Healing Historical and Racialized Trauma with Resmaa Menakem

Change The Narrative with JD Fuller

Resmaa Menakem is the author of “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies,” published in September 2017, which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list in May 2021 as well as "The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning," published in 2022. Resmaa is the founder of the Cultural Somatics Institute. He also wrote Monsters in Love: Why Your Partner Sometimes Drives You Crazy- and he tells us what to do about it. He has done more interviews than I can count, including the Breakfast Club. Resmaa has single handedly changed my professional and personal life and numerous others.

What You Will Hear:

• The catalyst and ripple effect of My Grandmother’s Hands
• Iatrogenesis
• White supremacy trauma and how it can manifest in culture, family traits, personality traits, et cetera.
• Decontextualizing trauma
• The Plantation and white body supremacy
• Clean pain vs dirty pain and white ferality
• Our virtues and our limitations
• How white bodies can hold each other accountable
• Tools vs toys
• The pervasiveness and persistence of white body supremacy
• Human growth and healing
• Privilege vs advantage
• Liberatory work and appealing to the kindness of white people

Quotes:

“Trauma works in alignment with your virtues. Trauma works in alignment with what you do best. Trauma works in alignment with what fuels you.”

“The white body deems and has deemed itself the supreme standard by which all bodies, humanity shall be measured structurally and philosophically.”

“The most enduring structure in America is the plantation.”

“White bodies have collective understanding or efficacy when it comes to race.”

“A key factor in the perpetration of white body supremacy is many people's refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance. And inevitably or invariably, Prolong the pain.”

“Our virtues are wrapped inside of our limitations. It is only when we are close in proximity to others that we begin to intimately explore the boundaries of virtues by slamming into our limit limitations.”

“White folks want to do good shit and wanna do good things when it comes to race but they have not developed the conditioning and done any conditioning around race communally……they have to begin to get together in a room and sit with each other and try and work with not a book club. A book club is like crack to a white woman.”

“When you're talking about liberatory work, you're talking about a toy box, an exploration, a sitting with I don’t know if this is gonna work, but I'm gonna try it anyway. That's different than tools.”

“White body supremacy is the water, not the shark.”

“You can both be brutalized by something and be benefited by the brutalization at the same time.”

“In today's America, we tend to think of healing as something binary, either we're broken or we're healed from that brokenness, but that's not how healing operates. It's almost never

How human growth works.”

“What has happened to our peoples and continues to happen to our people ain't happening to our people individually. It's happening communally. So only developing individual response to a communal horror is inadequate. It's not enough.”

“White folks are not privileged by white body supremacy. They're advantaged by white body supremacy.”

Mentioned

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

I AM Music Group