After the mass murder of nine members of the historic Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 by an avowed white supremacist, local governments throughout the country began taking active measures to remove Confederate statues from public property. Many of these statues were erected to assert white supremacy and justify segregation during times of increased civil rights activism. Now white supremacist and pro-Confederate demonstrations were held to challenge the removal of these monuments. As I watched the news, a reporter interviewed one particular protester, a man in his thirties. When he was asked why he wanted to celebrate a Confederacy that fought for the inhumane enslavement of African Americans and the expansion of slavery to other states, the protester responded by saying “I don’t care about slavery.” He was demonstrating to protect his heritage he said. His response was fundamentally one of grievance. “My family were sharecroppers. We built the South.” I was struck by his callous attitude toward the enslavement of others and the experience of human suffering. I was also struck by the way he romanticized the system of sharecropping and aligned himself with the powerful white elite in his claim to white privilege.
My maternal grandmother was a sharecropper in Mississippi. Her children and grandchildren were under no illusion regarding the cruel and exploitive nature of the sharecropping system and who it benefited. We were clear eyed about the violence of racial segregation and white supremacy. The sharecropping system was designed to keep workers like my grandmother indebted to landowners. Although my grandmother didn’t speak of it often, she told me stories about the harsh realities of growing up in the Jim Crow South and the relationship of Jim Crow laws to the system of slavery. She described working in intense heat and how she was constantly pricked and scratched by thorns to the point that she had to bandage her bloody feet and keep working in the hot sun. Poor people (black and white) like my grandmother didn’t go to high school. They typically started working in the fields after completing the 8th grade. My grandmother didn’t have access to child care. She had to leave her children unattended while she worked. When Emmett Till was brutally murdered in 1955, my grandmother left Mississippi with her family and moved to the North because she was afraid that one of her nine children might one day meet the same horrible fate.
As I watched this man who was so determined to celebrate, to the detriment of other human lives, a Confederate system and wealthy whites who participated in the exploitation of his own family’s labor, I remember thinking that this man has more in common with my family then the powerful whites he was defending. While I understood the ideology of white supremacy as a terror-based system that inflicts trauma onto its targets and bestows privilege according to perceived racial “membership,” I still could not fully wrap my mind around the disconnect between this man’s worldview and the way in which land owners exploited his family. Suddenly, I flashed back to footage of the Emmett Till murder trial. White men lined the sidewalk and peered out of windows outside the courthouse. The men who murdered Emmett Till held and played with their young sons. These were working class men who were well aware of the power of their whiteness and were using it in an attempt to intimidate Till’s family members and members of the black community. The men were grinning and talking with their sons as if they were teaching them, schooling them in the power of white supremacy. They had brought their sons to witness how systems of white supremacy worked. These men bonded with each other and with their sons over the power they could wield against black people and black bodies and the violence they could exact with impunity. This violence was enabled by the legal system and law enforcement. I could tell the boys enjoyed being fawned over by their fathers but I wondered how these young boys processed the abuse and violence involved. I wondered had this protester against the removal of Confederate monuments participated in these types of white supremacist bonding rituals with members of his family or community institutions. It is clear that this is at least symbolic of the ways in poor and working class whites may bond with each other and assume a bond with the powerful, elite whites who had inherited wealth and status from their fathers.
While it is clear that racial animus and the desire to claim white identity as a means to assert racial privilege motivates many white folks to hold onto a deeply distorted view of U.S. history, I must admit that I am still confounded by the ways in which working and middle class whites who embrace white supremacist ideologies choose again and again to act even against their own self-interest in order to align themselves with the wealthy. I have started thinking more about historical trauma, white supremacy and the connections between historical trauma and white violence in making some sense of this. As a country, we have done little to address the historical trauma of racialized violence we have inflicted and experienced in this country nor have we adequately dealt with the structural impact of systematic, historical, and racialized trauma. Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies has helped me to better understand another component to the fallout of historical trauma in this country. While I understood and worked with some techniques regarding how trauma shows up in the bodies of black survivors of violence and oppression, I needed to do more work to understand the ways in which white body supremacy infects white bodies.
Menakem describes “white-body supremacy” and its trauma as something that inhabits all of our bodies and is integrated into structures and systems within all of our communities. [1] White body supremacy takes up residence in black, brown, and white bodies. Therefore, discursive approaches to confronting racism and white supremacy, while critical and necessary to the work of anti-racism, can only go so far. It is also important to address the ways in which racialized trauma inhabits the body. Let me be clear, racialized trauma deeply impacts the primary targets of terror and violence. It is those who are the primary target of racial violence and witnessing members of the targeted community who are in need of immediate and ongoing support, and for whom we must find justice. When current acts of racialized violence occur, these primary targets are the priority. But if we are to engage in efforts to bring about broader systemic changes, work should also be done to address what Menakem refers to as the secondary trauma of witnessing and inflicting pain and the unmetabolized trauma in the body.[2] White supremacy is rooted in an abusive belief system. It is authoritarian in nature. Parental and institutional authoritarian power wielded by church leadership and fraternal societies shaped by practices of white body supremacy pass abusive belief systems, violence and entitlement off as culture sanctioned by a vindictive god. Whites who monopolize resources and abuse power know how to trigger white animus and white grievance (encased in unmetabolized trauma) among poor, middle, and working class whites. Whites who cling to alternative white supremacist histories and authoritarian power are dependent upon those who occupy positions of power for validation. These are the historical or symbolic descendants of the pre-Emancipation southern aristocratic class. Rather than act in solidarity with black and brown people of similar socioeconomic groups to change systems and structures that do not serve them and confront abusive power, these whites align themselves with white supremacist structures and the attending white privileges to, themselves, exercise sanctioned forms of abusive power over black and brown people in order to “soothe” their own social and economic fears and to soothe the “dissonance” between them and wealthy whites. [3]
Invitation: I would like to invite you to start the Cultural Somatics Institute’s Free Racialized Trauma 5-day eCourse at the bottom of the web page https://www.resmaa.com/. The first session will help you to start to assess symptoms of historical, intergenerational, or institutional trauma in your life or in others who are close to you. Subsequent sessions address trauma in black bodies, white bodies and police bodies. 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.
NEXT Sankofa & Solidarity (Part II): Historical Trauma and Solidarity Practices
[1] Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017. p 10.
[2] Ibid., p 46. Menakem also argues that whites need to contend with intergenerational trauma that is rooted in torture techniques Europeans used on one another dating back to the Middle Ages. pp 58-63.
[3] Ibid., p 63.
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.