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

by Resmaa Menakem

“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. Your job is often stressful, difficult, and sometimes dangerous. Yet you’ve likely been given little training and support in helping you handle that pressure. After each workday, you’re expected to go home, get a night’s sleep, and report for work the next day feeling refreshed, relaxed, and alert. This does not happen automatically; it requires strong and consistent self-care. Many law enforcement professionals live day after day with the chemicals of chronic stress in their bloodstreams. This is bad for your body, sometimes traumatic, and occasionally tragic. It is also why you need to learn to manage and care for your body. No one else can do this for you. Caring for your body may save your life. It may also keep you from unnecessarily taking the life of a stranger.

Second, to do your job well, you need to metabolize your trauma and move through it. If you don’t, you may find yourself blowing that trauma through some of the very people you vowed to protect and serve.79 Too many cops have ended their careers prematurely in just this way.

Third, like it or not, being a public safety professional in America means being an apparatus of white-body supremacy—a manager and controller of Black bodies. When you first became a cop, you probably did not sign up for this. Yet, no matter...

Anchor 1: Soothe yourself to quiet your mind, calm your heart, and settle your body. • Anchor 2: Simply notice the sensations, vibrations, and emotions in your body instead of reacting to them. • Anchor 3: Accept the discomfort—and notice when it changes—instead of trying to flee from it. • Anchor 4: Stay present and in your body as you move through the unfolding experience, with all its ambiguity and uncertainty, and respond from the best parts of yourself. • Anchor 5: Safely discharge any energy that remains.

It’s especially important to practice Anchor 5. After you’ve been through a dangerous or high-stress encounter—such as seeing a dead child, attending to a gaping wound, being shot at, or shooting someone—your body needs to discharge any excess energy. If it doesn’t have that opportunity, the energy may stay stuck in your body—possibly as trauma. Here are some ways to discharge that energy: • Most forms of exercise, including walking. • Playing most sports. • Dancing. • Physical labor—heavy yard work, construction, snow shoveling, etc. • Following your body’s moment-by-moment guidance. You might experience a sudden urge to push your hands in the air, or run around the block, or shake your head vigorously and shout. Let your body do whatever it wants to do—so long as it doesn’t harm you or others.

ADD SOFTNESS TO YOUR LIFE Since your job is often difficult and hard-edged, it’s important to build some soft things into your life—on a regular basis. I don’t mean teddy bears and rainbows, but simple, everyday practices that help your body feel good and stay (or get) healthy. Here are some options: • Get enough rest. Every human body needs sufficient sleep and relaxation. • Learn and regularly practice a form of silent meditation. This can be secular (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), religious, or something in between (insight meditation or Zen meditation). • Do yoga. I recommend basic, easy stretching poses—not hot yoga, Power Yoga, Ashtanga yoga, Bikram yoga, or anything else difficult or expensive. • Get plenty of pleasurable physical exercise. This can be anything from walking to boxing to competing in triathlons, as long as it feels good to your body. • Get regular massages. Massage therapy feels wonderful and is excellent for reducing stress. Many health clubs offer massages at reasonable prices. Get massaged at least once a month if you can. • Take long walks. Ideally, walk in the neighborhood where you work. This will help you get to know the people you have pledged to protect. • Go dancing often. Line dancing, ballroom dancing, square dancing, folk dancing, and ordinary boogying all count. • Download and use a stress-reduction or grounding app. Some examples include Inner Balance; Stop, Breathe & Think; My Calm Beat; Calm; and Mindfulness Training. A...

created this eight-minute song to relieve listeners’ anxiety and help them relax. In lab tests, the song worked as promised: people’s breathing and heart rates slowed, and their blood pressure went down. • Listen to music with female vocalists—and the bass turned down or off. This appears to have a unique ability to settle the soul nerve.80 • Get regular manicures and pedicures—especially if you’re male. Pedicures feel particularly good. Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Tebow, Dwayne Wade, and 50 Cent have all reportedly received (or given) pedicures.81 • Apply essential oils to your body. I recommend this for both men and women. It’s surprisingly soothing. Potential bonus: applying oil to someone else, or having them apply it to you, can be a turn-on. So can the sight of an oiled body. • Add soft, pleasant scents to your home with candles, essential oils, or scent plug-ins. These can evoke spices, flowers, the ocean, or the woods. Visit a specialty candle, soap, or fragrance shop, and follow your nose.

Take long, relaxing baths in bath salts (Epsom salts, for example) or bubble baths. Some of the best bubble baths are the ones supposedly formulated for kids. • Spend time in nature. Surfing, hiking in the woods, hang gliding, napping on the beach, and sitting on a park bench all qualify. • 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. • Hug and kiss your parents, grandparents, and siblings—and, of course, your partner and kids. If you don’t already do this regularly, start now. • If you have a dog or cat, spend regular time with it. Pet it, play with it, run with it, train it, etc. • Volunteer at a hospital neonatal intensive care unit to touch and hold newborns. Hold babies of every color.

TALK TO SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO LISTEN

Too many Americans reflexively support their police officers, seeing them as noble protectors who can do no wrong. Too many other Americans reflexively oppose the police, seeing them as enemies—members of an occupying force. Meanwhile, too many public safety professionals reflexively distrust some of their fellow officers. A cop who gets close to people in the community may be looked on with suspicion by his or her peers. The thinking goes: It’s us cops against the world. We’re the line of protection against chaos. If you hang out with community members—and if those community members like and appreciate you—you must be untrustworthy and possibly a snitch. You won’t have other cops’ backs when the chips are down. We don’t want you hanging out with those community people. You need to make a choice—either us or them. Whose side are you on? Each of these views is simplistic and unrealistic. Each can also be a trauma response.

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.

In the three chapters that follow, I suggest some possible directions and activities for each of the three cultures. First, though, let me call out a few essential aspects of creating culture: • Developing and uplifting elders (and eldership) is especially important, because elders provide mentoring and guidance for the next generation. Elderhood isn’t an entitlement that comes with age or a position that individuals can claim. Someone becomes an elder because a community gives that authority to that person, based on who he or she is and what he or she has done. • The creation, telling, and passing on of new stories is crucial. The stories should be narratives of resilience, compassion, achievement, and transformation. • The most effective leaders lead by example and model the way for others. The most effective followers also model the way for others. • Cultural change takes hold through consistency and repetition. When enough people do the same thing, in the same way, over and over, eventually those actions become culture.

Everyone needs to learn to take care of themselves—and to help care for others. To support this, each culture needs to create body-centered rituals and practices that promote self-care and collective wellness. These practices, too, need to be passed on from person to person—particularly from parents to children. • These practices help our bodies to slow down and settle. They help us have fewer and less intense reflexive responses. And they help us give more energy to love, compassion, and regard. • You already know what needs to be at the center of all these efforts: an individual and collective willingness to be in our bodies, accept and metabolize clean pain, and heal.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” FANNIE LOU HAMER

I also don’t give a rat’s ass how guilty—or how offended and falsely accused—you feel. (As a therapist, I’d better not. If I did, I’d need to find a new line of work.) What I do care about is what you do with your life now. Are you treating all human beings with genuine regard? Are you calling out evil and immorality when you encounter it? Are you serving your fellow human beings? Are you acting out of the best parts of yourself? Are you working with other white people to develop culture and dismantle all forms of white-body supremacy?

Lastly, you’re not an exception, no matter how much you think you are. As I said at the beginning of this book, white-body supremacy is part of the operating system of America. It is in the air you and I breathe and the water you and I drink. And it is literally in our blood. You (or I or anyone) can’t opt out of breathing or drinking water or circulating blood throughout our bodies.

you’re a member of one of these organizations, you might lead an effort to issue a collective public statement like this one: When our ancestors came to America, they were looked down upon and denied opportunities because of where they came from. Eventually they were accepted as full citizens and normal human beings—but at the cost of diluting their heritage and becoming “white” people. We reject that identity. We are not content to passively accept the identity and perks of whiteness. We are proud to be German Americans (or Italian Americans, Polish Americans, Irish Americans, etc.102), and we stand together with African Americans, Chinese Americans, and the descendants of immigrants from any other nation against the constraints and dehumanization of white-body supremacy.

White supremacists created whiteness and then defined it as something childish, selfish, and closed-minded. But it doesn’t have to be. Whiteness can mean taking responsibility.

We need to work in partnership with other European Americans and people from other cultural communities to change institutions, so that they stop claiming authority over people’s lives … another path is to look to our own past for at least part of our means of transformation…. we, as European Americans, need to help our people see themselves as having a culture. This is a powerful way to disrupt whiteness, not just to rid ourselves of something that is destructive, but to reclaim/reconstruct something that is positive, that fills a void, that has the potential to create health and harmony.103

Efforts to dissolve white-body supremacy do not (and should not) focus on taking anything away from white people. Instead, they focus on extending white Americans’ rights, privileges, and opportunities to people of all colors, so that all Americans get to enjoy them in equal measure.

One example: 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.

In a 2016 Slate video, Michael Wood, Jr., a retired Baltimore cop, eloquently describes how real community policing works: If we actually did a community policing model, designed to have decentralized power, so that the patrol officer can take care of things in his or her responsibility area. So, in a true community policing model, if I came down here and I see this overgrown brush, I have the power and the resources to get city workers or something like that down here to fix that. I should have the ability to get weed whackers and recruit people in the neighborhood. And maybe for that day of work, instead of locking people up, I came out with the neighborhood and did this, because that would have some kind of improvement overall … We have to start thinking about what are we actually doing and what are our goals. So if our goals are to reduce violent crime, we have to change our metrics. Right now our metrics are arrests…. We have to change the metrics to crime reduction, to justice, to problem solving … You should be focused on improving your post, not on locking up many of those people on your post, because if you’re taking their freedom away, how are you not going to be their enemy?105

Can you feel hope in your body? Excitement? Anticipation? Where do you sense it? Is it a release or expansion? A tightening born of eagerness? A rush of heat or energy? What hopes accompany these sensations? The chance to continue to heal and live an ever-bigger, ever-deeper life? To help others mend and live bigger, deeper lives? To free the world from the shackles of white-body supremacy? Congratulations. You’re just where you need to be for what comes next.