My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem | Book Review

In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem asserts that white supremacy, or as he terms it, white-body supremacy, lives not only in the thinking brain, but in the body – and has been passed down from generations of unprocessed trauma.

Resmaa’s brilliant book offers a path forward from it. Our bodies “have a form of knowledge that is different to our cognitive brains” causing some people to reflexively act out white-body supremacy, even if we mentally convince ourselves we are not racist. One can “think one thing, and your body can simultaneously respond as if you had exactly the opposite thought.”

In America, “nearly all of us, regardless of our background of skin color, carry trauma in our bodies around the myth of race.” This racialized trauma “decontextualized in a people looks like culture.” Privileged people rely on this culture for a false sense of identity and superiority, while also weaponizing it for protection and control. The ‘white as a standard’ culture is completely entwined in what we call ‘America’ and is what we need to change – today. “Today’s manifestations of this conflict appears to be a struggle for political and social power” but the conflict also needs to be resolved in our bodies.

Therefore, we cannot move past white-body supremacy by educating our cognitive brains alone — we must focus on the body’s retention of the underlying racialized trauma. We need to work through “metabolizing the trauma” cleanly (not with guilt, blame or denial) and “grow out of it with our bodies, not just our thinking brains.” In this way, we will begin to heal – individually and collectively.

Trauma, in all forms, is spiritually and physically damaging. Healing from racialized trauma benefits not only ourselves but the generations we birth. In addition to an understanding of racialized trauma, this book offers body and breath-based practices to move us on the path beyond it to healing.

I highly recommend Resmaa Menakem’s book and writings, My Grandmother’s Hands, to everyone. It’s a book that is not only of the moment, but of history, and, hopefully, of the future. It is now a NY Times Bestseller!

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