Healing white body trauma as part of anti-racism
I wonder if you read this title and have a bit of a reaction? Do you ask yourself, what does healing trauma in WHITE people have to do with anti-racism? Actually, white people, too, are hurt by systemic racism. And I’m not talking about “reverse racism”, or referring to the way white people sometimes feel discriminated against by black, indigenous, and people of color, by affirmative action, or by the formation of exclusive affinity groups that “leave me out”. I am talking about the way systemic racism, trauma, the body, and whiteness interweave to create suffering and fragmentation for white bodies. While many black, indigenous, and people of color have named and owned and located themselves within this complex web of suffering, it’s almost as if a white person like myself can feel outside of the suffering of racism, as if that is something that happens to other people, over there - but not to me.
But that’s not true. We live on one round, rotating, interconnected planet. In fact, there is no “over there”.
Much attention has been given to the ways a white person like myself benefits from systemic racism. These benefits protect not only my rights and property, but also my comfort and my body, over others. But recent works point out that systemic racism costs white people too. According to Heather McGee, author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, white people – not just “minorities” – also experience disparities because of racism in areas such as education, health care, housing policies, and in the environment.
Systemic racism harms not only our social, political and economic lives, but also traumatizes our bodies and nervous systems, says somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem, who wrote My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies. In America, he says, “nearly all of us, regardless of our background or skin color, carry trauma in our bodies around the myth of race”.
For white people, embodied trauma originated in Europe, “where white bodies traumatized each other for centuries before they encountered black and red bodies” when they emigrated to America. Like black and brown people, who carry the trauma of being kidnapped, tortured, murdered, enslaved, and legally/politically/economically/socially persecuted in their ancestral memory and their DNA, white people also carry ancestral trauma from their own history in their DNA. Many white immigrants were fleeing imprisonment, torture and mutilation in their countries of origin; and once in America, they subjected each other to the same barbaric punishments they sought to escape by emigrating. Instead of healing their trauma in the New World, white people perpetrated “long standing white-on-white practices” on Blacks and Native Americans.
White bodies have yet to heal their own traumatic history. As a result, the trauma has been passed on and is unconsciously enacted in the present. Many of the reactions that white people have to black and brown people – and even to other white people – are recognizable as unconscious reflexive trauma responses of “fight” (countless accounts of unprovoked violence and killings of black people by police and others), “flight” (denial of racism, denial of white privilege, avoidance of doing anything to combat racism, moving to Europe to ‘get away’ from racism) and “freeze”(feeling numb and disconnected from racism and from whiteness, staying put in the “cocoon of white comfort” while feeling guilty, ashamed, and sad). The patterns of collapsing into “fragility” when racially threatened or uncomfortable, which sometimes include a component of “I need black and brown people to understand and support my perspective/feelings/work,” resemble trauma reactions of “submit” and “cry for help”. If you are a white person reading this blog, do you find yourself in these descriptions? What automatic, unconscious reactions do you tend to fall into when it comes to interacting with non-white people or addressing issues of race and racism? What trauma – ancestral or otherwise – lies unhealed and undigested in you?
It is painful to walk around in bodies that are in the grips of unhealed trauma and susceptible to reflexive responses that harm others. It’s excruciating to be present to the consequences of white body supremacy – whether that means facing into the harm we have inflicted on non-white bodies throughout our history, grappling with our sense of moral injury and shame, or losing sight of our own strength and abilities.
To combat racism as a white person, you can learn to be aware of your reflexive, culturally and genetically inherited responses to threat. You can train yourself to settle your own nervous system when you feel uncomfortable or afraid. You can create or affiliate with communities of other healing bodies that support your healing and your resolve to face into, and digest, the unmetabolized traumatic past and present. You can locate yourself and your lineage as both perpetrator and victim of the trauma and suffering of racism, and heal yourself, your community, and the planet from the inside out.
If you are interested in embodied and collective healing approaches to working with white body trauma and racism, check out the following programs (and please let me know what other trauma-focused white body healing paths you have found!):
https://www.sevenstonesleadership.com/courses/heal-collective-trauma-embody-anti-racism/
https://www.educationforracialequity.com/resmaa
https://www.theembodylab.com/embodied-social-justice-certificate