My Grandmother's Hands

  • racialised trauma
  • ‘quite literally lives in our bodies, our cells [sic] the expression of our genes’
  • 1600 Virginia, phrase ‘white person’ existed first, started the separation of us and them based on skin tone specifically - us and them before not so strategically weaponised
  • ‘others’ - less powerful white bodies, when came to colonised lands they brought that trauma and much of their resilience and [sic]
  • Puritans etc came to avoid torture and imprisonment but then routinely performed these violences on each other, often in the name of God
  • as more came and forcez bolstered, this brutality directed instead to the indigenous peoples and Africans who arrived as indentured servants or enslaved/kidnapped
  • same with aboriginal australians, the maori in aoteara, moghuls in india, south african peoples, etc
  • Britain reaped financial reward from American white body supremacy
  • 1640 - 1807 (British trade in humans abolished) over 3 million shipped over the Atlantic
  • 19th century primary manufacturer of cotton textiles Briain - from African/American labour
  • racial hatred wasn’t the cause of white body supremacy but its byproduct ‘stamped [sic]’
  • 17th century onward, white body supremacy was a marketing tool for rich white Americans
  • US police evolved from armed patrols of white men in the pre-civil war South,, to monitor and enforce disciplline on enslaved Africans/Americans and o return escappees
  • highly militarised police - 1990s, the US military sold at low prices and gave away weaponry to local law enforcement through the Defence Logistics Agency 1033 LESO program - even small towns could obtain tanks/aircraft/armoured cars - 5 billion dollars
  • well over 1000 shot and killed a year in the US
  • don’t experience this book as an outsider - this concerns all bodies variants existed before US and it was exported worldwide
  • healing accessible within is, body centred healing for communities
  • white supremacy not just an ideology - exists beyond that, in our bodies.
  • not just fixable through socio-political means, requires healing of trauma, justice, larger strategy
  • racism is a visceral experience
  • ‘the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions, all land with great violence upon the body.’ - Between the world and me - book
  • ‘we are bodies born of other bodies’ - our inner ape - book
  • white body will repeatedly constrict to protect you from the truth you will encounter’ - pay attention to the body, reflexive thought, observed
  • profound hope or relief, let them wash through and go
  • ‘our bodies exist in the present’ - to a traumatised body there is only now - that now is the home of intense survival energy
  • ‘unavoidable time of reckoning’
  • assumption of whiteness
  • normalcy of white dominance
  • ’ we move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized unidentity’ - white people can represent all of humanity but racialised people represent only themselves and their own race
  • that’s why eg white kids relating to black superheroes is important. relating to other qualities.
  • ‘cultural operating system of white (body) supremacy’
  • subconscious reflexive ‘unsafe’ in the presence of racialised people is felt quite consciously by them
  • it is so ingrained in our reflexes that we have to begin with our own bodies
  • me thinking now - but what of my reflex being that, unpacking it, and then reinforcing it by feeling a reflexive ‘they feel that I#M unsafe BECAUSE of my white body supremacist bullshit’ - how to switch it to all of us being bodily aware of the trauma - lots of people will still always be in fightflight state and how to physically baseline protect myself as a traumatised person when dealing with other traumatised people
  • cotton plants have thorns so at first they tear and bloody your skin - enslaved people in America grew thick hand skin - presumably where the ‘thick skin’ myth came from that opens up black people to abuse and medical negligence/mistreatment
  • ‘our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brain’
  • ‘this knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy of numbness’ ‘often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe, and what is dangerous’ ‘our body is where we fear, hope and react, where we constrict or release, or where we reflexively fight,m flee or freeze.’
  • our deepest emotions involve actuation of bodily structures, nervous system that literally connects organs
  • vagus - wandering nerve, ‘helps to mediate between our body’s activating energy and resting energy’.
  • ‘lower brain’ concepts, ‘lizard brain’
  • ‘all our sensory input has to pass through our reptilian brain before it reaches the cortex’ - the priority of our brains and bodies is keeping us safe
  • allow thoughts in or rejects it, sending fight/flight/freeze
  • body reacts before brain
  • too much, too fast, or too soon
  • ‘trauma is not primarily an emotional response, trauma always happens in the body, it is a spontaneous, protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further or future potential damage’
  • ‘trauma is not a flaw or weakness, it is a highly effective tool of safety and survival’
  • ‘trauma is also not an event. trauma is the body’s protective response to an event, or a series of events, that is perceived as potentially dangerous. This perception may be accurate, inaccurate, or entirely imaginary.’
  • ‘trauma is a wordless story our body tells us about what is safe and what is a threat’ - ‘our rational brain can’t stop it from happening and it can’t talk our body out of it’
  • ‘over-reactions’ almost always a trauma response
  • something here and now rekindling past discomfort, body tries to address it with reflexive energy still stuck inside the nervous system.
  • ‘the body’s attempt to complete a protective action that got thwarted or overridden during a traumatic situation’
  • develops strategies such as extreme reactions, compiling strange likes and dislikes, seemingly irrational fears, and unusual avoidance strategies - embedded in the body as standard ways of protecting itself
  • some people re-enact or precipitate events similar to the ones that caused the trauma - creating an opportunity to complete the overridden protective action
  • the trauma response can look like a part of a personality
  • when these strategies are internalised and passed down generationally they take on the appearance of a culture
  • ‘soul wound’
  • unsafe/abusive family cultures, ‘institutionally oppressive systems, cultural norms and genes - all pass them on
  • ‘our bodies house the unhealed dissonance and trauma of our ancestors’
  • resilience is also passed through generations
  • ‘white bodies traumatised each other in Europe for centuries before they encountereM9thA4n2d black and red bodies. This carnage and trauma profoundly affected white bodies and their expressions of their DNA.’
  • if and when you ultimately turn away that doesn’t make the time spent healing not worth it, you’ve cleared room in your nervous system
  • healing is not binary, healing and growth on a continuum, no-one is entirely broken or healed
  • CBT as limited due to focus on the rational brain
  • collective trauma should be collectively healed, else stuck in habitual pain
  • in therapy ppl often get angry, numb or silent when their brain rejects something held in their body - not always necessary to entirely understand the process
  • trauma can be the body’s response to a long sequence of smaller wounds