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

by Resmaa Menakem

The soul nerve is not just where we experience our emotions. It’s also where we feel a sense of belonging. This is why we can think of it as both a bodily organ and a communal one. More than almost anything else, each of us yearns to belong. Within each human body is this deep, raw, aching desire. Here is what makes white-body supremacy so pervasive and so intractable: Beneath all the exclusion and constriction and trauma, white-body supremacy offers the white body a sense of belonging. It provides a false sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, of being a part of something intrinsically valuable. A variety of organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan to the NRA, have capitalized on this, offering quasi-community, a manufactured history, respected elders, cohesive symbolism, rules of admonishment, an internally coherent (though toxic) worldview, and so on. White-body supremacy partly soothes white bodies in this way. But white-body supremacy also reflexively triggers the historical trauma embedded in those bodies. African American bodies also feel a sense of belonging, of course. Ours, however, has its roots in necessity and an actual shared history. American police have their own sense of belonging, too, sometimes called the Blue Brotherhood. But there are many other ways to belong, and many other people and groups we can belong to. We can belong as family, as friends, as intimate partners, as neighbors, as countrymen, and as fellow human beings. We will not end white-body suprem...