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

Chapter 11 challenges readers to settle their bodies to be calm, alert, and fully present. Bodily vibrations and energies connect people. Thus, settled bodies perpetuate calm, while unsettled bodies engender chaos. People who learn to settle their bodies are better equipped to handle racial trauma. For example, Black people would be less apt to internalize the standards of white-body supremacy, and police officers would be less likely to find Black bodies threatening. Although learning to settle the body takes time and practice, the process increases the body’s ability to manage stress and creates space for the nervous system to find coherence and flow.

Menakem outlines six body exercises to settle readers’ bodies. These emphasize breathing, grounding, and safeguarding the body. Menakem recommends creating and following a self-care growth routine. He also suggests avoiding tobacco, limiting prescription drug use, losing weight (if necessary), and putting an end to negative thinking. Visiting healthcare professionals is essential to self-care. Settling is not the same as healing; however, healing cannot occur if the body is unsettled.

Menakem outlines a five-step process to move through clean pain. He refers to each step as an anchor. Anchor 1 comprises quieting the mind, calming the heart, and settling the body. Anchor 2 consists of noticing the sensations, vibrations, and emotions in the body instead of reacting to them. Anchor 3 entails accepting discomfort rather than trying to avoid it. Anchor 4 requires staying present in the body, despite uncertainty and ambiguity, while responding to the best parts of the self. Anchor 5 consists of safely discharging any remaining energy through exercise or physical labor.

Menakem ends the chapter with a description of two body practices. The first focuses on accepting whatever happens in the body. The second entails being attentive to the body’s checkpoints—specifically, the physical sensations that activate strong emotions, such as fear and danger. These two practices can be used independently or alongside the five anchors. Whereas the anchors promote healing by allowing people to recognize, accept, and move through clean pain, the two practices help settle the body, allowing people to remain present as painful situations unfold.

Chapter 13 describes two strategies to heal trauma: reaching out to others and completing thwarted actions. Menakem recommends reaching out to trusted bodies to share traumatic experiences. This should happen regularly, not just after stressful events. These encounters involve describing a meaningful event while the trusted person listens attentively, a process therapists call active listening. The experience may involve bodily movements, such as swaying or crying.

Completing a thwarted action is also important to the healing process. This can take the form of holding an imaginary conversation with someone who has wronged you. While completing the thwarted action, it is important to remain aware of bodily sensations and to maintain a protective boundary. The goal of completing an action is twofold: first, to allow traumatized individuals to complete actions they were not able to complete at an earlier time; and second, to help traumatized individuals respond to trauma better in the future. Completing an action sets up the conditions for healing past trauma, including ancestral trauma. Mending trauma involves two different forces: the body’s natural urge to relax (settling) and its equally natural urge to protect itself (activation).

Chapter 14 stresses the importance of harmonizing with other bodies. All bodies, including Black, white, and police bodies, must learn to be more settled with each other. Respect is key to this process. Much public discourse emphasizes divisiveness and promotes myths about race. Settling one’s own body is the first step to harmonizing with other bodies. Harmonizing activities include humming and walking in sync with others. These activities should be simple and should not be the focus of an encounter. Rather, they should be incorporated into existing activities, such as business meetings. Using the anchors described in Chapter 12 can help individuals remain present in their bodies during the harmonizing process. As Menakem noted in Chapter 11, settled bodies help other bodies settle. With time and the right tools, enough bodies will heal from trauma, learn to harmonize, and become the foundation for change.

Menakem’s grandmother used corporal punishment as a form of discipline. He describes the pain of being struck by a willow switch in vivid terms: “When the switch strikes you, it wraps around your arm or leg. It doesn’t usually break the skin, but it leaves welts that last—and sting—for a couple of days” (188). The practice sanitizes a common way of punishing Black bodies for centuries, with the “whipping” euphemized to “whupping” and the leather whips used to inflict pain sanitized into willow switches. Menakem’s grandmother was raised in a sharecropping family in Round Lake, Mississippi, and her grandparents spent most of their lives on a plantation. As Menakem observes, “You don’t need a degree in psychology to recognize my grandmother’s whupping us with a switch as a traumatic retention” (188). Now, he has a violence-free approach to parenting. Menakem wants to keep his son safe, especially from strangers. Helping people settle their bodies and heal from trauma is one way of accomplishing this task.

In Chapter 13, Menakem discussed the importance of harmonizing with other bodies. This chapter focuses more specifically on harmonizing with Black bodies. Menakem lists activities to promote sync, including group drumming, rhythmic group clapping, cooking together, and mindful hugging. Being aware of how white-body supremacy operates inside Black bodies is critical to healing. Attentiveness to traumatic retention and other problematic behaviors, such as reflexively making white people feel safe and comfortable, is equally important.

The chapter ends with exercises designed to help Black people notice their reflexive responses to white people. These activities are not meant to encourage reflexive trust of all white bodies.

Chapter 16 provides white people with tools to understand and heal from racial trauma. It opens with body practices focusing on violent imagery, including the mutilated bodies of lynching victims. The goal of these exercises is to bring awareness to bodily reactions to trauma.

Black bodies carry the trauma of their ancestors in their DNA, including that of lynching victims. Menakem wonders how to explain this barbaric practice. White-body supremacy does not fully explain lynching, nor do relativist arguments that claim it was a different time. Menakem proposes that at the heart of the practice lies intergenerational trauma, which allowed white people to participate in lynchings by enabling them to override the normal human reactions of shock, horror, terror, and disgust. Europe’s long history of public violence, including drawing and quartering, laid the foundation for lynching in the US.

White people must heal their trauma to bring an end to white-body supremacy. Changing the lizard brain’s reflexive responses to Black bodies is critical to this process. Menakem guides white readers through body practices to mend personal, historical, intergenerational, and secondary trauma related to white-body supremacy. He recommends combining these activities with those of Chapter 12. Everyday activities, such as choosing a Black doctor or offering to help a Black person in distress, also help dismantle racism, as does working to settle the body in the presence of Black people. Equally important is calling out white-body supremacy in a calm but firm manner. White-body supremacy harms white people by making them feel fragile and shielding them from their own pain, grief, and disappointment. White people have a responsibility to share their privilege, heal from trauma, and stop spreading their trauma to others.

Chapter 17 opens with two key observations. First, policing is stressful and sometimes dangerous work. Second, all law enforcement officials participate in institutional white-body supremacy. Policing has its roots in slavery—in slave patrols tasked with helping white landowners capture and punish escaped enslaved people. These origins impact policing today. Menakem provides tools to help law enforcement officials shake off the influence of white-body supremacy. He recommends using the five anchors described in Chapter 12 whenever officers feel stress or conflict. He also advises learning to settle the body through self-care. Finally, seeking help from a therapist, social worker, or religious leader can help officers manage their stress.

Body practice can help police bodies end white-body supremacy. Being attentive to one’s reactions during encounters with unfamiliar Black bodies is a crucial first step. This process is not meant to encourage reflexive trust of Black bodies, but rather, to draw attention to reflexive mistrust. People in leadership roles can support the physical and mental health of their subordinates by offering daily exercise classes, setting up running clubs, organizing stress management workshops, providing fitness trackers, and hiring social workers. Policies automatically giving officers recovery time and support after traumatic events are also important, as is lobbying for money to spend on officer wellness. Activities and policies must be strategically organized and implemented to maximize benefits. Law enforcement professionals must be trained in psychological first aid and body-settling activities. Unnecessary risks must be eliminated to reduce stress. Similarly, it is important to avoid situations that prompt lizard-brain responses. Police need more than tactical training—they also need settling techniques, though most officers are taught the opposite.