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

Throughout the book, Menakem’s grandmother serves as a source of wisdom and an example illustrating the link between The Body and Intergenerational Trauma. In the first chapter, Menakem remembers watching television with his grandmother and rubbing her calloused hands. His grandmother explained that her hands had been damaged by a lifetime spent picking cotton from the age of four. She is in ongoing pain as a result of this personal history, and the pain is visible on her body. This image serves as a metaphor for one of Menakem’s most central ideas: that racial trauma is embedded not just in the mind but in the body, and that effective healing must take account of this bodily trauma. Menakem uses his grandmother as an example of this healing as well, recalling how she used to sing to herself while rocking in a favorite rocking chair—an intuitive way of soothing the vagus nerve, the part of the nervous system that Menakem calls the “soul nerve” for its connection to deep-rooted emotion.

Later, Menakem describes how his grandmother used to “whup” him and his siblings with a willow switch when they misbehaved. In Menakem’s analysis, the willow switch is an example of “traumatic retention,” as it recalls the far more violent whipping that enslavers used against enslaved people, suggesting that the trauma of whipping had been passed down to his grandmother from a previous generation and had found expression in this attenuated form. Menakem does not condone corporal punishment in any form, but he recognizes that his grandmother acted out of love. Because she always took the time to explain to the children why they had been “whupped,” none of them went on to pass this trauma down to their own children.

Joy DeGruy is an American scholar and author who previously served as assistant professor at the Portland State University School of Social Work before founding her own publishing company, DeGruy Publications, Inc. She is the author of the 2005 book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, which Menakem cites as a key source for his own ideas about inherited trauma. In Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, DeGruy argues that the traumas of slavery have reverberated through generations of Black Americans and that these traumas in combination with the present-day traumas of racist violence, discrimination, and mass incarceration mean that many Black Americans experience symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Menakem draws on these ideas to argue that the legacy of slavery and white supremacy lives in Black bodies and that body-centered healing is necessary to combat this legacy.