic stress, which releases harmful biochemicals into their bloodstream. Some manage this stress with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Others suffer from burnout, chronic anger, and health problems.

Law enforcement officers treat Black and white bodies differently. For example, police use force unequally, subduing Black bodies but not white ones in similar circumstances. Society condemns such acts as racist. However, racism is not always cognitive. Some racist acts are reflexively activated by the lizard brain. Many officers view Black bodies as foreign and in need of being controlled, damaged, or destroyed. Police departments have been militarized, so “control, arrest, and shoot” have replaced “protect, serve, and keep the peace.” This has created chronic stress for police, prompting them to behave like soldiers in combat and to overreact when confronted with Black bodies. Officers often cite fear when justifying discharging their weapons without cause, which helps explain the high instances of police shootings of unarmed Black people. Healing trauma may alleviate some of these fears.

The chapter ends with body and breath exercises aimed at settling police bodies. Menakem asks police officials to take inventory of their physical and emotional sensations at the end of a workday, starting with the strongest and ending with the weakest. Jotting down notes about the sensations and any images that arise may also be helpful. After breathing deeply, participants should ask themselves the following question: “If I had the ability to quickly settle my body whenever I wanted to—including at work—how might this change what I’m experiencing right now?” (127).

Racialized trauma impacts the body. Many Black people suffer from hypervigilance, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, disordered thinking, panic attacks, depression, and self-hatred. High blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, heart problems, and other diseases also impact traumatized Black bodies. Addressing and preventing these health concerns demands in part confronting the trauma that fuels them. It also requires addressing the trauma of white and police bodies, who must learn to feel safe in the presence of Black bodies. Growth and healing are not possible without first addressing trauma. Collective and communal healing can help build respect, recognition, community, and culture.