My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

Menakem emphasizes body mindfulness, helping readers move from unhealthy reflexive responses to traumatic emotions to the conscious experience of “clean pain,” which involves directly facing such emotions and thereby getting past them. (Sept.)Reviewed on 07/14/2017. To this end, bodycentric activities, such as breath exercises, are described throughout. Central Recovery, $17.95 trade paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-942094-47-0Sensitive and probing, this book from therapist Menakem delves into the complex effects of racism and white privilege. Trauma, both present-day and historical, forms the cornerstone of Menakem’s analysis. He writes that race is a “mythsomething made up in the 17th century,” with the concepts of whiteness and racial superiority nonetheless now “essential facts of life, like birth, death and gravity.” The result is that both black and white people are traumatized with fear of the racial other and with the “dirty pain of av

My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for Americans to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body. Author Resmaa Menakem introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze