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

“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, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.” 

This passage is about healing. Menakem’s overarching goal is to promote healing from racial trauma. He draws on his years of experience as a trauma therapist to offer insights, explanations, and practical tools to help people heal. As this passage reveals, however, healing is a complex and life-long process. Rarely are people entirely broken or entirely healthy. Rather, people experience varying degrees of brokenness and health throughout their lives, with innumerable advances and setbacks along the way.

“A key factor in the perpetuation 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, invariably, prolong the pain.” 

Race is a social construct that was invented in the 17th century to help reinforce existing power structures. Institutions, beliefs, and narratives were created in support of, and around, this construct. Debunking the myth of race demands facing the ugly truth that formalizing a culture of white-body supremacy served practical functions for wealthy white landowners, soothing the dissonance between more powerful and less powerful white people, allowing white people to blow centuries of trauma through Black bodies, and helping colonize the minds of all people. Avoiding this truth is less painful than owning up to it, which explains why many Americans choose dirty pain over clean pain.