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

The US Department of Justice calls community policing a philosophy or set of ideas, but Menakem defines community policing as bodily commitment and participation: “It is a set of ongoing actions. It is making your body a part of the community—and then wholeheartedly serving, protecting, and assisting the human beings in that community” (277). For Menakem, community policing is community-wide, not just something for law enforcement officers. This means members of communities take responsibility for their surroundings and neighbors, calling the city to report a broken streetlight, providing a ride to someone in an emergency, helping to push a car out of a snowbank, helping plant a community garden, picking up an overturned trashcan, and other prosocial activities.

Police officers do play an important in community policing, but first, they must be integrated into the communities they serve. Then, they can advocate for residents, interact with locals, volunteer in their communities, meet with local leaders, aid with community projects, and take care of things that need fixing, such as a leaking hydrant or an abandoned car. In addition to participating fully in community life, police officers must continue to prevent and fight crime.

Community policing differs significantly from the current model of policing in the US: Militarized police departments whose officers behave like soldiers in combat zones. This model of policing increases stress and promotes police violence. Menakem argues that the community policing model can transform the relationship between law enforcement and communities, ease officer stress, and curb police brutality.

Historical trauma is trauma that continues for generations. Menakem compares historical trauma to a bomb exploding repeatedly. European bodies traumatized each other for centuries before they encountered Native Americans and African slaves. This trauma profoundly affected their bodies and the expression of their DNA. Similarly, Black people experienced generations of trauma as slaves, which also impacted their bodies. Trauma-related problems include anxiety, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and many other physical and mental ailments. Menakem cites historical trauma as a primary source of white-body supremacy. He argues that white people did not process or heal their trauma. The carnage they unleashed is, in part, a manifestation of their historical trauma.

Secondary trauma, also called vicarious trauma, comes from watching or experiencing someone else get traumatized. Witnesses to traumatic events such as murder, rape, and torture, experience secondary trauma. The perpetrators of violence also experience secondary trauma. Dissociation, a common response to inflicting harm on someone else, deepens trauma by causing profound shame or moral injury. Secondary trauma can impact anyone, but it is particularly common in law enforcement. Many police officers witness and perpetrate violence and consequently experience moral injury. Currently, police officers do not have the know-how, support, or tools to metabolize their trauma. Few are even aware that they are traumatized. Thus, they return to duty unhealed. This has serious consequences for the officers’ mental and physical health, for their families, and for the communities they are charged with protecting.

The soul nerve, also called the vagus or wandering nerve, is the largest organ in the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the body’s basic functions. The soul nerve stretches from the stomach, spleen, lungs, and heart to the brain stem. Advances in psychobiology reveal that strong emotions, such as love, fear, anger, and sorrow, activate the soul nerve. This explains why humans feel strong emotions in certain parts of their bodies (i.e., fear in the pit of the stomach). The soul nerve connects directly to the lizard brain, that is, the part of the brain that does not use cognition or reasoning as its primary tool to navigate the world. The soul nerve is complex and highly sensitive. It communicates not only with different parts of the body but also from person to person. The soul nerve also helps mediate between the body’s activating energy and resting energy, making it a critical component for healing from white-body supremacy.

Trauma ghosting and reenactment are two trauma responses. The former is the pervasive sense that danger lies around every corner or that something bad is going to happen at any moment. Like many trauma responses, trauma ghosting does not make cognitive sense. Rather, it is the body’s reflexive way of protecting itself. Reenactment consists of reenacting or recreating situations like the one that caused the trauma. Reenactment provides the opportunity to complete an action that was thwarted. This may help a person heal from trauma. However, reenactment often repeats, re-inflicts, and deepens trauma. The only way to stop harmful traumatic responses like ghosting and reenactment is to heal trauma. This entails experiencing clean pain to allow the body to grow through difficulties, develop nuanced skills, and mend.

Traumatic retention occurs when reflexive trauma responses are repeated. Over time, these responses can start to look like part of a person’s personality. Trauma responses are often divorced from their context, meaning individuals may forget that something happened and internalize the trauma response. Typically, a trauma response is viewed by others (and by the traumatized individual) as a personality defect. When trauma remains unhealed and responses are passed down over generations within particular groups, they begin to look like culture. Many personality traits and cultural norms associated with Black people are, in fact, traumatic retention. Black self-hate is among the most harmful forms of traumatic retention. For example, some Black people believe straightening their hair is more beautiful than wearing natural hairstyles, and that light skin is more attractive than dark skin, attitudes that reflect white-body supremacy. Experiencing clean pain around white-body supremacy can help resolve harmful trauma responses.