The Body Holds and Remembers:
In My Grandmother's Hands, Resmaa Menakem urges us to think of racism as an embodied experience. His chapter on European trauma outlines how internalized trauma embodied in White bodies continues the cycle of violence inflicted on Black bodies. (2017) Menakem argues that "without a clear and present focus on the body, trauma cannot be fully addressed." (p 58) In chapter four, European Trauma and The Invention of Whiteness, Menakem provides a brief history of the trauma that emerged from medieval Europe and settlers likely brought with them when they arrived in the New World. Centuries of violence and brutality marked European history and the beginning of the New World's settler-colonial experience. Menakem centers the bodily experience of trauma by providing threads of violence between English and Puritan punishment styles.
"Common punishments in the New World English colonies were similar to the punishments meted out in England, including whipping, branding, and cutting off ears. People were routinely placed in stocks or pillories or the gallows with a rope around their neck. While they were thus immobilized, passerby would spit or throw garbage at them." (p 61)
By providing this history, Menakem argues that the brutality perpetrated on Black and Native bodies in the New World began as a continuation of the violent "white-on-white practices." For Menakem, understanding the historical trauma that exists in White bodies is necessary to start confronting and dismantling white-body supremacy. (2017)
Confronting Pain
There is a need for the United States to confront its history and the traumatic structures that built and sustained the settler-colonial state. Resmaa Menakem and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz help us rethink American history by examining how the history of racialized trauma lives in the land and the body. By challenging historical narratives of American exceptionalism, Dunbar-Ortiz and Menakem center the emotional, physical, and generational trauma that exists at the root of American history but is often ignored. Both Menakem and Dunbar-Ortiz, confront the false narratives of American history and challenge the reader to consider how settler-colonial violence transformed into policies that exist in contemporary American life. Dunbar-Ortiz writes, "Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny." (2014) We are reminded that the myth of manifest destiny materializes in insidious ways as we witness Indigenous communities continue to fight for land sovereignty and are erased from political discourse. Uninterrogated history becomes a dangerous tool of oppression as it repackages and reinforces a sanitized account of the United States with a white supremacist underlining. When we put Dunbar-Ortiz and Menakem in the context of the 2020 Presidential elections, we see that the path towards our current violent political divide was inevitable. It's estimated that 70 million voters cast their vote for the Trump/Pence campaign, and supporters demonstrated their fervor across US cities throughout the tumultuous election week. Despite the hateful rhetoric and disastrous leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic, a substantial number of Americans continue to support the Trump administration. At the root of this support is Dunbar-Ortiz's unconscious manifest destiny (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014) that upholds white-supremacist ideologies. A clear line can be drawn from the settler-colonial policies that eradicated Indigenous communities to the racist, homophobic, and xenophobic rhetoric that attracts Trump supporters. Furthermore, the recent violence inflicted on Black and Brown bodies through police brutality and mass incarceration is a continuation of, as Menakem describes, white people "managing their fear and hatred of other white people" that began with European settlers. (p 63) However, many Biden/Harris supporters' willingness to return to a false sense of normalcy after their campaign won the 2020 elections illustrates why we need to confront history. Dunbar-Ortiz and Menakem demonstrate how the white-body supremacy we experience did not begin with one administration or policy. Instead, it was a series of traumatic moments internalized in this country's soil and each of our bodies. Menakem teaches us that our path towards healing must start by confronting and metabolizing the trauma (2017) that sparked this nation's story. Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) tells us that facing this trauma begins with interrogating and rethinking history.
Education as Healing
The work of confronting this country's trauma should not solely lie on Black and Brown bodies. The scars that run through the land are connected to all of us. As such, all of us need to work towards transforming the oppressive systems that prevent us from metabolizing the dirty pain (Menakem, 2017) running through us. In We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and The Pursuit of Educational Freedom, Dr. Bettina L. Love situates us in the classroom as a space where this metabolizing can start happening. Dr. Love argues that educators must teach students racism and oppression if we want to dismantle white supremacy and foster empowered and civically engaged communities. Notions of incompleteness run through all three of these authors’ text. Dunbar-Ortiz outlines how we continue to teach an incomplete history of the United States. Menakem writes of incomplete processing of trauma. Love confronts an education system that fails to address Black students' intersectional experience that leaves them with an incomplete access to education. Love writes, "Education research is crowded with studies that acknowledge dark children's pain but never the source of their pain, the legacy that pain has left, or how that pain can be healed." (p.13) The failure to address this pain in the K-12 education system is replicated in higher education, and this unprocessed trauma continues to influence policy and practices in the United States. The 2020 presidential elections exemplify the real cost of refusing to honestly confront American history and the brutality that built this nation. The Trump/Pence administration, grounded in white-supremacist ideologies, tapped into a collective fear that emerges from the dirty pain (Menakem, 2017) that's left unprocessed and uninterrogated. Abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019) begins to confront the deep wounds that scar this land and remain untended in the body. Empowering students to engage in history and providing the supportive structures to work through the pain of racialized trauma starts us on the path towards healing. By developing an intentional and intersectional education with teachers who love all their students and are committed to anti-racist practices, we can start to clean the ancestral wounds that continue to fester on this land.
Metabolizing
Often, education is seen as a path towards success, and our teachers the lighthouses that guide our way, but for me, education was alienating. The primary and secondary schools were just a series of facts that needed to be memorized, and college only offered over intellectualization of real social ills with no solutions. However, Dunbar-Ortiz and Menakem taught me that, for those of us placed at the margins of history books, an education that genuinely includes us is a healing process. As I read Menakem and completed the body practice, I felt tensions release and muscles relax. As I read Dunbar-Ortiz, I saw this country's history come into focus. Perhaps, these texts helped me begin to metabolize my pain, or I am finding the language to name the pain that I always knew was there. The pain of knowing this country was not built for me, nor has it ever loved me, but I am here, and my work as an educator begins by making sense of this historical pain and helping others metabolize theirs.
References
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. (2014) An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Beacon Press Boston
Love, Bettina L. (2019) We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and The Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon Press
Menakem, Resmaa. (2017) My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press