“What we saw at the Capitol [on January 6] is not a mental health issue, it is a communal health issue that the sickness has become standardized. ” Resmaa Menakem1 During a decade spent exploring my own racial conditioning, among my most disturbing discoveries has been my own internal aversion to the behaviors and traits that are the antidotes to white supremacy culture. I live in my head, not my body. As an introvert, I quake at the idea of creating new relationships. At my core, I have internalized the Western frontier mythology that society’s problems can only be solved by exceptional, gifted individuals, rather than through community, collective effort, and learned skills. It’s been so easy for me to spend my life believing that race is not my problem. To believe that I am the “right kind of white.”2 Resmaa Menakem has had enough of my kind of racial hubris. “What I always tell white people is stop divorcing yourself from your cousins. Stop, because it is unhelpful. Figure out how is that part of me ... what you saw at the Capitol were police officers, clergy, florists, bankers, fire people, a blogger, you saw every walk of white life you could imagine.”3 Menakem is a therapist and trauma specialist, and the author of My Grandmother’s Hands , a 2017 book that describes how the toxic story of “white body supremacy” has caused trauma for people of all races – Black bodies, brown bodies, white bodies, and police bodies. Menakem’s book – and his work as a therapist and activist – provide body-centered practices to help heal that racial trauma. Menakem has advice for people like us, white readers – those who think of themselves as white “allies”: They love declaring that they’re independent from other people, but they haven’t developed a culture that can sustain what they believe to be true. … They’ve developed strategy, but not culture, not a lifespan culture that says we’re going to cultivate a living embodied anti-racist culture among white people.4 My ...
