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

Product Information

Because it’s been decontextualized and handed down from my mom, my grandmother, my grandfather, blah blah blah, all the way down, I didn’t have a language for it, but there was a knowing that “this ain’t right. The basis of the book is about how our bodies retain generations of violence, and thus pattern our reactions in our everyday world, whether we are black or other people of color, white citizens or police/public safety bodies. as such, trainings that focus on the mind as the site from which to undo white-body supremacy will never be enough.

If my mom is born as a Black woman, into a society that predicates her body as deviant, the amount of cortisol that is in her nervous system when I’m being born is teaching my nervous system something. He has served as director of counseling services for the Tubman Family Alliance; as behavioral health director for African American Family Services in Minneapolis; as a domestic violence counselor for Wilder Foundation; as a certified Military and Family Life Consultant for the U. Krista Tippett, host: Well, I was kind of aware that I was half-thinking about what was gonna come next, but, I don’t know, I felt more settled. It sees Black bodies as dangerous and needing to be controlled; yet, also, as potential sources of service and comfort. Unlocking the Genius of your Body: Why your logic isn’t adequate when it comes to the violence of race:, Psychology Today, December 2020.And so those types of things need to be handled and taken care of with the amount of legitimacy and the amount of care that they should have. Resilience can also be passed intergenerationally, although resilience is a combination of what is passed down as well as what we learn.

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. Somatic Abolitionism is a living embodied Anti-Racism practice and culture building that requires endurance, agility, resource cultivation, stamina, discernment, self and communal discipline cultivation, embodied racial literacy and humility.

This article overviews My Grandmother’s Hands and complements an earlier review by Paula Hendrick (Hendrick 2020) It includes a review of what I consider the main subjects of the book, and the body-based practices, which I consider the heart of the book . g., brutal treatment of children and criminals, torture) occurred in Europe for centuries before Europeans brought it to the "new world" and spread it during colonization. If you study the history of Europe during the Middle Ages, you’ll see that the same cruelty—dislodging brains, blocking airways, and so forth—was what powerful white bodies did to less powerful white bodies for many hundreds of years. My Grandmother’s Hands comprises four introductory sections, followed by three parts and concluding matter. The elites portrayed the black body as a fearful thing—dirty, impervious to pain, almost invulnerable and hypersexual—something to be controlled however necessary.

Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words.You’re not going to heal the Mason-Dixon line, but real, breathing, flesh-and-blood bodies can heal.

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.And she said, “As you walking up and down the rows, you put your hands in, them cotton plants rip your hands up. The author tells us that “(t)rauma is never a personal failure, nor the result of someone’s weakness, nor a limitation, nor a defect. Menakem distinguishes how our thinking brains work–which can focus on the past, present and future—with what a traumatized body experiences, only now , “the home of intense survival energy”. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics.