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

Menakem’s approach—focusing on the connection between racial trauma and the body—contrasts sharply with other work on white supremacy, much of which seeks to end racism in the US with reason, principles, and ideas. Advances in psychobiology reveal a link between the vagus nerve, or “soul nerve” in Menakem’s coinage, and the lizard brain, which controls survival and protection in the form of the fight, flee, and freeze responses. Since these responses generally set in too quickly to involve the rational brain, trauma response is not primarily rational. Rather, it is a spontaneous protective mechanism that happens in the body. Healing trauma thus demands attending to the body.

Strong negative emotions, such as fear, anxiety, and anger, negatively impact the body. Repeated trauma causes the body to release a variety of stress hormones into the bloodstream. Over time, these chemicals can have toxic effects, making people less healthy and more prone to illness. Menakem points to studies linking trauma to a wide range of conditions, including learning disabilities, depression, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. In addition, trauma is associated with poor academic performance, teenage pregnancy, and attempted suicide. Stress chemicals also crowd out healthy ones that encourage trust, intimacy, and motivation.

Trauma compounds and perpetuates over time. The pervasive sense that danger is imminent deepens trauma. Trauma can cause people to have extreme reactions that are then embedded in the body and become the standard way of surviving. These strategies are often repeated within families and communities over time, allowing trauma to pass from person to person and from generation to generation. Genetics also plays a role in compounding and perpetuating trauma: Stress alters the biochemistry of the body, including that of eggs and sperm. Women who experience high levels of stress during pregnancy are more likely to have children with health problems. Stress can disrupt the immune, vascular, metabolic, and endocrine systems. Moreover, it can cause cells to age more quickly.

Intergenerational trauma is embedded in Black and white bodies. Black people carry the trauma of their African ancestors, who were forcibly taken from their homelands and enslaved by wealthy white landowners. Enslaved people were severely traumatized by abuse that continued even after the abolition of slavery. However, the roots of racial trauma in the US reach back to a time before the US existed: White people carry the trauma of their European ancestors, in particular that of their medieval forebears, who experienced and witnessed extreme forms of public torture. White people did not heal their trauma. Instead, they passed it down to their descendants, who in turn imposed that trauma on Black bodies. Embedding trauma in Black bodies did nothing the mend the trauma in white ones.