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

by Resmaa Menakem

—BODY PRACTICE— For now, find a quiet, comfortable place where you can be alone for ten to fifteen minutes. Once you’re settled, take a deep breath. Then consider the following questions: When were your ancestors first declared Black or white (or Asian, or American Indian, or something else)? Who determined this? How was that determination communicated to your ancestors? Where did this happen? What were the surrounding circumstances? How did this categorization change your ancestors’ immediate situation? How did it change their future? How is your body responding to these questions? Where do you experience resistance or constriction? Where do you sense a recognition or affirmation? Do these questions seem insightful and important, or stupid and pointless? Do you want to laugh, or cry, or cuss, or run away? RE-MEMBERINGS • Trauma was not invented in 1619. For thousands of years before that, human beings murdered, butchered, tortured, oppressed, abused, conquered, enslaved, and colonized one another. • By the late 1600s the English controlled nearly all the colonized territory in what would become the United States. In England, the 1500s and 1600s were not gentle times. People were routinely burned at the stake, tortured, hung, and otherwise brutalized. • Many of the English who fled to America were victims or first-hand observers of this brutality. Others were desperately trying to get away from poverty, starvation, overcrowding, and the Great Plague. • It seems likely ...