reflexivity—which is why, in addressing trauma, each of us needs to work through it slowly, over time. We need to understand our body’s process of connection and settling. We need to slow ourselves down and learn to lean into uncertainty, rather than away from it. We need to ground ourselves, touch the pain or discomfort inside our trauma, and explore it—gently. This requires building a tolerance for bodily and emotional discomfort, and learning to stay present with—rather than trying to flee—that discomfort. (Note that it does not necessarily mean exploring, reliving, or cognitively understanding the events that created the trauma.) With practice, over time, this enables us to be more curious, more mindful, and less reflexive. Only then can growth and change occur.
There’s some genuine value to talk therapy that focuses just on cognition and behavior. But on its own, especially when trauma is in the way, it won’t be enough to enable you to mend the wounds in your heart and body.
In America, nearly all of us, regardless of our background or skin color, carry trauma in our bodies around the myth of race. We typically think of trauma as the result of a specific and deeply painful event, such as a serious accident, an attack, or the news of someone’s death. That may be the case sometimes, but trauma can also be the body’s response to a long sequence of smaller wounds. It can be a response to anything that it experiences as too much, too soon, or too fast.
Trauma can also be the body’s response to anything unfamiliar or anything it doesn’t understand, even if it isn’t cognitively dangerous. The body doesn’t reason; it’s hardwired to protect itself and react to sensation and movement. When a truck rushes by at sixty miles an hour and misses your body by an inch, your body may respond with trauma as deep and as serious as if it had actually been sideswiped. When watching a horror film, you may jump out of your seat even though you know it’s just a movie. Your body acts as if the danger is real, regardless of what your cognitive brain knows. The body’s imperative is to protect itself. Period.
Trauma responses are unpredictable. Two bodies may respond very differently to the same experience. If you and a friend are at a Fourth of July celebration and a firecracker explodes at your feet, your body may forget about the incident within minutes, while your friend may go on to be terrified by loud, sudden noises for years afterward. When two siblings suffer the same childhood abuse, one may heal fully during adolescence, while the other may get stuck and live with painful trauma for decades. Some Black bodies demonstratively suffer deep traumatic wounds from white-body supremacy, while other bodies appear to be less affected.
Trauma or no trauma, many Black bodies don’t feel settled around white ones, for reasons that are all too obvious: the long, brutal history of enslavement and subjugation; racial profiling (and occasionally murder) by police; stand-your-ground laws; the exoneration of folks such as George Zimmerman (who shot Trayvon Martin), Tim Loehmann (who shot Tamir Rice), and Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (who murdered Emmett Till); outright targeted aggression; and the habitual grind of everyday disregard, discrimination, institutional disrespect, over-policing, over-sentencing, and micro-aggressions.7
As a result, the traumas that live in many Black bodies are deep and persistent. They contribute to a long list of common stress disorders in Black bodies, such as post-traumatic stress disorder8 (PTSD), learning disabilities, depression and anxiety, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other physical and emotional ailments.
These conditions are not inevitable. Many Black bodies have proven very resilient, in part because, over generations, African Americans have developed a variety of body-centered responses to help settle their bodies and blunt the effects of racialized trauma. These include individual and collective humming, rocking, rhythmic clapping, drumming, singing, grounding touch, wailing circles, and call and response, to name just a few.
The traumas that live in white bodies, and the bodies of public safety professionals of all races, are also deep and persistent. However, their origins and nature are quite different. The expression of these traumas is often an immediate, seemingly out-of-the-blue fight, flee, or freeze response, a response that may be reflexively triggered by the mere presence of a Black body—or, sometimes, by the mere mention of race or the term white supremacy or white-body supremacy.
Many English words are loaded or slippery, especially when it comes to race. So let me define some terms.
When I say the Black body or the African American body, it’s shorthand for the bodies of people of African descent who live in America, who have largely shaped its culture, and who have adapted to it. If you’re a Kenyan citizen who has never been to the United States, or a new arrival in America from Cameroon or Haiti or Argentina, some of this book may not apply to you—at least not obviously. Aside from your (perhaps) dark skin, you may not recognize yourself in these pages. (I’m not suggesting that non-Americans without white skin aren’t routinely affected by the global reach of white-body supremacy, only that some of these folks have been fortunate enough to have little or no personal experience with America’s version of racialized trauma. Others have strong resiliency factors that have mitigated some of the effects of white-body supremacy in their lives.)
When I say the white body, it’s shorthand for the bodies of people of European descent who live in America, who have largely shaped and adapted to its culture, and who don’t have dark skin. The term white body lacks precision, but it’s short and simple. If you’re a member of this group, you’ll recognize it when I talk about the white body’s experience.
When I say police bodies, it’s shorthand for the bodies of law enforcement professionals, regardless of their skin color. These professionals include beat cops, police detectives, mall security guards, members of SWAT teams, and the police chiefs of big cities, suburbs, and small towns.
These categories provide ways of communicating, not boxes for anyone to be forced into. It’s possible that none of them fits you. Or maybe you fit into more than one. Don’t try to squeeze yourself into one in particular. Instead, adapt everything you read in this book as your body instructs you to. It will tell you what matches its experience and how to work with its energy and wordless stories.
Maybe you’re an African American whose body, for whatever reason, is entirely free of racialized trauma. Or maybe you’re a white American or police officer whose body doesn’t constrict in the presence of Black bodies, and who can stay settled and present in your own discomfort when the subject of race arises. Either way, I encourage you to try out the body-centered activities in this book. Whether or not you yourself are personally wounded by white-body supremacy, working with these exercises and letting them sink into you will help you build your self-awareness, deepen your capacity for empathy, and create more room for growth in your nervous system.
I’m not the first to recognize the key role of the destruction, restriction, and abuse of the Black body in American history. In Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts wrote of centuries-long efforts by white people to control the wombs of African American women. A decade later, in Black Bodies, White Gazes, George Yancy explored the confiscation of Black bodies by white culture. In Stand Your Ground, Kelly Brown Douglas examined many social and theological issues related to the African American body. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s The Black Body collected thirty writers’ reflections on the role of the Black body in America. James Baldwin, Richard Wright, bell hooks, Teju Cole, and others have written eloquently on the subject of African American bodies. As I worked on this book, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, an examination of the systematic destruction of the Black body in America, reached the number one spot on the New York
