these writers are wise, loving, and profoundly observant. I’m deeply grateful for their contributions, which have helped to create the foundation on which this book is built. But I come at the subject from a different direction.
Some of these writers—Yancy, Roberts, hooks, Douglas—are academics and philosophers, while others—Coates, Baldwin, Wright, Danquah, Cole—are literary authors. With piercing insight and eloquence, they reveal what white-body supremacy tries to keep hidden, and lay bare what many of us habitually overlook or cover up. In this book, I accept with gratitude the baton that these wise writers have handed to me.
My Grandmother’s Hands is a book of healing. I’m a healer and trauma therapist, not a philosopher or literary stylist. My earlier book, Rock the Boat: How to Use Conflict to Heal and Deepen Your Relationship (Hazelden, 2015), is a practical guide for couples. In that book, as well as in this one, my focus is on mending psyches, souls, bodies, and relationships—and, whenever possible, families, neighborhoods, and communities.
In Part I, you’ll see how white-body supremacy gets systematically (if often unconsciously or unwittingly) embedded in our American bodies even before we are born, creating ongoing trauma and a legacy of suffering for virtually all of us.
This racialized trauma appears in three different forms—one in the bodies of white Americans, another in those of African Americans, and yet another in the bodies of police officers. The trauma in white bodies has been passed down from parent to child for perhaps a thousand years, long before the creation of the United States. The trauma in African American bodies is often (and understandably) more severe but, in historical terms, also more recent. However, each individual body has its own unique trauma response, and each body needs (and deserves) to heal.
In Part II, you’ll experience and absorb dozens of activities designed to help you mend your own trauma around white-body supremacy and create more room and opportunities for growth in your own nervous system. The opening chapters of Part II are for everyone, while later chapters focus on specific groups: African Americans, white Americans, and American police.
The chapters for African American readers grew, in part, out of my Soul Medic and Cultural Somatics workshops. I began offering these several years ago, along with workshops on psychological first aid. These provide body-centered experiences meant to help Black Americans experience their bodies, begin to recognize and release trauma, and bring some of that healing and room into the communal body.
The chapters for white readers draw partly from what I’ve learned from conducting similar workshops for white allies co-led with Margaret Baumgartner, Fen Jeffries, and Ariella Tilsen—white facilitators, conflict resolvers, and healing practitioners. The material on the community aspects of mending white bodies is supported by work I’ve done in collaboration with Susan Raffo of the People’s Movement Center and Janice Barbee of Healing Roots, both in Minneapolis.
The chapters for law enforcement officers draw from the trainings I’ve led for police officers on trauma, self-care, white-body supremacy, and creating some healing infrastructure in their departments and precincts.
Part III will give you the tools to take your healing, and your newfound knowledge and awareness, into your community. It provides some simple, structured activities for helping other people you encounter release the trauma of white-body supremacy—in your family, neighborhood, workplace, and elsewhere. Because all of us, separately and together, can be healers, I begin with tools and strategies that anyone can apply, and follow them with specific chapters for African Americans, white Americans, and police.
As every therapist will tell you, healing involves discomfort—but so does refusing to heal. And, over time, refusing to heal is always more painful.
In my therapy office, I tell clients there are two kinds of pain: clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth.9 It’s the pain you experience when you know, exactly, what you need to say or do; when you really, really don’t want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway. It’s also the pain you experience when you have no idea what to do; when you’re scared or worried about what might happen; and when you step forward into the unknown anyway, with honesty and vulnerability.
Experiencing clean pain enables us to engage our integrity and tap into our body’s inherent resilience and coherence, in a way that dirty pain does not. Paradoxically, only by walking into our pain or discomfort—experiencing it, moving through it, and metabolizing it—can we grow. It’s how the human body works.
Clean pain hurts like hell. But it enables our bodies to grow through our difficulties, develop nuanced skills, and mend our trauma. In this process, the body metabolizes clean pain. The body can then settle; more room for growth is created in its nervous system; and the self becomes freer and more capable, because it now has access to energy that was previously protected, bound, and constricted. When this happens, people’s lives often improve in other ways as well.
All of this can happen both personally and collectively. In fact, if American bodies are to move beyond the pain and limitation of white-body supremacy, it needs to happen in both realms. Accepting clean pain will allow white Americans to confront their longtime collective disassociation and silence. It will enable African Americans to confront their internalization of defectiveness and self-hate. And it will help public safety professionals in many localities to confront the recent metamorphosis of their role from serving the community to serving as soldiers and prison guards.
Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others.
A key factor in the perpetuation of white-body supremacy is many people’s refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance and, invariably, prolong the pain.
In experiencing this book, you will face some pain. Neither you nor I can know how much, and it may not show up in the place or the manner you expect. Whatever your own background or skin color, as you make your way through these pages, I encourage you to let yourself experience that clean pain in order to let yourself heal. If you do, you may save yourself—and others—a great deal of future suffering.
In Chapters Ten, Eleven, and Twelve, I’ll give you some practical tools to help your body become settled, anchored, and present within your clean pain, so that you can slowly metabolize your trauma and move through and beyond it. (I’ll also give you parallel tools to help you quickly activate your body on demand, for times when that might be necessary.)
It’s easy to assume the way people interact in twenty-first-century America is the way human beings have always interacted, at all times and in all places. Of course, this isn’t so. It’s equally easy to imagine that twenty-first-century American society is somehow fundamentally different from any other time and place in history. That isn’t so, either. Here are some things to acknowledge before we go further:
• Trauma is as ancient as human beings. In fact, it’s more ancient. Animals that were here eons before humans appeared also experience trauma in their bodies.
• Oppression, enslavement, and fear of the other are as old, and as widespread, as human civilization.
• A variety of forms of supremacy—of one group being elevated above another—have existed around
