each other, harming human beings in profoundly negative ways.
• Race is an invention—and a relatively modern one.
• My Grandmother’s Hands looks at racialized trauma in America, how that trauma gets perpetuated through white-body supremacy, and how we can heal from it. Because of its American focus, some of its insights and activities may not be appropriate for some other countries and cultures.
• White-body supremacy in America doesn’t just harm Black people. It damages everyone. Historically, it has also been especially brutal toward Native Americans, and, often, Latino Americans.
• As we’ll see, while white-body supremacy benefits white Americans in some ways, it also does great harm to white bodies, hearts, and psyches.
So far, all you know about me is that I’m a body-centered therapist who specializes in trauma work, that I lead Soul Medic and Cultural Somatics workshops, and that I’ve published a book that helps couples mend and deepen their relationships. (I’ve also published a book of guidance for emerging justice leaders.) But for you to trust me and stick with me throughout this book, you probably want to know much more. Fair enough.
I’m a longtime therapist and licensed clinical social worker in private practice. I specialize in couples’ trauma work, conflict in relationships of all kinds, and domestic violence prevention. Recently I established Cultural Somatics, an area of study and practice that applies our knowledge of trauma and resilience to history, intergenerational relationships, institutions, and the communal body. I’m also a leadership coach for emerging justice leaders. I’ve been a guest on both The Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil, where I discussed family dynamics, couples in conflict, and domestic violence. For ten years, I cohosted a radio show with US Congressman Keith Ellison on KMOJ-FM in Minneapolis. I also hosted my own show, “Resmaa in the Morning,” on KMOJ.
I’ve worked as a trainer for the Minneapolis Police Department; a trauma consultant for the St. Paul Public Schools; the director of counseling services for Tubman Family Alliance, a domestic violence treatment center in Minneapolis; the behavioral health director for African American Family Services in Minneapolis; a domestic violence counselor for Wilder Foundation; a divorce and family mediator; a social worker and consultant for the Minneapolis Public Schools; a community organizer; and a consultant for the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.
For two years I served as a community care counselor for civilian contractors in Afghanistan, managing the wellness and counseling services on fifty-three US military bases. As a certified Military Family Life Consultant, I also worked with members of the military and their families on issues related to family living, deployment, and returning home.
But here’s what may be most important: I’m just like you. I’ve experienced my own trauma around white-body supremacy—and around other things as well. Sometimes white people scare me. Sometimes my African American brothers and sisters scare me. Sometimes I scare myself. But when I’m scared, I know enough to let my body tap into its inherent resilience and flow, to help it settle, and to lean into my clean pain. I also have a community of healed and healing bodies that supports me and holds me accountable.
Even though I’m law abiding and my brother is a cop, police sometimes scare me. I drive a Dodge Challenger with racing stripes, so police follow me a lot, and sometimes I get pulled over.10 I’m always friendly and polite when this happens, but I worry I’ll get the wrong officer who’s been struggling with his or her own trauma.
I was raised in a family that was sometimes stable, sometimes chaotic. My father struggled with chemical dependency and was violent at times. As a young adult, I was angry, frightened, and confused. It took me a long time to find my place in the world. Fortunately, I had a family, community, mentors, elders, and ancestors who all expected the best of me and encouraged me to grow up and heal.
I want you, and me, and all of us to heal, to be free of racialized trauma, to feel safe and secure in our bodies and in the world, and to pass on that safety and security to future generations. This book is my attempt to create more of that safety.
—BODY CENTERED PRACTICE—
Take a moment to ground yourself in your own body. Notice the outline of your skin and the slight pressure of the air around it. Experience the firmer pressure of the chair, bed, or couch beneath you—or the ground or floor beneath your feet.
Can you sense hope in your body? Where? How does your body experience that hope? Is it a release or expansion? A tightening born of eagerness or anticipation?
What specific hopes accompany these sensations? The chance to heal? To be free of the burden of racialized trauma? To live a bigger, deeper life?
Do you experience any fear in your body? If so, where? How does it manifest? As tightness? As a painful radiance? As a dead, hard spot?
What worries accompany the fear? Are you afraid your life will be different in ways you can’t predict? Are you afraid of facing clean pain? Are your worried you will choose dirty pain instead? Do you feel the raw, wordless fear—and, perhaps, excitement—that heralds change? What pictures appear in your mind as you experience that fear?
If your body feels both hopeful and afraid, congratulations. You’re just where you need to be for what comes next.
One final note: at the end of each chapter you’ll find a list of Re-memberings, which highlight the key insights from that chapter. Rememberings will help you easily recall these insights and use them for healing in a variety of ways: to re-member your ancestors, your history, and your body; to create more room and opportunities for growth in your nervous system; to build and rebuild community; and to discover or rediscover your full membership in the human community.
RE-MEMBERINGS
• White-body supremacy doesn’t live just in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.
• As a result, we will never outgrow white-body supremacy just through discussion, training, or anything else that’s mostly cognitive. Instead, we need to look to the body—and to the embodied experience of trauma.
• Our deepest emotions involve the activation of a single bodily structure: our soul nerve (or vagus nerve). This nerve is connected to our lizard brain, which is concerned solely with survival and protection. Our lizard brain only has four basic commands: rest, fight, flee, or freeze.
• In the aftermath of a highly stressful event, our lizard brain may embed a reflexive trauma response—a wordless story of danger—in our body. This trauma can cause us to react to present events in ways that seem out of proportion or wildly inappropriate to what’s actually going on.
• Trauma is routinely passed on from person to person—and generation to generation—through genetics, culture, family structures, and the biochemistry of the egg, sperm, and womb. Trauma is literally in our blood.
• Most African Americans know trauma intimately. But different kinds of racialized trauma also live and breathe in the bodies of most white Americans, as well as most law enforcement professionals.
• All of us need to metabolize the trauma, work through it, and grow up out of it with our bodies, not just our thinking brains. Only in this way will we heal at last, both individually and collectively.
