Tippett: Also, you talked about how your mother and your grandmother, again, how they just modeled this for you, that there is no failure, there is only practice.

I am curious — I’ve read you and listened to you — I’m always curious what people’s passion and calling become. And it feels to me like it’s right here in the title of the book — your grandmother’s hands. Tippett: So some of the ways we’re trying to work forward, we’re actually making ourselves unsafe again?I've studied racism and been part of anti-racism work for over 25 years, and I have to say, this book is one of the most valuable pieces of work on the topic that I've read. Menakem's teachings don't replace or supplant other racial liberation tactics or philosophies, but instead give us a fresh way to expand how we understand the lived racial experience we ALL have. It gives us another road into this work, a road that seems essential to travel, even as we commit and recommit ourselves to multiple additional types of racial liberation work. Plus, Menakem's writing style is accessible, clear and blunt - just what this topic needs. Menakem: I think what it means to be human is to realize that we’re ever-emerging and that that — that we are not machines. We are not flesh machines. We are not robots. We come from and are part of Creation, and that that cannot just be something we talk about when we go to a yoga retreat — that it has to be a lived, emergent ethos and that — one of my ancestors, Dr. King, talked about how when people who love peace have to organize as well as people who love war. And for me, what that means is that it’s about work. It’s about action. It’s about doing. It’s about pausing. It’s about allowing — the reason why we want to heal the trauma of racialization is that it thwarts the emergence. So let’s not do that. Let’s condition and create cultures that will allow that emergence to reign supreme so that the intrinsic value can supersede the structural value. Sewell, CheyOnna. "Artist Resmaa Menakem launches new book, gallery exhibit and album to inspire action on racial justice". Twin Cities Daily Planet . Retrieved 2020-11-26.

Tippett: That makes sense too, in terms of how trauma is in the eternal present — you’re not remembering it, it’s reliving itself. And you’re getting — just for that minute, you’re actually settling in the real present. This adds such an important somatic lens for anti-racist conversations and work. I highly recommend this book for white people, as the exercises and suggestions helped me feel out the white supremacy my body holds and figure out regular practices that can help weaken or release it. My Grandmother's Hands is a beautiful, thoughtful, though provoking, painful growth/hope engendering book. Menakem: Because when you say “diversity,” that means you start someplace first, and then you diversify from it. Tippett: There’s a line from you, which really is what this all comes down to — which is just so kind of [ laughs] sad to think that this is basic human reality — that “all adults need to learn how to soothe and anchor themselves rather than expect or demand that others soothe them. And all adults need to heal and grow up.” And so many of the things we’ve done in this culture, especially around the invention of whiteness, allows people to avoid developing the full range, or inhibits people from developing the full range of being a grownup.

Menakem: I’m operationalizing it. The white body is used to hearing things that make it comfortable. And so when you say something like “white supremacy” — especially here in Minnesota — everybody goes, “Yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.” And then what happens is, it goes — just the term, “white supremacy,” is a very intellectual term. It doesn’t land in the body. Menakem: Just watching you say that, this is why I talk the way that I talk. So let me start with just a definition, first. So the premise of the work is predicated on the idea that there was a certain time where the white body became the supreme standard by which all bodies’ humanity shall be measured. If you don’t understand that, everything about America will confuse you. Everything about racialization will confuse you. The healing that results on an individual and group level can be taken into the community, for each of the groups that receive focus in the book, as well applying to the greater community.

Menakem: So the other thing that I say is that when people talk about the 13 colonies, the 13 colonies were filled with colonized white people. So what ends up happening is that when you have that level of brutality for all that time, and then right after the Bacon Rebellion is the first time you start to see, in law, “white” persons — not landowners, not merchants, “white” persons …

Cultural and Intergenerational Trauma

The Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders’ interests in religion, community development, and education. Tippett: And the Middle Ages — medieval torture chambers, which is another — those are two words that follow. I also noticed stereotypical ideas about weight and overweight people. I did not appreciate that and I do not think it was necessary at all. There were definitely some other suggestions that I found a little odd - like white people renaming themselves after civil rights figures as a way of committing to a healthier white identity. I think if a white person I knew renamed themselves Rosa Parks Smith, I would find it off-putting and performative. Soul wounds can come about through family mistreatment, abusive institutions, systems, or cultures. But it can also be transmitted through genetic and epigenetic inheritances from traumatized ancestors.

Resmaa Menakem (born Chester Mason, Jr.) [1] is an American author and psychotherapist specialising in the effects of trauma on the human body and the relationship between trauma, white body supremacy, and racism in America. [2] [3] [4] [5] [1] Menakem: So the idea that people could go through a thousand years of the Dark Ages and come out of that unscathed — 500 A.D. to 1500 is when we’re talking about, when we say the Dark Ages. So you mean to tell me that the level of brutalization — Resilience can also be passed intergenerationally, although resilience is a combination of what is passed down as well as what we learn. It can be manifested on an individual or communal basis. Menakem, Remaa. Sounds True video interview with Tami Simon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dAAWgpokvo&feature=youtu.be

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Therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem is working with old wisdom and very new science about our bodies and nervous systems, and all we condense into the word “race.” “Your body — all of our bodies — are where changing the status quo must begin.” A powerful book, a call for all of us to get to work, with practical suggestions presented in historical contexts, for us to begin to heal. I can’t praise Mr. Menakem enough, or be more grateful for the gift that he has given us all. Let us use it wisely and comprehensively.