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

by Resmaa Menakem

The transference of trauma isn’t just about how human beings treat each other. Trauma can also be inherited genetically. Recent work in genetics has revealed that trauma can change the expression of the DNA in our cells, and these changes can be passed from parent to child.14

A landmark study demonstrating this effect in mice was published in 2014 by Kerry Ressler and Brian Dias (“Parental Olfactory Experience Influences Behavior and Neural Structure in Subsequent Generations,” Nature Neuroscience 17: 89–96). Ressler and Dias put male mice in a small chamber, then occasionally exposed them to the scent of acetophenone (which smells like cherries)—and, simultaneously, to small electric shocks. Eventually the mice associated the scent with pain; they would shudder whenever they were exposed to the smell, even after the shocks were discontinued. The children of those mice were born with a fear of the smell of acetophenone. So were their grandchildren. As of this writing, no one has completed a similar study on humans, both for ethical reasons and because we take a lot longer than mice to produce a new generation.

“It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place . . . and the future of the country depends on that.” JAMES BALDWIN

For America to outgrow the bondage of white-body supremacy, white Americans need to imagine themselves in Black bodies and experience what those bodies had to endure. They also need to do the same with the bodies of their own white ancestors. And they need to ask themselves this question: “If we don’t address our ancient historical trauma, what will we pass down to our children, and to their children and grandchildren?”

Throughout the United States’s history as a nation, white bodies have colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered Black and Native ones. But well before the United States began, powerful white bodies colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered other, less powerful white ones. The carnage perpetrated on Blacks and Native Americans in the New World began, on the same soil, as an adaptation of longstanding white-on-white practices.35 This brutalization created trauma that has yet to be healed among white bodies today.

The phantasm of race was conjured to help white people manage their fear and hatred of other white people.

White men who did not own land were not granted the right to vote until much later—as early as 1792 in Kentucky and as late as 1856 in North Carolina. Women could not vote until 1920; Natives Americans not until 1924; and Chinese immigrants not until 1943. Residents of Washington, DC, could not vote in presidential elections until 1961. Voting rights for Black Americans and other non-white citizens were not guaranteed by law throughout the United States until 1965, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

I heard myself shout, “God damn. Those dirty motherfuckas. Watch. They’re going to get away with shooting that baby. Fuck them.” A wave of helplessness washed over me. I thought, I can’t protect my son from this. I can’t protect my wife or my grown daughter from it. I can’t even protect myself from it. My jaws clenched, and a sharp pain shot from my gut across the left part of my heart. Tears welled up in my eyes.

I thought, I want you to be safe. I want to not have to watch you every weekday morning, to make sure you’re okay, until you climb onto the school bus. I want to trust our police instead of fear them. I want you to be able to play in a public park and not have someone put a bullet in your body. I want you to live to be a man, not end up like Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Emmett Till.

A white body with centuries of traumatic dissonance in its DNA encountered a Black body. The white body experienced reflexive fear. In a fraction of a second, this fear activated the white body’s unmetabolized historical trauma, which in turn reflexively triggered a fight, flee, or freeze response. The white body destroyed the Black body—a body that it feared was dangerous and imagined was impervious to pain. This was exactly what the body was conditioned and trained to do.

When such sensations are embedded in a white body, that body experiences discomfort and a lack of safety in the presence of a Black body, especially an unfamiliar one. As a result, when many white American bodies encounter Black bodies, the white bodies automatically constrict, and their lizard brains go on high alert.

If so, then should Black men routinely be frightened of being shot by police, especially when they are pulled over for little or no reason? What if one of those Black drivers, scared to death, were to shoot the police officer who pulled him over? Does “I feared for my life” constitute a valid defense for that dark-skinned man? If it does, then we are in deep trouble. If it does not—but it becomes one for police—then we are also in deep trouble.

There was a time when police were called peace officers, because their job was to keep the peace, at least in some communities. But it’s hard to keep the peace when your own body is constricted, unsettled, stressed, and traumatized.

Over the past two decades, the policing imperative in many American communities has morphed from protect, serve, and keep the peace to control, arrest, and shoot. • The movement toward militarization is now also taking place with private security teams in malls and airports—and even in our schools. • As a result, in many towns and neighborhoods, police are expected to act like soldiers.

We will not end white-body supremacy—or any form of human evil—by trying to tear it to pieces. Instead, we can offer people better ways to belong, and better things to belong to. Instead of belonging to a race, we can belong to a culture. Each of us can also build our own capacity for genuine belonging.

Gather together a large group of unsettled bodies—or assemble a group of bodies and then unsettle them—and you get a mob or a riot. But bring a large group of settled bodies together and you have a potential movement—and a potential force for tremendous good in the world. A calm, settled body is the foundation for health, for healing, for helping others, and for changing the world.

If you’re like many white Americans, the presence of an unfamiliar Black body may sometimes trigger an alarm in your lizard brain. This may be the case even if you’re a lifelong progressive who has many Black friends and relatives. If so, you need to get to work on healing and growing. Stop for a moment. Did your body recoil or constrict as you read the previous paragraph? If so, notice how reflexive that response was and how quickly it happened.

“It seems that it’s either pro-cop and anti-Black or pro-Black and anti-cop, when, in reality, you can be pro-cop and pro-Black, which is what we should all be.” TREVOR NOAH

To everyone in America who works in law enforcement, there are three things you need to hear: First, you need to take better care of yourselves, both individually and collectively. You deserve to take better care of yourselves. You deserve bodies that are healthy and whole, that feel good, and that can operate at their best. America’s current police culture does not support this.

Laugh regularly. Spend at least an hour a week watching funny films, standup comedians, cat videos, late-night comedy shows, or anything else that makes you laugh out loud.

You don’t have to choose between being a loyal cop who enforces white-body supremacy or a traitor who protects and serves the community. There is a third option: you can be a justice leader. You can be a police officer who is also a grown-up human being. You can care for, serve, protect, and be responsible to the community. You can also care for, and be responsible to, your fellow officers and your department. And you can also be responsible to your own conscience and your own physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. You can consistently act out of the best parts of yourself.

Washing someone’s feet creates deep harmony and a strong body-to-body connection. It is an immediate, tactile, visceral expression of caring, respect, empathy, humility, and service. It is simple and wordless, yet its message is unmistakable: You matter to me. When you wash someone’s feet, his or her heart naturally opens a bit.87 And when someone washes yours, your heart naturally opens a little as well. Foot washing tends to settle the bodies of both the recipient and the giver. It also feels deeply pleasant, nurturing, relaxing, and calming.

We would also be wise to stop calling each other by the N-word, even in an affectionate or ironic way. (Jews do not call each other kikes in any context. Latinos do not call each other spics. Native Americans do not call each other redskins.)

More African Americans also need to know that Black Lives Matter is not a historically isolated movement; it is the most recent manifestation of a resistance movement that goes back centuries.

I was born Chester Mason, Jr. When I was young, people called me Little Chet. Now that I have a different name—one that I chose to adopt as an adult—calling me Chester would be disrespectful. The name Resmaa has a dual benefit: it connects me to an ancient tradition, and it’s unusual enough to make me easy to find online.

In the 1930s, Nazi leaders closely studied America’s race laws, which they deeply admired, to help them create their own Nuremberg Laws in 1935. One of the laws stripped Jews of their citizenship; another prohibited sex or marriage between Jews and people with “German or related blood.” See James Q. Whitman’s eye-opening book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Laws (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). In addition, some of South Africa’s and Australia’s forms of white-body supremacy were informed by American practices.

This is a predictable outcome of the neo-Crow era. For the past several decades, policing in America has routinely meant targeting, accosting, searching, convicting, incarcerating, shooting, and killing large numbers of African Americans and other dark-hued human beings. It has also created a generous—and reliable—income stream for the prison industrial complex, which profits from the corralling and incarceration of Black bodies.

Community policing is not a philosophy. It is not an idea. It is a set of ongoing actions. It is making your body a part of the community—and then wholeheartedly serving, protecting, and assisting the human beings in that community.

Think about these statistics: in 2014, about 1,100 people in the United States were killed by police; in 2015, about 1,200 were. In comparison, in 2011, German police killed six people; British police killed two; Australian police killed six; and Japanese police killed zero human beings.

I’m looking at a photo of a smiling white cop in uniform. He’s sitting down and talking with a group of small Black kids. One is leaning on him and eating potato chips; another is sitting between his legs. Everyone looks relaxed and happy. Their bodies are obviously harmonized. This didn’t happen automatically. It happened because that cop is regularly out in the community, day after day—sitting and talking with people, listening to stories and jokes, telling stories and jokes of his own, buying things in the local stores, and being a consistent part of that world.

“Forget the R or the D or the liberal or the conservative. Are you for right or are you for wrong? Are you for humanity or are you not? . . . Are you for brown people to be treated fairly or are you not?” D. L. HUGHLEY

“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. . . .When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.