Narrator: Imagine you’re at a Wal-Mart, watching the exit. A white woman is stopped, her receipt checked against her cart. A few minutes later, you watch as eight different Black customers walk past, and every single one of them is stopped for the same check. During that same time, multiple non-Black customers pass by, completely ignored. The employee doing the checking insists she isn’t racist, that she’s just picking people randomly. And the most unsettling part? She probably believes it. This small, everyday scene reveals a profound and uncomfortable truth: racism isn't always a conscious choice or a hateful ideology. It's often an unconscious, bodily reflex.

This is the central territory explored in Resmaa Menakem's groundbreaking book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Menakem argues that to truly understand and heal from racism, we must look beyond our minds and our politics and turn our attention to the one place where its legacy truly lives: in our bodies.

Narrator: Menakem’s core argument is that racism is not simply a set of prejudiced beliefs; it is a form of trauma that has been inflicted upon bodies for generations. He reframes the concept of white supremacy as "white-body supremacy," a visceral, physical phenomenon that lives in our nervous systems. It’s the gut-level constriction a white person might feel walking through a Black neighborhood, or the reflexive fear a police officer experiences during a traffic stop with a Black driver. As the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates famously stated, all the sociology and history of racism ultimately "land, with great violence, upon the body."

Menakem illustrates this with the story that gives the book its title. As a boy, he would rub his grandmother's hands, which were stout and thick, with pads below each thumb. When he asked her why they were like that, she explained it was from a lifetime of picking cotton, a job she started when she was just four years old. The sharp burrs on the cotton plants constantly ripped her skin, and over the years, her hands grew thicker and tougher to withstand the pain. Her hands were a physical testament to embodied, intergenerational trauma—a history of racialized labor written directly into her flesh. This, Menakem argues, is where racism resides: not in abstract theories, but in the blood, bone, and nerve endings of our bodies.

Narrator: The book makes a startling historical claim: the trauma that fuels white-body supremacy did not begin in America. It began in Europe, centuries before the concept of "race" even existed. Menakem points to the brutal, chaotic, and violent conditions of medieval Europe, a period defined by public torture, constant war, and widespread cruelty. Practices like drawing and quartering, where a person was publicly disemboweled and dismembered, were not aberrations; they were state-sanctioned forms of social control.

This relentless, white-on-white violence created a deep and unhealed cultural trauma. When Europeans colonized America, they brought this trauma with them. Menakem argues that the invention of "whiteness" in the late 17th century was a psychological coping mechanism. It was a way for powerful white bodies to soothe the dissonance of their own history of brutality by projecting that trauma onto othered bodies—specifically, Black and Native American bodies. This created a hierarchy where even the poorest white person was granted a superior status over any person of color, a strategy that effectively prevented the servant classes from uniting against the ruling elite. In essence, Menakem posits, "What white bodies did to Black bodies they did to other white bodies first."

Narrator: White-body supremacy has inflicted unique and distinct traumas on different groups. Menakem outlines three key experiences: the white body, the Black body, and the police body.

The white body carries the historical trauma of European brutality and the secondary trauma of inflicting and witnessing violence against others. This manifests as "white fragility," which Menakem sees not as weakness, but as a defensive, protective response to unhealed pain. It’s an inability to tolerate racial stress, leading to avoidance, anger, or guilt.

The Black body, in contrast, carries the trauma of being systematically brutalized, controlled, and dehumanized for centuries. This trauma is not just historical; it is relived daily. Menakem points to the tragic 2014 shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy who was killed by a white police officer within seconds of the officer’s arrival on the scene. Tamir was playing with a toy gun. This incident exemplifies the reflexive fear that has been conditioned into white bodies, a fear that perceives Blackness itself as a threat.

Finally, the police body experiences its own unique trauma. Officers are routinely exposed to violence and suffering, yet are often given no tools to metabolize this stress. This, combined with a militarized culture and the ingrained biases of white-body supremacy, can create a hyper-vigilant state where reflexive, life-or-death decisions are made in situations that do not warrant them. This is tragically illustrated in the case of Charles Kinsey, an unarmed Black mental health therapist who was shot by police while lying on the ground with his hands in the air, trying to help his autistic patient. The officer who shot him later said he didn't know why he did it—a clear sign of a non-cognitive, trauma-based reaction.

Narrator: Because trauma is stored in the body, Menakem insists that healing cannot be achieved through intellectual understanding alone. We cannot think our way out of it. Instead, we must engage in somatic, or body-centered, practices. He introduces the concept of the "soul nerve," his term for the vagus nerve, which runs through the body and regulates our nervous system. By learning to work with this nerve, we can learn to "settle" our bodies and calm our fight, flight, or freeze responses.

This process requires a willingness to experience what Menakem calls "clean pain." Clean pain is the discomfort that comes from growth—from staying present with difficult sensations and emotions until they can be metabolized and released. This is contrasted with "dirty pain," which is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. Dirty pain only perpetuates trauma. Practices like humming, chanting, rocking, and mindful breathing are not just relaxation techniques; they are ancient technologies for settling the soul nerve and building the body’s capacity to move through clean pain and build resilience.

Narrator: Individual healing is the first step, but Menakem argues that it is not enough. To truly dismantle white-body supremacy, we must create new, healing cultures. He notes that when strategy competes with culture, culture wins every time. Therefore, we need to intentionally build cultures that promote safety, belonging, and mutual regard.

Crucially, he argues that this work must initially happen separately within each group. Black Americans, white Americans, and police officers must each develop their own stories, rituals, symbols, and elders to heal their specific traumas. Attempting to come together too soon often results in re-traumatizing one another. For white Americans, this means creating a culture of "whiteness without supremacy," one that takes responsibility for historical harm and actively works to build a more just world. For Black Americans, it involves reclaiming cultural practices that build resilience and community. For police, it means shifting from a culture of control to one of service and self-care. The "Don't Mess with Texas" anti-littering campaign is used as a powerful example of how a group’s identity can be intentionally and successfully reshaped for the collective good.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from My Grandmother's Hands is that racialized trauma is not a moral failing but a physiological wound that is passed down through generations. The path to mending our society is not through blame, shame, or intellectual debate, but through somatic practices that settle our nervous systems, build our resilience, and create new cultures of healing.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. It asks us to stop simply talking about racism and start tending to the trauma it has left in our own bodies. It forces us to confront the idea that true healing is not comfortable; it requires choosing the "clean pain" of growth over the "dirty pain" of avoidance. The ultimate question Menakem poses is not whether we can solve racism, but whether we are brave enough to feel it—and through that feeling, finally begin to heal.