Resmaa Menakem’s Grandmother’s Hands
If y’all ain’t jumped into Resmaa Menakem, you need to — for realz!
I know I come off bossy AF, telling y’all regular what you need to be doing. Y’all need to git past y’all egos and accept I’m a mah fugging prophet spitting truth at you and just git wit the program. Serious, dough, I’m just the telephone delivering the call the ancestors dialed in. You can answer or do like my mama used to and have the kids tell ‘em you ain’t home.
In they book My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem locate racial trauma where it live: In the body. ‘Cording to Resmaa we can talk ‘til we blue in the face (at least we’d be one color) but, until we address he effect that all this violence has been having on flesh and bone, we ain’t gonna heal from history. The book walks through what that process might look like for Black bodies, White bodies and, surprising AF, the bodies of police officers that hold they own special kind of trauma.
See, racism ain’t just an idea that you think (or don’t think). It’s a system that kills people dead. It’s the real threat that somebody’s gonna decide you are dangerous and shoot you for being Black in the wrong place. It’s the evidence of that threat we see on TV, the news or hear about through social networks when people can’t seem to wait to “gossip” about the last Black person got took out by the police (or another Black person).
Our reptilian brains trying to process all this input telling us this is not a safe place. Unfortunately, the instincts that would tell us to fly, fight, freeze or chill can’t respond to a threat that’s perceived as coming from all places at all times. Sometimes it’s a threat got experienced a long time ago, like a kid with an abusive parent who didn’t have a place to “fly.” The body holds on to that trauma for “the next time.” Since the next time can’t be known the body can hold it a long ass time.
I ain’t gonna get to deep into it. If you’re reading this, you can read. Get your hands on Resmaa and dig in for yourself.
