In his book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem describes his grandmother. While she wasn’t a large woman, her hands were “surprisingly stout, with broad fingers and thick pads below each thumb.” Her hands hurt from a lifetime of cotton picking, and when Menakem was a boy, he’d watch television with his grandmother and rub her fingers to help her hands relax. “Sometimes she’d start to hum melodically,” Menakem writes, “and her voice would make a vibration that reminded me of a cat’s purr.” Menakem’s book is about the deep and persistent trauma that lives in Black bodies, pointing out that many African Americans cannot feel settled around White people; a somatic response to not feeling safe or secure. Menakem also describes racialized trauma embedded in White bodies, oftentimes expressed by reflexive, seemingly out-of-the-blue fight, flight or freeze responses triggered by the mere presence of a Black body. White supremacist racial myths – perpetuated lies that Black bodies are dangerous and somehow less than human – lead White bodies to tense and constrict protectively as a Black man walks by on the sidewalk or jogs through a predominantly White neighborhood, as a Black boy plays on a playground with the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. For decades in America, Menakem writes, we’ve tried to address racism cognitively — with reason, principles and ideas, trying to teach our brains to think better about race. But racism doesn’t just live in our thinking brains. It also lives in our bodies. ... Read the rest of the commentary on the website. | 
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