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June 28 - July 20, 2023
An estimated eighteen million Native people were custodians of the North American continent when European colonists arrived. They and their ancestors had lived here for an estimated 14,000 years. Today this same land contains over 204 million white Americans, over forty-six million Black Americans, and just over five million Native Americans. The story of the unique arc of trauma in the Native American body is only now beginning to be told.
Relatively few white Americans consciously recognize, let alone embrace, this subtle variety of white-body supremacy. In fact, there is often no way to measure or recognize it.
For most Americans, including most of us with dark skin, white-body supremacy has become part of our bodies. How could it not? It’s the equivalent of a toxic chemical we ingest on a daily basis. Eventually, it changes our brains and the chemistry of our bodies.
trauma is never a personal failing, and it is never something a person can choose. It is always something that happens to someone.
Indeed, a traumatic response temporarily overrides the rational brain.
healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.
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.
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.
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.
Because all of us, separately and together, can be healers,
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.
Whenever one group oppresses, victimizes, brutalizes, or marginalizes another, many of the victimized people may suffer trauma, and then pass on that trauma response to their children as standard operating procedure.
As we have seen, the result is a soul wound or intergenerational trauma. When the trauma continues for generation after generation, it is called historical trauma. Historical trauma has been likened to a bomb going off, over and over again.
A fetus growing inside the womb of a traumatized mother may inherit some of that trauma in its DNA expression. This results in the repeated release of stress hormones, which may affect the nervous system of the developing fetus.
Trauma can alter the DNA expression of a child or grandchild’s brain, causing a wide range of health and mental health issues, including memory loss, chronic anxiety, muscle weakness, and depression.
Health experts now think that stress throughout the span of a woman’s life can prompt biological changes that affect the health of her future children. Stress can disrupt immune, vascular, metabolic, and endocrine systems, and cause cells to age more quickly.
When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression.
Remember, to the traumatized body, all threats—current or ancient, individual or collective, real or imagined—are exactly the same.
Published in 2014, ACES clearly links childhood trauma (and other “adverse childhood events” involving abuse or neglect21) to a wide range of long-term health and social consequences, including illness, disability, social problems, and early death—all of which can get passed down through the generations.
trauma is a major contributor to many of our bodily, mental, and social ills, and that mending our trauma may be one of the most effective ways to address those ills.
Like trauma, resilience can ripple outward, changing the lives of people, families, neighborhoods, and communities in positive ways.
Over generations, many of us African Americans have developed thick emotional skins in a variety of ways.28 This has served us well, protecting us from a great deal of damage and pain in a dangerous world. This is how resilience works. It doesn’t always create full healing, but it may build protection and prevent (or blunt) future wounding.
Trauma can damage the genes in our cells. That damage can be passed on from parent to child, and from the child to his or her own child.
One of the best things each of us can do for ourselves, and for our descendants, is metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal, we may spread our emotional health and healthy genes to later generations.
Trauma is not destiny. It can look like destiny when people choose to blow their trauma through others. But when you make a deliberate choice not to pass on your trauma to others, that choice begins to heal some of the trauma.
Many white Americans need to be confronted—firmly and compassionately—on their white fragility.
Americans of European descent have histories that demonstrate great courage, ingenuity, ability, achievement, and resilience in virtually all aspects of life but one: their relationship with African American bodies.
Policing has become more and more like soldiering. In some communities, police forces have transformed from community servants into occupying forces.
“As soon as the officer gets on the stand and subjectively says, ‘I was fearing for my life,’ many juries are not going to convict at that point … We’ve seen it over and over again.”
Settling is not the same thing as healing; it is an all-important foundation for healing. A settled body invites and accepts efforts to mend it; an unsettled one tends to resist those efforts.
When you heal a soul wound, you heal the people who came before you. You heal their presence in your life, in your memory, and in the expression of your DNA. This opens up a bit more room for flow and compassion inside you. You also heal the generations to come, because your healing means that you will not pass on your trauma to your descendants.
Trauma is never a personal failure, nor the result of someone’s weakness, nor a limitation, nor a defect. It is a normal reaction to abnormal conditions and circumstances.
In fact, however, American policing has many of its historical roots in slavery. As early as 1704, long before many settlements had anything like police, the colony of Carolina created a slave patrol. The patrol’s job was to assist wealthy landowners in capturing and punishing enslaved people who had run away. The people in those patrols were tools of the colony’s landowners. Their job was to round up other tools that had gone astray.
When one of your officers is on trial for shooting someone, and his or her defense is “I was simply following my training,” something is clearly wrong with that training.
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.
Because Black Americans, white Americans, and police have each developed their own subcultures, each group first needs to create profound change within its own culture. This means that each group needs to develop its own new stories, symbols, rituals, role models, elders, and so on.
The most effective leaders lead by example and model the way for others. The most effective followers also model the way for others.
Like all human beings, we African Americans need to hold onto the strongest and most resilient parts of ourselves, and grow out of the weakest ones. We need to do this as individuals, as a group, and in our culture.
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.
Americans have reached a point of peril and possibility. We will either grow up or grow smaller. This trauma will either burst forth in an explosion of dirty pain, or provide the necessary energy and heat for white Americans to move through clean pain and heal. Only this second outcome will provide us with genuine safety.
The killing of an American by an American police officer is not unusual. In fact, on average it takes place three times a day.109 And the percentage of African American bodies that die at the hands of police is two and a half times that of white bodies.
