Healing White Body Supremacy

NY Times best-selling author of My Grandmother's Hands: Pathways to Healing Racialized Trauma in Our Hearts and Bodies , Resmaa Menakem writes,

“We've tried to teach our brains to think better about race. But white body supremacy doesn't live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies… From the body's viewpoint, safety and danger are neither situational nor based on cognitive feelings. Rather they are physical, visceral sensations. 

The body either has a sense of safety or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it will do almost anything to establish or recover that sense of safety. Trauma is a wordless story our body tells itself about what is safe and what is a threat. Our rational brain can't stop it from occurring, and it can't talk our body out of it." 

My passion for justice work and movement came together when I read Menakem's book. He connects cutting edge neurobiological research and trauma research with the persistence of white supremacy culture.  I dove into understanding the physiology of trauma and how to enlist the body in its healing. 

Practices to integrate trauma and settle the body can include movement, breath, interoception or feeling the 'felt sense' of our bodies, and coregulation.  Menakem provides a collection of such embodiment practices in his book, applying them to racialized trauma healing.  Over the past twenty years, I have worked with many of these practices, introduced to them through dance and movement. Menakem's work provided a justice context for the embodiment practices I love. I have always danced to commune with aliveness and authentically connect with others. I still do; only now I also share some of dance’s embodied practices with communities so we can identify how we embody oppression and separation. Once we can feel it, we can heal it. 

Menakem invites white bodied people to practice decoupling danger from discomfort. The discomfort many white bodies feel around Black, Indigenous, and people of color is a traumatic retension from the very real, bone smashing, body annihilating, violent legacy of forced enslavement and white superiority.  I believe I am uniquely trained for this work.

I had the opportunity to test this belief in the winter of 2021, teaching an undergraduate course at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa.  I was invited to rethink their course on The Human Condition, which I did centering Menakem's book as our central text. I was invited back the following fall to share this work with a faculty cohort. I shared my syllabus and teaching materials. I would be thrilled to continue to support all people, and especially white people, in coming to recognize how white supremacy lives in our bodies so that we might be part of healing it.