Tippett: Also, you talked about how your mother and your grandmother, again, how they just modeled this for you, that there is no failure, there is only practice. That’s why I put the practices in there. And so that is a very important place that I think white bodies get to, sometimes, and they either genuflect to process or strategy, and then they never —

The poignancy of the author’s discussion of his childhood, as well as how he raises his own son, who doesn’t understand the dangers waiting for him in the world, is captured in this quote: “(The) paradox of creating a loving home: parents raise kids whose bodies are unprepared to protect themselves from all the evils they will eventually will face.” And one of the things that I talk to people about is that there is this nerve that comes out of the brain stem, and it’s called the wandering nerve. And it hits in the face, it hits in the pharynx, it hits in the chest, it hits in the gut — it wanders the whole body. And it, I believe, is one of the things why we have “gut” reactions, because most of that nerve actually ends up in the gut. And when we’re stressed, that gut constricts or opens. And so one of the things that happens is that if I’m with you long enough, like if me and you become friends, over time I will start to hear things in your throat because the vagal nerve is either open or constricted. The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org. Menakem: I’m operationalizing it. The white body is used to hearing things that make it comfortable. And so when you say something like “white supremacy” — especially here in Minnesota — everybody goes, “Yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.” And then what happens is, it goes — just the term, “white supremacy,” is a very intellectual term. It doesn’t land in the body.The healing that results on an individual and group level can be taken into the community, for each of the groups that receive focus in the book, as well applying to the greater community.

Phrases like soul nerve, and clean pain vs dirty pain, are introduced as vital concepts but only clumsily and superficially handled. Also included is generalized diet and weight loss advice, which is inappropriate for anyone serious about bodywork. Tippett: So some of the ways we’re trying to work forward, we’re actually making ourselves unsafe again?Menakem: … at that moment, the white body became the standard of humanity — not merchants, not landowners, the white body, because at that moment, the white body had dominion over, and everything else was a deviant from that. And then a couple years later is when you start to see white persons show up in Virginia law. Menakem: Exactly right. So if I’m a 13-year-old white boy, and I get on the internet, and I see symbol, I see rules of admonishment, rules of acceptance, a tone, a cadence, a dress, an understanding, a rhythm — so I’m not just talking about just the things that we see, the dress and stuff like that. I’m talking about the glue — the resonant and dissonant glue that holds things together.

Would recommend this book to everyone who reposted that quote on insta about the trauma white people hold in a white supremacist society, therapists, and anyone who liked the body keeps the score (so therapists). Really I would recommend this book to everyone I know, if they were willing to read it. Tippett: Well, I was kind of aware that I was half-thinking about what was gonna come next. But I don’t know, I felt more settled. And there was also a feeling of — there was kind of a feeling of comfort.My Grandmother's Hands was an interesting book about racialized trauma and its effects on our bodies. Menakem: That’s right. That’s right. Right there. That’s the energy. Einstein said energy cannot be created nor destroyed. But it can be thwarted. It can be manipulated. It can be moved around.

Tippett: One of the things you — this was one of the five anchors for moving through clean pain — the first one, Anchor 1, was: Shut up.Find a quiet place and experience this short, simple body practice offered in Resmaa’s conversation with Krista on the On Being episode, ‘Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence.’ The book also has useful breathing exercises and other strategies to help cope with trauma and heal it. Menakem Introduces a model he refers to as "somatic abolitionism," which focuses on feeling and healing the embodied trauma of racial injustice. Resilience can also be passed intergenerationally, although resilience is a combination of what is passed down as well as what we learn. It can be manifested on an individual or communal basis. Menakem discusses project zero. A call to reduce American death by police from the current average over 1000 (as of 2022) to zero (in the future).