My Grandmother''s Hands

What if racial injustice isn’t just a moral or intellectual problem but a bodily one? In My Grandmother’s Hands, trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem argues that white-body supremacy lives in the flesh—literally in the nervous systems of people in white, Black, and police bodies. Racial trauma does not start in the thinking brain but in the body’s instinctive responses to threat. This shift in perspective—seeing race as a somatic, not solely social, issue—anchors the entire book.

Menakem proposes that justice work must include body work. Centuries of violence, colonization, and racial hierarchy have etched stress patterns—tightening, bracing, freezing—into our collective nervous systems. These reflexes show up automatically when bodies read danger, even when no danger exists. The book’s ambition is to help you recognize, soothe, and transform those automatisms so that healing can ripple through families, communities, and cultures.

Racialized Trauma and the Soul Nerve

The body holds what the mind forgets. Menakem calls the vagus nerve the soul nerve because it connects your brainstem to your heart, lungs, gut, and spine—the very circuits that carry sensations of fear, belonging, or love. When a threat appears, the body reacts before the mind understands. This ancient survival loop—sometimes called the “lizard brain”—determines whether you tighten, flee, or freeze.

Racial trauma rides these circuits. It explains why a police officer may “fear for his life” in the presence of a Black teenager, or why a Black person’s shoulders stiffen walking into a room filled with white people. You cannot reason yourself out of embodied reflex; you must work through the body to unwind it.

Trauma Passed Through Generations

Menakem describes trauma as a family inheritance. The effects of oppression, terror, and dominance can pass biologically (through hormones and epigenetics), socially (through silence or reenactment), and culturally (through rules of belonging). Studies of Holocaust survivors and their children illustrate how gene expression shifts after trauma. Likewise, centuries of racialized violence in America have primed Black bodies for vigilance and white bodies for guardedness. Healing your own nervous system, the author insists, is moral work: it alters what future generations inherit.

Whiteness as a Creation of Trauma

Menakem rewinds history to show that European brutality didn’t start in the colonies—it began in medieval Europe, where public torture and punishment trained white bodies to either dominate or endure pain. When settlers arrived in America, they transferred centuries of internalized violence onto African and Indigenous bodies. Plantation elites fortified that displacement by inventing whiteness—a political identity granting symbolic safety to poor Europeans. The inherited reflex of supremacy thus began as a misdirected coping mechanism for older, intra-European trauma.

To dismantle that system today, you cannot only appeal to intellect or morality. You must reeducate the body: calm the soul nerve, slow the reflex, and rebuild cultural rituals that anchor safety across differences.

The Path Toward Healing

Healing demands embodied awareness. Menakem invites you to notice the sensations within your own body when you encounter racial tension. Does your chest tighten? Do you hold your breath? That awareness becomes the first step to transformation. The book then offers breathing, humming, movement, and grounding techniques—descended from African and Indigenous traditions—as tools to retrain your nervous system toward safety and connection.

Ultimately, My Grandmother’s Hands reframes healing as a cultural project: mending the embodied legacies of white supremacy through somatic practice, community care, and the creation of new, resilient rituals. You start with your own body; you extend compassion to others; and collectively, you begin to heal a nation’s nervous system.

Trauma does not stay in one generation; it travels. Menakem shows that unprocessed pain becomes habit, family rule, even culture. What begins as a nervous reflex grows into a social custom. You can see it when parents silence children after conflict or when communities mistrust joy as unsafe. He names this process traumatic retention—a nervous-system pattern mistaken for character.

Inherited Patterns

Epigenetic and sociological evidence underlines this inheritance. Rachel Yehuda’s research on Holocaust survivors and mouse experiments by Ressler and Dias suggest that stress can alter gene expression, predisposing offspring to vigilance or anxiety. Menakem translates this science into story: a slave’s survival instincts, a soldier’s conditioning, or an abused parent’s hypercontrol all become bodily scripts for later generations. You don’t choose them, but you can rewrite them.

Clean Pain and Dirty Pain

Healing happens when pain is metabolized rather than avoided. Clean pain means facing distress with honesty—the discomfort that heals. Dirty pain is denial, blame, or defensive action that perpetuates trauma. When white people flee racial discussions or when Black communities silence grief, both are enacting dirty pain. The job is not comfort; it’s completion. Every time you sit with fear, grief, or guilt until calm returns, you interrupt generational transmission.

Central lesson

If trauma can be passed down, so can resilience. The practices you choose today set the biological and emotional tone of your descendants.

Culture as Container

Culture solidifies trauma or dissolves it. Rituals like gospel singing, drumming, or wailing help release stuck energy; cultural habits like silence, sarcasm, or control keep it trapped. The invitation is to build “resilient culture”—shared practices that allow bodies to settle, discharge tension, and reconnect. Healing, then, becomes both personal and collective.

Menakem contends that white fragility isn’t just thin skin—it’s an expression of historical trauma. Centuries of dominance taught white bodies to avoid discomfort and externalize pain. When confronted with racial truth, many react with tears, anger, or withdrawal because their nervous systems are dysregulated, not simply their morals compromised. These are trauma reflexes: fight, flee, or freeze dressed in the language of innocence.

The Gaslight of Whiteness

Whiteness, Menakem explains, was historically invented to protect certain bodies from old European pain by projecting danger onto others. Over centuries this creation became internalized as “normal.” The modern myth that whiteness is natural continues to gaslight individuals into defending it unconsciously. Defensive moves—“Wait for the facts,” “I have a Black friend,” “I feel attacked”—all function as body-based evasion of clean pain.

Facing Clean Pain in White Bodies

Menakem urges white readers to reeducate their bodies. Practice staying present when discomfort arises rather than retreating to guilt or rationalization. Reflection must happen below the neck: breathe, soften, slow down. The goal isn’t shame but capacity—the ability to remain stable while facing historical truth. Over time, embodied endurance replaces defensive reflex.

(Context: similar to Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Menakem agrees that awareness is key but adds the somatic step—the body must learn safety before genuine dialogue or change can occur.)

Menakem paints an intricate, three-way picture of U.S. racial interaction. The Black body carries inherited hypervigilance from centuries of threat. The white body carries a false armor of fragility meant to protect against guilt or loss of status. The police body endures chronic exposure to danger and trauma, often with little somatic training for release. When these nervous systems meet, misunderstanding is almost guaranteed.

Automatic Perception

You learn that bodies don’t just see—they feel interpretively. A white shopper tightens as a Black man walks by; a police officer’s body flashes danger at a sudden movement; a Black child freezes under a white teacher’s stare. These aren’t random biases; they are historical reflexes. Awareness begins by noticing the sensations themselves—tightness, heat, or coldness—before thought jumps in.

When Policing Becomes Militarized

Police departments that train like armies reinforce activation instead of calm. Menakem describes tragic encounters—from Tamir Rice to Philando Castile—where split-second, body-based fear produced deadly outcomes. Officers often live in a state of constant alarm with few tools to discharge trauma. The prescription is systematic: add somatic training, psychological first aid, and rituals of decompression so officers can reenter community life with settled bodies.

Relational Healing

Each group—Black, white, and police—requires different mending but shares a common goal: nervous system safety. Practices like singing, drumming, rocking, yoga, conversation, and communal touch rebuild trust. Across divides, settled bodies communicate safety faster than words ever can.

The soul nerve is both metaphor and biology: your vagus nerve, the main highway between brain and body. When relaxed, it signals safety; when agitated, it triggers fight or flight. Menakem makes this scientific concept practical by offering everyday exercises to strengthen and soothe it. The aim is simple: help your body feel safe so your mind and relationships can function better.

Breath, Voice, and Vibration

Humming, chanting, or softly buzzing your lips sends vibration through your chest and belly, toning the vagus nerve. Studies confirm that practices like OM breathing lower heart rate and blood pressure. The grandmother’s old humming, the church’s songs, or the lullaby your parents sang—all do the same biological work: they calm the body’s alarm system.

Touch, Rocking, and Grounding

Place a hand on your belly, sway gently, or rotate your joints one by one. These slow, rhythmic movements discharge trapped energy and signal groundedness. When anxiety spikes, Menakem suggests closing your eyes, naming five sensations, and breathing until the body loosens. This reprograms the nervous system from alarm to agency.

Practical reminder

Start these exercises slowly and, if trauma surfaces, pause and seek guidance. Healing happens through safety, not force.

By engaging this nerve daily, you create an embodied language of calm that others can feel. This, Menakem suggests, is how liberation starts—in the felt sense of your own body.

Somatic work thrives on consistency. Menakem encourages you to build a growth routine—a simple rhythm that helps your nervous system stay resilient under stress. Sleep well, eat nourishing foods, move regularly, and maintain daily practices that anchor calm. A settled body is contagious; it regulates others, diffusing conflicts before they escalate.

Why Settling Matters

Trauma’s hallmark is speed—rapid reaction, instant protection. Healing demands slowness. Settling teaches your body that safety can coexist with discomfort. It creates the space needed to engage clean pain rather than react with dirty pain. Menakem reminds you that activism without self-regulation becomes aggression, while spiritual practice without courage becomes avoidance.

The Routine’s Core

• Sleep seven to eight hours; fatigue mimics trauma activation.
• Eat whole foods and hydrate; body stability precedes emotional clarity.
• Move daily—walk, stretch, or dance—to discharge energy.
• Pause for simple joy: music, laughter, or gardening rewire pleasure circuits.
• Use breath and humming before stressful events to preempt escalation.

The message: stability is not luxury; it’s liberation infrastructure. Each rested, regulated body strengthens the social fabric.

Menakem distills the practice of clean pain into five anchors—tools for staying embodied during conflict. These anchors help you slow down, stay honest, and discharge leftover energy safely. They transform ordinary disputes into opportunities for healing.

Anchor 1: Soothe and Slow

Pause before reacting. Sit down, breathe, place your hands on your knees, and silently remind yourself to calm. Slowing turns threat into awareness.

Anchor 2: Notice Sensations

Shift attention from story to body. Observe heat, trembling, or tightness. Naming sensations keeps you present.

Anchor 3: Accept and Track Change

Stay with discomfort as it moves. Avoid the reflex to fix or explain. Watching it pass teaches resilience.

Anchor 4: Act from Integrity

Respond from your best self, even if that means saying “I don’t know.” The goal is embodied honesty, not perfection.

Anchor 5: Discharge Energy

After confrontation, move. Shake, run, dance—anything to release adrenaline. Without discharge, pain freezes into trauma.

Memorable tip

Remember “Stop, Drop, and Roll”: stop escalation, drop into your body, roll with what arises without harming anyone.

Personal healing is incomplete without cultural transformation. Menakem argues that white-body supremacy persists because it is embedded in culture—stories, rituals, symbols, and norms repeated until they feel natural. Therefore, you must not only heal yourself but also help build new, body-centered cultures of belonging.

Harmonizing Bodies

Before strategy comes regulation. In group settings—from protests to organizing meetings—shared body practices like humming, rhythmic clapping, synchronized walking, or silent grounding harmonize participants’ nervous systems. Police and activists alike benefit from pre-event settling rituals. When collective energy aligns, safety and creativity emerge.

Redefining Whiteness

White Americans have a special assignment: create white culture without supremacy. That means crafting new narratives, symbols, and rituals that reward compassion and responsibility. Menakem suggests publicly rejecting racial entitlement and forming communities focused on repair and shared humanity. (He references thinkers like Peggy McIntosh and Tim Wise who similarly explore unearned advantage.)

Cultural Infrastructure of Healing

Culture changes through repetition and ritual. Historical movements—from the civil rights sit-ins to postwar reconciliation efforts—succeeded partly because they trained bodies, not just minds. Menakem envisions a world where humming circles, foot washing, and somatic literacy are as common as prayer or pledges of allegiance. Over time, new rituals can make care, not control, our default reflex.

Healing the nation’s racism, in this view, is not only a policy challenge but also a spiritual and bodily reprogramming. Change happens at the speed of the body—breath by breath, generation by generation.