My Grandmother's Hands - A Book Review and Recommendation

My Grandmother’s Hands, Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem 2017.

I found this a great little book. The author is a psychotherapist who lives in Minneapolis. The book is a fine collection of information about how our bodies are our primary source of feelings, actions, culture, etc. The author teaches the reader how to understand this, how to manage it, and, potentially, how to fix our national culture that so divides us today.

The key thing to my mind is that most recent neuroscience research absolutely supports what he has discovered through reading and his own counseling practice. Our gut, our abdomen has more control over what we "think" and do than our conscious brain. We FEEL things, we RESPOND to threat, to attraction, etc. For more on that topic see: Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett. She is a neuroscientist, leading much of the research into our much of out "thinking" is actually "feeling". 

This author is focused on the black body, the white body, and the police body. Some of the recent violence enacted by our law enforcement on black citizens has been an almost "automatic" response of their nervous system to the "other" body. 

He has a clear understanding of what he calls our "culture" of black and white bodies. It is a learned culture that is passed down for generations on both sides. It is barely amenable to our conscious control. Changing our "culture" or "world view" as individuals is a start, but we need to put in place mechanisms and visible things to help our whole national culture heal.

The author has worked as a training consultant for the Minneapolis police department. The book was published in 2017, before the George Floyd incident. Interestingly enough, the shooting of Justine Damond, a white body, by Somali-American Minneapolis Police Department officer Mohamed Noor, a black body, has the same characteristics. It made no rational sense. He clearly felt threatened, and responded in what we would call an irrational manner. A similar incident is the more recent case where officer Kim Potter, a white body, mistakenly shot Daunte Wright, a black body, thinking she was using her taser. This was a tragic mistake, coming out of the culture of fear and mistrust that is carried about in our bodies. It appears that this happens more often than we would like to believe. See this reference. It comes from the "body culture", that this book explores.

The good news is that the book has many ideas and suggestions for changing this culture - for individuals, police departments, and our whole nation. 

I found some of the therapeutic exercises to be a bit much. I tend to lean more to a regular program of meditation or mindfulness - but I am now expanding that to include more of a bodily presence to myself. Just paying attention to what my body does in a stressful situation has already proved to be of significant benefit.

I continue to be amazed by what we are learning about human beings. The challenge now is how to get that into the popular mind and "culture". We shall see. I continue to have hope.