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

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Krista Tippett, host: Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds, with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, I return again and again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up Resmaa’s intelligence anew on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towards the transformed reality I believe most of us long to inhabit.

Tippett: Also, you talked about how your mother and your grandmother, again, how they just modeled this for you, that there is no failure, there is only practice. Resmaa Menakem is also pretty tight with police in his life, with his brother being an officer and a lot of his own work being with the Minneapolis Police Department. While I sympathize that police officers are also human beings and it's essential that someone does the work of making them less harmful, I'm not as hopeful as the author that the institution of policing can be reformed. One of his tips was to smile and greet police officers at protests and marches, with the reasoning that they'll be less likely to brutalize protesters if we can calm their nervous systems through these interactions. I see that logic, but I also think it's complicated for white people to do that at BLM actions. Guided Imagery: Body work guided imagery exercises of safe, secure situations, as well as threatening ones. Tippett: And it’s about your identity. It’s not even necessarily about actions you’re gonna perpetrate against other people. It’s about how you feel inside your body.It feels important to me right now, at this moment in our life together — there’s a lot of judging other people, or thinking, “Can’t they just get their act together?” or “Can’t they just see the truth?” “Can’t they just hear the facts?” And it happens on every side. And something that you know and that you articulate so well is that the vagus nerve also is about safety; that the core of us, the core of our bodies, is always asking, first, “Am I in danger; am I safe?”

Menakem: So one of the things about the animal part of the body is that even though me and you are in this room, this nice place, there’s a part of the body that’s saying, “Yeah, but what else is gonna happen?” And the reason why — especially when I’m working with bodies of culture, one of the first things I have them do is orient, just like, orient to the room. Not orient in a mystical way, but actually, literally — because many times, the bodies of culture are waiting for danger. Even though you know nothing’s behind you, letting the body know it actually helps some pieces. Menakem: So one of the things about the animal part of the body is that even though me and you are in this room — this nice place— there’s a part of the body that’s saying, “Yeah, but what else is gonna happen?” And the reason why — especially when I’m working with bodies of culture, one of the first things I have them do is orient; orient to the room, not orient in the mystical way but actually literally. Because many times the bodies of culture are waiting for danger. Even though you know nothing’s behind you, letting the body know it actually helps some pieces. Now, if you get reps in with that, not just do it one time or just when I tell you to, what you may notice is that you have a little bit more room for other — literally, for other things to happen that can’t happen when the constriction is like that. And so what I’ve been talking to people about is, how do we begin to get the reps in with those pieces? So you’re gonna need time to condition your body to be able to deal with the aches, deal with the doubt, deal with all of that difficulty. You’re gonna have to get up against your own suffering’s edge, before the transformation happens. But you need to condition that. Why do we think that when we talk about race, that’s any different — for me to say, “We’re gonna have a white body supremacy talk; deal with the root of this stuff”? Menakem also challenges the myth of white body fragility and pain sensitivity that too often distracts attention from the problem of racism and elicits cautious caregiving from other white enablers and BIPOC bodies that have been conditioned to sooth and comfort white bodies. Tippett: And we know the narrative — they fled. They fled. We never think, these were traumatized people.white supremacy is more accurately called white-body supremacy. it's got less to do with supremacy of white skin and more to do with supremacy of bodies that are considered white. this could be seen as semantic but is quite helpful. My Grandmother’s Hands will change the direction of the movement for racial justice.”— Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility