How do we address white body supremacy trauma? Resmaa Menakem argues that we can address the pain in “clean” and “dirty” ways.[1] “Clean” pain is pain from trauma that individuals and communities acknowledge and confront historical trauma honestly. Individuals and communities act out “dirty” pain by rejecting a clear-eyed view of the historical traumas and by detaching themselves from responsibility or accountability and the racialized violence and pain they have witnessed, enabled, and produced. When acting out dirty pain, white folks drawing upon white body supremacy try to “soothe” the pain of unmetabolized trauma and the dissonance with more powerful white bodies coursing through their bodies, by blowing it through “Other” bodies—black bodies, brown bodies and perceived “foreign” bodies. Examples of choosing “dirty pain” and unleashing the trauma of these terror-based systems include the erection of Confederate statues to assert white supremacist power, and brandishing assault rifles in coffee shops and state houses as a “right” or an entitlement under the protection of law enforcement. Whites who identify as liberal or even progressive are not immune from acts of white entitlement and racialized violence. Whites of all political spectrums may choose to weaponize law enforcement or self-deputize to intimidate, detain or annihilate by way of extrajudicial killings free, “self-managing”[2] black bodies. This need to annihilate the perceived threat of free black people who will not service or yield to white assertions of power or who will not soothe white guilt or absolve white responsibility for racialized trauma speaks to the nature of white body supremacy, and its relationship to both a perceived white privilege and the identification of racist ideology with “normative” culture. This need to annihilate the “Other” rather than confront one’s own racial history, complicity in racialized violence, and embodied trauma also speaks to the perceived necessity of white supremacists and their allies have to dispatch with empathy and to sacrifice others—by way of projecting blame, annihilating, harassing, terrorizing, incarcerating, deporting, dismissing and rendering invisible—to temporarily soothe the economic and social dissonances of their own lives and avoid confrontation with the poisonous nature of white privilege.
Gaining a better understanding of how white body supremacy can infect the body helped me to see how our family and other black folks in my community have been able to survive and even thrive despite white supremacist efforts at annihilation. My grandmother and the other elders in our family chose to largely engage in “clean” practices that confronted and metabolized much or at least some of the pain of white body supremacy trauma and passed on ethical traditions, tools and techniques for resiliency. They told us stories and passed on words of wisdom that grounded us in our own bodies and the realities of racism. We were taught to demand justice and dignity. We participated in the music, the hymns and congregational singing of the black church, the moans of the blues and the joy of soul music, jazz, funk and R & B. The running of sound through our bodies[3] by way of speech and song grounded us in a humanity that demanded mutual respect and dignity. My family emphasized education and hard work. My grandmother was an example and she gave us the blue print. She became a hair dresser and built a cosmetology business that serviced blacks and whites in her southern town and later in the North. She was a musician and choir director for local churches. My Sunday School education in our family church emphasized close reading of texts. We were taught how to ask questions, listen to others and develop rhetorical strategies for respectful debate. I had opportunities to give speeches and formulate arguments and listen to the reasoning of others. This taught us to debate with compassion and courage. We were given avenues to develop and play with our individuality and were deeply affirmed in our identities as we came in to our own. There were, of course, limits to this affirmation. Our community institutions and elders often reinforced patriarchy and heteronormativity. But we were also taught that we are a part of a collective and mutual respect and dignity are the foundations of a God-given life. We were learning and drawing from traditions that black folks carried with them across the generations. These Sankofa practices are what enabled us as a family and the communal circles to which we belong to metabolize the trauma of white body supremacy, in clean ways in order to find healing and create our own spaces to thrive. But this doesn’t mean that racialized trauma has not and still doesn’t take its toll.
Sankofa is an Adinkra symbol and concept. [4] In the Twi language of the Akan, Sankofa literally means “go back for what you have forgotten.” Sankofa practices are based on a worldview in which all of life is interrelated. The elders—those who have demonstrated an ethical commitment to the earth and the community—pass on tools and wisdom traditions that support mutual respect and dignity for individuals and the community. To be sure there are black people who are among those who have adapted “dirty” ways of dealing with unmetabolized pain and trauma such as internalized racism, colorism, forms of corporal punishment that echo slaver narratives of punishment, and the need to soothe white peoples’ fears by aligning themselves with white power.[5] Alternatively, Sankofa practices are meant to break the power of historical trauma, address the clean flow of pain through the body and facilitate healing. These tools and traditions provide ways to confront trauma and death-dealing historical events and avenues for personal and social transformation.
As a country, we have failed to effectively acknowledge and confront the historical trauma of indigenous genocide, the enslavement of African people, and the demonization of darker skinned immigrants. While a few exceptions exist such as the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama we have largely dealt with these oppressions by building monuments to individual exceptionalism and speaking platitudes of inclusion. In order to effectively address the historical and racialized trauma that impacts their and our lives, white folks need to reject dirty pain responses and choose the “clean” and hard work of metabolizing this trauma by honestly confronting historical racism and acknowledging the role that they, their families and the institutions and people with which they have been aligned have played and continue to play in the oppression and brutalization of others. It also means to work in solidarity with the primary victims of white body supremacy and being able to imagine themselves in the shoes of others. Being in solidarity means acknowledging the evil that is white supremacy and their own role in its perpetuation. It means to understand the ways in which the trauma of white body supremacy has impacted their own lives and the lives of their family and friends. It also means acknowledging and rectifying the white body supremacy trauma they have caused by direct action, passively witnessing or remaining silent. This includes recognizing the ways in which white body supremacy has become the equivalent of identity and culture and the toll that has taken on their own lives and the lives of their own family members and the institutions to which they belong. Additionally, it means to deal honestly with the dissonance between working class white people’s lives and white elites by confronting the power wealthy whites exact over their lives and holding them accountable rather than projecting this dissonance onto the lives and bodies of black people or those deemed vulnerable or expendable. Finally, it means to develop culture in which whites are accountable to repair the damage of the trauma white body supremacy has caused to black and other dark skinned people.
Invitation: I would like to invite you to continue to work through Cultural Somatics Institute’s Free Racialized Trauma 5-day eCourse at the bottom of the web page https://www.resmaa.com/. Try to move through those sessions directly related to groups of which you are not a part. Again, try to get plenty of rest and drink plenty of water as you engage in this course and find support when you need it. Feel free to pause and rest.
[1] Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017. pp 165-167.
[2] Ibid., p 28.
[3] Bernie Johnson Reagon. Bill Moyers Journal. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11232007/profile3.html. November 23, 2007.
[4] Adinkra symbols are symbols that represent proverbs of the Akan people of the southern part of Ghana in West Africa.
[5] Menakem. p 167.
Resources and Further Reading
Robin Diangelo. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.
Kelly Brown Douglass. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.
Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017.
Jonathan Metzl. Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. New York: Basic Books, 2019.