A review by adhochman
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem

5.0

The title is more than a Bill Withers song, y’all. In this crucial book on racialized trauma, Resmaa Menakem describes his grandmother’s hands, calloused from picking cotton as a girl. Like her hands, the souls of her descendants have been calcified and calloused from generations of anti-Black racism and white body supremacy. Moreover, because her experiences--both the aftershocks of her trauma and the strength to persevere-- lived in her DNA, they are now a part of Menakem and his own children. My Grandmother’s Hands provides practices for both overcoming the traumas and, for Black folks, recovering that strength that America’s racist past has wrought.

Menakem approaches racism as white body supremacy. This tweak means that he is focusing on the way that racism, both its enactment and the suffering it causes, lives in our bodies. Therefore, he argues, the ground floor of racial healing is our own bodies. It seems really important to acknowledge that racism is also an embodied experience, one that impacts us all on a cellular level, in this moment when our national conversation is shifting to a focus on structural racism and policy solutions.

My Grandmother’s Hands is meant to be used more than merely perused. The book focuses on three main groups, white bodies, black bodies, and police bodies. Menakem uses his years of study with experts like Bessel Van Der Kolk (who wrote another of my favorites, The Body Keeps The Score), as well as his own practice as a therapist to explain the embodiment of trauma, particularly racialized trauma. He suggests practices that each group can use to explore how white body supremacy lives in their body, what trauma feels like, and how to manage these states with body practices. Most chapters ask you to pause and do a body practice, and every chapter ends with a summary of its main ideas. Thus, reading My Grandmother’s Hands is a practice unto itself, one that you will want to keep engaging.

I find myself returning to Menakem’s ideas and practices almost daily at this point. It has transformed my thinking about managing my responses to everything from capital T traumas to everyday challenges and relationship tensions. There is so much here, but two ideas that have really impacted me are his thoughts on generational trauma and the idea of clean vs dirty pain. For more of my musings and sqwakings on the subject, subscribe to my newsletter, link in bio.

Especially to my educator friends, I recommend buying this book because you will want it on hand. Next time I teach a pedagogy course, this one will be hot & heavy on my reading list!

Menakem explores the science behind generaitonal trauma, or the idea that traumas faced by our ancestors, including the Holocaust, slavery, physical abuse, or poverty can be passed down in our genes, and suggests body practices for getting in touch with the traumas that live in our bodies as a result of this fact. In my own life, I’ve always had a deep connection with my grandmother, who had two really difficult marriages and a super depressed mother. Though I haven’t had these experiences, I definitely find myself reflecting on her experience when I make my own choices in life, sometimes not even consciously. Maybe generational trauma is at work in my body, though I so often try to regulate it with logic instead of somatic solutions. Menakem’s work made me reconsider my approach. Second, the idea of clean pain and dirty pain

Without being able to connect to our bodies, Menakem proposes, we can legislate, pontificate, and debate all we want, but change will not happen until we deal with the embodiment of our racial trauma and start to heal.