What is the main message of My Grandmother's Hands?

The main message of My Grandmother's Hands is about healing ancestral and racial trauma.

How long does it take to read My Grandmother's Hands?

The reading time for My Grandmother's Hands varies, but the Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is My Grandmother's Hands a good book? Is it worth reading?

My Grandmother's Hands is a powerful and insightful book that explores trauma and provides tools for healing. It is definitely worth reading.

Who is the author of My Grandmother's Hands?

Resmaa Menakem is the author of My Grandmother's Hands .

My Grandmother's Hands Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: My Grandmother's Hands
Rating: 4.5 (56 reviews)
Author: Resmaa Menakem

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Learn how we can heal the trauma of racism.

Anti-Black racism is part of America’s DNA. Whether it’s the country’s history of slavery, its widespread police violence, or the small, day-to-day injustices Black people experience, the burden of racism weighs down on every single American today. This is not just true for Black Americans, but for white Americans too.

The burden of racism is best described as a cumulative trauma caused by historical, social, and personal events. And such deep trauma always affects the body. It changes our nervous system and brain chemistry. That’s why, as these blinks will argue, racism won’t just end through social and political change. For it to fully disappear, we also need to heal our bodies from the trauma it has induced.

These blinks will guide you in how to do just that – as an individual and as part of your community. But first, they will help you understand how we got here in the first place, tracing the trauma of racism from the brutal European Middle Ages to its modern incarnation of police killings.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

which simple body exercises can help you begin to heal your personal trauma;
why police encounters often end so violently for Black Americans; and
how America can overcome white body supremacy.

Key idea 1 of 8

Racism lives in our bodies.

When the author was a child, he spent a lot of time with his grandmother. She would often ask him to massage her aching hands while they were watching TV. One day, he asked her why her fingers were so swollen and thick. She explained that it was from picking cotton. She had started working on a plantation when she was only four years old, and the sharp burrs of the plant had torn up her hands.

This is just one powerful example of the marks that racism leaves on the body. But not all of the bodily trauma that racism causes is visible. One of the most pernicious things about racism is that its roots and consequences are often hidden. In fact, with the exception of white supremacists, most people don't consciously engage in racism – but they often perpetuate it nonetheless.

The key message here is: Racism lives in our bodies.

The author’s wife once observed a Walmart employee whose job entailed randomly selecting customers after check-out to see if their receipts matched the items in their shopping carts. Except her selection was not at all random – she seemed to exclusively target Black customers. The author’s wife alerted a supervisor to this racial profiling. When the supervisor talked to the employee, she seemed genuinely sorry and surprised. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she was only checking Black people.

For many white Americans, racism is so deeply ingrained into their nervous systems that they don’t even register how they contribute to it. For Black Americans, on the other hand, racial injustice is so quotidian that they can’t even afford to pay much attention to how it affects their bodies.

But it does. In a country in which white bodies are routinely valued higher than Black bodies, Black people suffer disproportionately from physical and mental distress. They are more often subject to direct violence, such as police brutality, and they experience higher rates of stress, depression, and anxiety. As a result, they more often suffer from stress-related diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and alcoholism.

Racism in the US is always a bodily experience – both for its victims and its perpetrators. It’s a trauma caused by the cumulative effect of American history, the country’s social systems, and daily injustices. And it’s buried deep in the body of every American.

Key idea 2 of 8

Trauma compounds over time, between individuals, and across generations.

Our body’s main goal is to feel safe, or settled. When our body is settled, we are calm and collected. But when our body perceives a threat, it enters a state of high alert to help us quickly respond to the situation – for example, by fighting our attacker or fleeing the scene.

Sometimes a threat is so overwhelming that our body gets stuck in this state of high alert. This is what therapists refer to as a trauma.

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Key idea 3 of 8

Race is an invention.

When talking about the very real consequences of racism, it’s easy to forget that race is a wholly fictional construct. For a long time in American history, people weren’t considered “white” – they were Dutch, or French, or English, or wherever else they had emigrated from. The social category of “white people” only appeared in the late seventeenth century. Immigrants from Ireland and Italy, as well as many Jewish people, weren’t even a part of it until much later.

It might surprise you to know that in some early revolts on plantations, Black enslaved people fought alongside white laborers from Scotland, Ireland, and England. Dividing working class people into Black and white, and giving the latter group marginal benefits, was actually a deliberate strategy implemented by those in power.

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Key idea 4 of 8

Overcoming racism begins with healing our bodily trauma.

Racism is a vicious cycle. We transmit it through our bodies onto others – often without even being aware of it. Just think back to the story about the white supermarket employee who only targeted Black people. Or consider how often Black people denigrate each for being either “too Black” or “not Black enough.”

Considering how deep the trauma of racism really goes, we can begin to comprehend the horrible instances of police violence against Black people. When a white police officer encounters an unfamiliar Black body, their own body often responds in a way centuries of white supremacy have inscribed: it reacts with instinctive fear, triggers a trauma reaction, and opens fire before the police officer can engage their thinking brain. This is something white officers have to change.

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Key idea 5 of 8

Body-based exercises can help Black people metabolize trauma.

Unresolved trauma wreaks havoc on your body and soul – and the bodies and souls of the people close to you. Not only does it cause mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, it burdens the entire nervous system and can lead to a variety of physical diseases. That’s why it’s so important for Black people to begin to heal the trauma stored in their bodies.

The key message here is: Body-based exercises can help Black people metabolize trauma.

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Key idea 6 of 8

To unravel white body supremacy, white people should start with their own bodies.

Undeniably, Black bodies carry the greater burden when it comes to the trauma of racism. But that doesn’t mean that white bodies aren’t affected by trauma. Let’s not forget that a lot of white Americans – no matter where they originally came from – have their own cultural history of violence. Many of them fled to America to escape persecution in Europe. Practices like lynching weren’t invented in America; they were imports from Europe, where they’d been carried out on white people.

White Americans are also routinely subject to secondary trauma. Whether they participated in, condoned, or even fought against it, many white Americans have witnessed incredible violence inflicted upon Black and Native American bodies over the course of American history.

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Key idea 7 of 8

Police must learn to care for both themselves and their communities.

Police violence against Black people is a terrible, all-too-frequent occurrence in America today. But police officers aren’t aliens sent from another planet to terrorize Black people. They’re human like the rest of us, and many of them aren’t white.

The problem is that their job serves white body supremacy by design. Perhaps this isn’t surprising considering that policing has its roots in “slave patrols” established in South Carolina in 1704. On top of this, police work is extremely stressful. Police departments offer no guidance in how to discharge the stress; instead, they incentivize the wrong things, like arrest rates. As a result, police in America often behave as if their purpose weren’t to serve their communities, but to subjugate them.

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Key idea 8 of 8

We can create a culture of anti-racism by coming together in our own communities and then expanding outward.

Social change starts in our bodies, spreads to our communities, and finally transforms our culture. Our culture then creates the possibilities for future bodies to grow up with fewer burdens – and more possibilities.

America is still a long way from overcoming its deep-rooted culture of white supremacy. But the seeds for change have already been planted.

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