The Embodied Path to Healing Racialized Trauma with Resmaa Menakem

Speaker A
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Welcome to we can do hard things. You're not going to want to miss this next hour because it is with Resma Menakim, who is an author, agent of change therapist, and licensed clinical worker specializing in racialized trauma, communal healing and cultural first aid. As the leading proponent of somatic abolitionism, an embodied anti racist practice for living and culture building, Resmaa is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Somatics Institute. Resma is the author of the New York Times bestseller my Grandmother's hands, racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies, the quaking of America and monsters in love. You can learn more about Resma and his work@resma.com.

dot so, Resma, we're just jumping right in with you. That's it. Let's crack. Let's crack. Let's do it.

I read my grandmother's hands a long time ago, and it blew my mind, which is, I think, was your point to be getting people out of their minds. And now I understand it completely differently because I have been in and out of recovery for 30 years. It just becomes whack a mole for me. It becomes something different every few years that I'm addicted to. And I have tried to recover in my mind for 30 years.

So, yes, I just keep thinking, okay, I got it. Now I know how I'm thinking about this. It's just patriarchy. It's diet culture. It's big pharma.

It's wine culture. I've got it. And then I keep not getting cured.

This last round of recovery, I have finally, through tons of therapy and whatever, allowed it to drop into my body, the recovery, and understand that. I don't even know if it's an understanding. Feel that my problem is just in my past, in my parents and their parents, their parents, in the culture, and it's like, all living in my body. So your work, to me, is like, our world has all of these terrible symptoms. Whack a mole symptoms.

Just what we see. The violence, the racism, the wars, the genocides. And we keep trying to solve it by making up new words intellectually, like, thinking our way out of it. And I know personally that that's not how it works, that we don't heal that way. I feel like if we actually had a world that actually wanted to solve racism, you would be the teacher that everybody would put everywhere.

Speaker C
Shit, I hope not. God damn.

Speaker B
What is trauma resemblance? Well, you did a pretty good description of it. I mean, so I have no interest in being anybody fucking guru. I come from a people that every time we start to begin to talk about liberation and start to begin to talk about ushering in a living, embodied, anti racist, generative culture, start to begin to talk about maybe it's not the past that we need to be cultivating. Maybe it's the new futures that we need to be like.

Speaker C
Those people coming from people that look like me. We get bullets in the fucking head. They don't appreciate us until we're dead. And then they can quantify us in terms of one speech we shall fucking overcome. When you're the most revolutionary man on the planet at the time.

White folks love doctor King. Now he was the most hated man in America at the time. And so I hope that God, people don't start. I got a grandbaby that's coming in June. I'd really like to see him get to 30.

Yeah, I just need to start with that. I find it more interesting to have people begin to just like you said, you understand it differently now than you did when you first started reading it. And I tell people all the time, my books are not books you read, they're books you do. And it takes on average nine to 13 months for people to get through my book in the first place. If they're doing the practices, if they're just fucking around and just reading it as a reader's digest or something like that, then you know, yeah, you get through it in a couple days, but if you're actually doing the practice, it takes you nine to 13 months.

And then when you go over it again, because you're not the same person when you started, you actually pick up just like them did res my come to my bedroom and write some new shit in this book. Because now I'm picking up on it, right? And that's because the practices are most important. It's not even the reading. It's like how you experience revulsion at trying to do the practices and then throwing the book up against the wall.

What you do when you get to a certain part and you go, oh, that was nice. I'm never fucking doing that practice again. I'm not like, that's part of how this stuff works. It's not I'm giving you the secret or the five tips to getting to a beautiful relationship. And that shit don't work because people are a part of creation.

We're not a part from creation. And we so busy trying to find the secret and the answer that we're missing the emergence. What needs to happen in order for us to grow the fuck up ain't a tip that rarely ends up being a tip that we go, oh shit, I'm going to change my whole. People know that if you meet somebody in a fucking bar and you take them home, you probably should put a condom on, or you probably should have a dental dam, or you probably should do fucking something, right? Most people don't do that.

We all like, we got the knowledge, like people have told us to do this shit right. The same way with the cigarettes. It says on the pack on the side of the cigarette, but if you motherfuckers smoke this, you are going to die. And we're like, not me. Not me.

Yeah, not me. It is not. And then you see a commercial. I wish that we all know that there's certain shit. The knowledge has never been a curative element for human beings.

Yes, it's. Can they develop the capacity to tolerate what it takes to grow the fuck up? And you have to temper and condition your body, especially when we're talking about race and especially when we're talking about white folks. White folks have. White bodies, have no.

No communal efficacy when it comes to race. None. None. I'm telling you two and all three of y'all, if you come up to me or send me a thing after this fucking thing, and you say, well, restaurant, you know, I had a friend and we used to do it, and we marched in the shit like, your fucking racial resume is not communal tempering. It's not conditioning.

What's happening to me and my people is not happening because individual white people are nice or not nice. That is not what's happening. It is because it is a structure, a philosophy that emerges and evolves. And most white folks benefit from it. They're advantaged by it.

That's the piece. So, I'm sorry, what was your first. What is trauma? Doesn't matter, but what is trauma? And what do people need to do to grow the fuck up?

Speaker B
Like, what is the equivalent of wearing the condom right? In life? So the way that my brain works, my agent and friends, always those that know, supposedly, like, when I first started writing my first book. So the way that I write. So let me tell you the way that I write, first of all.

Speaker C
So the way that I write is that I'll usually go to his house or go to somebody else's house, and I stumbled on this, is that what I do is we record it. We record whatever I write or whatever I want to talk about, and then we get enough of those together and then create the book. So that's why my books sound like I'm talking, right? Is because we do that and then we edit them. I get it back from the transcriptionist, and then we edit, we add other things in and stuff like that.

So that's how I write all my books. The only way that that was able to happen, the reason why we stumbled on that, is because my agent calls me a polymath. And what that means is that. And this is the way that my brain is always. When people are asking me things, my brain is thinking about it in seven different levels.

I'm thinking about the sensory pieces. I'm thinking about the vibratory piece my body is reacting to, the meaning, making the urges. So that's all happening for me at the same time. And so when you ask me a question around, what's trauma? So, for me, basically, trauma is what happens.

And this is from Brother Gabor, is what happens inside of you when what happens happened. Right. And so it is a move that happens. It's not conscious. It's not a like, oh, I'm going to do that.

It's just your body says, this particular thing is too much, too fast, too soon, or too long. There wasn't enough reparative stuff that happens, which is mostly what fucks people. And when that happened, your sense of yourself and your sense of yourself in the world shifted and got stuck. That's trauma. And so it can be anything that happens that's too much, too fast, too soon, or too long, along with something that repaired of that should have happened, that didn't have.

And most people, when we talk about trauma, they can go into therapy and they can say, this happened. My uncle did this, my daddy did this, my mom did this. Da da da. Right? But what they can't usually articulate is what should have happened that didn't.

Speaker A
That's good. Oof. Repair. Yeah. So what is the significance of that?

Speaker D
That they can't actually say it? Is that the equivalent of imagining the world differently? Well, it's not even the saying. It is how your body and how you position yourself once you can't get at that, you start to organize yourself around. This should have happened.

Speaker C
But it didn't. You start to organize. Well, fuck it, then. Fuck you. Like, if that's the way it is, then this is how I'm gonna get down, and it's not conscious.

So here's one of the things that I say when I'm doing my practices in my workshop, is I say that just the march of time, time decontextualizes Trump, right? Time, just time. So if we're on a call right now, y'all, and somebody comes in and y'all see some shit go down, and they put a gun to the back of my head, and as we start fighting, they beat the fuck out of me, right? And then something happened, and y'all, you know, everything's happening and everything. And then a month from now, y'all say, okay, we gotta check back in with Resma.

Right? And then we do a zoom call. And the zoom call comes on, and I'm on the call with y'all, and I'm butt ass naked, babbling, right? I'm just, you know, fucking crazy, right? There's not one person on this call that wouldn't say something happened to him.

I saw it. We experienced it. We got to get Resma some help. Do we have his wife's number? We got it.

Right. There would be no doubt in my mind that you would say, we know and we saw what happened to him. You will contextualize it. Right? You'll say, this happened, and now he's acting in these particular ways.

Right? What if you never saw it? Mm hmm. Well, then we just think you're crazy. Right?

So here's what I always say. When trauma happens in the person, decontextualize and it goes unattended to, what happens is, is that the march of time can make that look like personality. Trauma that happens in the body in a person over time can look like personality. Trauma that happens in the family over time look like family traits. Trauma that happens in that people can look like culture.

Trauma in a culture can look intrinsic or natural. So is this why when people, families, or cultures refuse to witness, have accountability, face the truth, then all of our stories go haywire, and we think everybody's crazy. They collapse. It collapses, right? It collapses into personality.

It collapses into family traits. It collapses into culture. Right? And then when we go to talk about it, all of the charge comes into the room before the resolution. The resolution can't happen because people are contending with charge in the body.

This is why when people say, well, we need to have an intervention, you know when that happened, and we need to sit there and talk, and people go, yeah, we may need to do that. And you're probably right, but this is going to be some bullshit. Why? Because it's 400 years of charge, 500 years of charge, 30 years of charge, and nobody is tempered and conditioned to deal with the charge. We think, let's just talk about it.

Speaker D
Yeah. Let's just get together and do a reconciliation. Let's get together and do, right. And the charge burns. So one of the contracts that I have is, I'm working with the meadows, right?

Speaker C
I do work with the meadows, right. Treatment facility. And one of the things I've been trying to get in, working with the therapist on is that if you can't work with the charge first, then when people come into the room and they tell you about their use, they tell you about the sexual stuff that happened to them. They tell you about all of this shit, right? You give them advice about how to deal with it, but you don't understand that the advice that you're giving them is not getting at the charge.

They're asking you a question, well, how do we do this? How to do it? You say, well, you do it like this, and you do it like that. And they go, okay. And then they say, yeah, I got.

Right. And then that. Char, you can see the charge behind their eyes. And we don't know how to address that. We don't.

As therapists. And I'm tell you this. This is the silly little fucking joke. Therapists are no more conditioned to deal with the charge than the people that they're talking to. Wow.

They are not. We don't go to school to learn how to deal with the charge. Here's the thing. I got my master's degree. I learned more about charge being fucking married than I did getting my master's degree, right?

I learned more about the charge dealing with my drug addicted daddy than I did in the master's degree, right? Because I had to learn it and grow up and begin to work with the shit and nibble on it and use it as ways to condition. Listen, we're all friends. Let's say we're all friends. And I come to y'all and I say, check it out.

Hey, y'all. I'm thinking about playing piano, the normal course. Oh, that's really cool. I'm thinking about running the marathon. Y'all all good?

Yeah, that's cool. You know, I knew a friend that actually ran a marathon. I can get you hooked up with them so they can talk to you about it, and. Da da da da. Right?

And you'd give me resources. You tell, you know, and there's this, that and the other, right? And then if I said to you. And then if you got the bright idea to ask me the question, when am I thinking about running this marathon? You guys would go.

And I looked at you in all straight, and I said, tomorrow. Exactly. Exactly. You smiled, you giggled. You like, okay, I gotta ask another fucking question now, right?

There's something else, right? Cause I wasn't prepared for that, right? I wasn't. And your question would be, well, you know, I get it. But have you run a block for it first.

Do you understand that? Your fucking nipples are gonna bleed like, your toenails are gonna fall? What's happening here? And I said, no, no, no, no. Don't worry about it.

I listen to a podcast on running a marathon. Yeah, I read. Right. If I said that to you every time I assured you that I got it handled, you would go, you don't have this handled right. Both things would be happening at the same time because, you know, I'm unconditioned and not tempered to be able to tolerate what I'm getting ready to go through.

And why do we think race is any fucking different? Why do we think that your opinion or your understanding of that that's as important as temper and conditioning? Yep. And race in this structure is traumatizing to any visibly melanated body. It is a traumatizing structure experience in philosophy.

And if you don't understand that, you think your ideas and your opinion is as important as the temporary and conditioning that my body has had to go through in order to navigate this shit.

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Speaker B
I was going to do an interview last year or a couple years ago with a black woman, and she wrote to me and said, we have all the same ideas. I've listened to all of your things like, yes, yes, yes, I cannot do this interview with you because I cannot be my most vulnerable in the same room as a white woman who looks like you. And at the time, I had bleach blonde hair. I was a certain visually looking white woman. And I think about that all the time.

And I thought it was so beautiful of her just to say it that way. But I think what she's saying is what you're saying. Our minds might have the same ideas, but our bodies are charged when we get into the room in a way that will make me unable to be vulnerable. Yeah. I am so glad she said that to you.

Speaker C
Not for you, but for her. For her to understand the texture of what this was and not override it for you. I think whether you got something out of it or not, I think for her to recognize that this had the potential to be extractive and she didn't want to put herself. And, you know, for most of our history, especially the black woman's body, for most of our. It's relatively new that a black woman can say that to a white woman and be somewhat sure she's not going to get raped.

For most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to every aspect of my body. For most of our history. For most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to every orifice, every idea, every understanding of my body. It is relatively. And this is an obvious.

Has been an obvious problem for visibly melanated bodies, but it's also a problem for white folks, because white folks don't understand the urges around, why they expect my deference, and that they're willing to murder me when I'm not deferential. They're willing to limit and thwart access and opportunity when I'm not deferential. Right. White bodies. Doctor King said that part of the problem is that white bodies have been put through a mass education around who the black person is and what the black body is.

They've been put through a mass education. They refuse to develop a mass de education and amass re education as it relates to the black body. They refuse. That's part of what the problem is they don't even shit. They don't even know it's a thing.

Even good white folks have this recoil when a black body says, you don't have access to them. I will not allow you access to me. There's something that happens to white bodies where that happens. I don't care how good you are. I don't care how nice you are.

That is irrelevant to the level of frailty that black bodies and visibly, Melanie bodies have to contend with. That is irrelevant. Your niceness and your kindness is irrelevant. Is not communal. You have tempered this with other white bodies, and you developed a sense of this communally.

Speaker B
Is there something about that? That is the heart of the millions of what we now call Karen moments, like when a white body sees bodies of culture. The thing that seems to be the common denominator in those moments where a white person calls in the police is there seems to be a body of culture experiencing some sort of freedom or joy in public that causes some kind of reaction in a white person's body that is not happening in anyone's mind. Right. Like, you can't think your way into that being logical.

So explain to us, body to body. Yeah. So for me, the Karen and the kin moments, people look at them as Karen. I mean, you can go on instagram, you can go on YouTube, and you can pull up hours and hours of videos of white folks acting fucking bananas, right. At barbecues, at churches.

Speaker C
Right, right. And we look at those as events and incidences. What if we didn't look at it like that? What if we said this was structural, that it is woven into the reflexive response in white bodies in general? Not a Karen, but Karens as philosophy?

Karenism as a philosophy. What if we did that? What if we stopped looking at this as events and started looking at it as structure, as philosophy, as the. What I call it, plantation ethos, that the most enduring organizing structure in America is the plantation. The plantation literally organized white people.

It organized their sense of relationships with each other. It organized their sense of hierarchy. It organized their sense of religion. It organized their sense of pigmentocracy. It organized their sense of sex roles.

It organized their. Did you guys understand what I mean? The plantation organized white people. When the plantation came into existence, America was the 13 colonies. Here's the thing that we forget.

Colonies are filled with colonized white people. Colonized white folks that were fleeing something that has never been dealt with. This is why the white woman is so fucking mad at the white man and doesn't understand why.

Speaker B
This is why I tell white men, I'm sorry, I can't do your interview. Yeah, I do what the woman did. You're the second man we've had on in 300 episodes because I can't be in the same room. I understand that. Listen, let me say this.

Speaker C
When white women were walking around their towns, their churches and all of that, and every place that they could go, and they started walking around seeing little black children with their husbands faces on them that never got dealt with, rape is part of the way that this country got wealthy.

Land theft is how this. When people say, well, how did America get so wealthy? Free land and free labor. And the philosophy is to try and get back. When we talk about conservative, that's what they're saying.

They'll never say it because it ain't good to say, well, that's what they mean. That's the again part. That's the again part. Yeah. We want to get it back to free land and free labor.

And if we can't get it back to that, we want to get as close as fucking humanly possible. We don't want to pay for your labor. I'll give you another one. I said this the other day. Can you believe that we, and this is why I believe that America doesn't, when it comes to race, doesn't have a liberatory bone in its fucking body, is that we allowed people, we allowed rich, primarily rich white men to at one point pay us for at least as close to our labor as possible.

So you paid me $20 an hour, but you take dollar 25 an hour because, you know, my labor's actually work. Dollar 45 an hour. You take dollar 25 of that and you put it in the pension and hold it. So when I'm old, I can actually do some other things. That was the fucking deal, right?

We allowed these motherfuckers to tell us about a 401k. We allowed them to say, now you get to contribute. Well, motherfucker, I am contributing. I gave you $45 worth of labor. Your job was to take 25 of that and put it over here.

Right? And we said, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Let me contribute. Of the 20, let me contribute $5 of that. And we took it.

That's what I mean by free land, by genociding the indigenous people and free labor, by enslaving african people and black people and white women wearing pussy hats in Washington, DC ain't gonna do a damn thing about that. This whole thing is white folks refusal to deal and can temper themselves so they can actually begin to create a living, embodied, anti racist, generative culture. They have no appetite for what it takes to condition themselves, and not condition themselves, but condition themselves so their babies can actually. So most of us, our kids, don't learn from just our instruction. They learn from what our bodies recoil from and lean into and conditioning ourselves.

To be able to say, I have to do some conditioning and tempering so my babies experience more room around race. Not just instruction around race, but they actually experience, oh, mama can work with that. Mamas can work with. They know. You know what I mean?

This is why the whole CRT and the reflexive stuff and the burning of the books and all of that shit is really about. What they're telling you is that white folks have no appetite for conditioning when it comes to race. None. Tell us what you mean by conditioning. When we don't have an appetite for conditioning, we don't have the appetite for the discomfort of it settling in our bodies for the.

Speaker D
What is the conditioning? We don't have no appetite. So, Amanda, if I came to you, like I said earlier, about the marathon, it goes right to. That's it. If I tell you that I'm gonna run a marathon tomorrow, and then I convince you, I keep saying no, I did everything that I'm supposed to do.

Speaker C
I read a book. I did this. Every time I say that, you go, I can't trust his judgment. I don't trust his judgment. So when I told you I read Rob and Angelou's white fragility, so I'm all set.

Speaker D
That's the equivalent of the, I don't. Trust your fucking judgment. Yeah, got it. There's nothing about that that means anything. Yeah, I know.

Speaker C
You put it up there like it means. And I mean, and me and Robin are tight. I know, I know. I'm just saying, probably half the people that are listening to this read that. That's what I'm saying.

They read it and it was good. And they ain't read it again since. Yeah. They haven't grabbed another white body and said, for the next 30 years, me and you gonna roll around race specifically, and we are going to cultivate between ourselves a different way of understanding this. And we may not be able to get to where we think we need to get to, but at least we're going to nibble on this.

At least we're going to put the road work in. I'm not just gonna read a book. I'm not like, I am going to body to body. We're going to raise babies in this shit, right? We are going to get divorced in this shit.

Do you guys understand what I mean? Like, this is my life. This is how we get down. Most white folks ain't talking about it like that. Most white folks is talking about it.

I read white fragility and it changed my life, motherfucker. I can't tell. I can only tell because you told. Me. That'S the only way I get that you said it.

And that's supposed to be enough. If I put all of my stock in what white people say as opposed to what white people do, I'd be fucked up. Like, I'd be really fucked up. So that's what I mean when I say temper and conditioning. I'm saying, if you're gonna do anything that pushes you up against your adult developmental edges, if you're gonna do something, you're gonna experience it as a sensation piece.

You're gonna experience it in terms of imagination. You're gonna experience it in terms of quaking and twisting and gnarliness and images that pop up that you've been trying to tamp down and get the fuck out of your head. You're gonna experience what it takes to metabolize that and use that shit as fuel for your growth as opposed to fuel that burns you to fuck up. Right? It's the same fuel.

It's the same fuel. It's the same thing. Like, when people come into my office and they say, I really need to get this out of me. And I said, if I was able to actually do that and remove that from you, what you would need in order to be the person that you think you want to be or get to. I just removed the fuel for that.

Speaker B
Mm hmm. Does that have the connection to dirty pain and clean pain? That's dirty pain and clean pain? Yeah. Most of us.

Speaker C
Let me ask y'all a question. I'm gonna ask y'all a question. I'm y'all all adult people, so. Right, so we're all adults ish. Adult ish?

Yeah, like, we're adultish. So let me ask you, if I said, have you ever been with somebody and you've been with him and you and y'all are having a good time and you fucking good. You eating good. You're doing all of the things that you do, but in your belly, something says, God, I shouldn't be with this motherfucker. God.

Speaker B
Like almost exclusively. You know what I mean? Like goddess. But I love these nasty draws. But goddamn, I know they ain't good for me.

Speaker C
You know what I mean? And your boys and your friends and your girlfriends and your mom and your daddy and everybody are like, what the fuck you doing? And you go, I don't know, but I can't stop you. I don't know what the fuck that is. What I tell people is that we know dirty pain.

We know dirty. And if you're lucky, after you do that for a while, something begins to move in a way that you go, yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I know I can't do this no more. I can't do this no more. More. I need to block her.

I need to block her. I got a blocker. I blocked her. And everything says, unblocked her just one more time. Like, you know what I mean?

That you're playing with clean and dirty. There's a part of you that's tied to your integrity, that's part tied to creation itself that gnaws at you, that says, if you go through this, it's going to be painful. If you stay with this, it's going to be painful. You get to choose which pain you want to contend with you. As adults, we don't get the choice between pain and no pain most of the time.

As adults, we get the choice between clean and dirty. And most of us want a choice between pain and no pain. You don't fucking get that as an adult. Yeah, that's not what you get. You get to choose between, am I going to do this?

Clean and painful and dirty and painful. Those are the choices. Resma. I thought about that so much that, yes, when I was watching, painfully watching the rebuttal to the state of the union where Katie Britt came on and sat in a kitchen, small white woman wearing a tiny cross close to fake tears, crying about a fake threat in the form of these violent immigrant bodies, just crying and lying that I just. Was like, oh, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty.

I don't watch that shit no more, honestly. And I'm not saying, you know, the white folks that are listening to you, I'm not saying y'all shouldn't watch it. I'm saying for me, I don't like, I'm not playing, I'm not asking you. I don't need to see your performative shit. And I'm talking about liberals too, right?

I'm writing a book right now and there's a chapter in it where I call the feckless and the fascist. I think liberals are some of the most feckless. They don't understand that these motherfuckers are not trying to reach across the aisle, that this shit ain't. This ain't that. And you keep trying to find the middle road and the middle ground.

These motherfuckers tell you, we will murder your fucking children in Sandy Hook, and you motherfuckers won't do a goddamn thing about it.

You won't do a fucking thing about it. 21 white babies were murdered, and y'all didn't do a motherfucking thing about it. You didn't bust a grape in the motherfucking food fight. So if you ain't gonna do nothing about that, I know you ain't gonna do nothing about my babies. That's the conditioning and the tempering that I'm talking about, right?

I read this thing one time, you know, people said the idea right wing and left wing are all part of the same racist bird. And if you don't understand that, you get confused about that type of shit. It's like when white people are sitting up there crying, and then other white bodies, liberal white bodies, are just aghast at the lying and stuff like that. But you ain't gonna do nothing about it. You're gonna be upset about it.

But there is a thing around your own dirtiness that is dovetailing with that dirtiness. So it's like the thoughts and prayers. Just thoughts and prayers. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And white folks are not interested in developing a living, embodied, anti racist, generative culture with each other.

They're so busy looking for the brown guru, the black guru, the indigenous guru. Like, they're so busy looking for them that they don't realize they have to literally start with each other, and they have to do it and create a communal ethos around, ushering in and emerging a different way of being.

Speaker D
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Speaker C
No. And it ain't going to. Yeah, listen, listen. Think about this. Close your eyes.

Let me close your eyes. White people, white bodies started from nothing and they tilled the soil and they were faithful to God and they were the chosen people. And they spread the gospel of the one true God, Jesus Christ, across the world. And they have created things that did not exist before their purity and their whiteness came on the scene. And it is their job to make sure that God exists on this planet and that anything that white people do that's mistake.

It is already washed away by God in their dominion over everything in creation. Now keep your eyes closed. That's the story. That story, even if you don't like it, has a beginning, a middle and the end. It says what you should be doing and not doing.

It tells you your positioning. Now open your eyes. Tell me an equivalent story from liberals. The story is find the right words, say them on Instagram. That's it.

There is no glue. So if I got symbols of the swastika, if I got symbols of hoods, if I got symbols that are a hundred years old, hundreds of years old, and you're going to come and talk to me about a fucking bill. You're gonna come and talk to me about, you know, we need to get out and vote. But if I'm a white person, that's already available. The symbols of that are all.

And it's got a whole story and it's steeped in hundreds of years, but yet I'm trying to convince you of what's right and what's wrong. There's no there there. Yeah. And then you've got the hate groups with their uniforms and their rules of belonging and their offering togetherness and their fucking uniforms and all the things. It organizes the body.

Speaker B
They also believe that they're great. Yeah, liberals, we're always wimpy. It's like we don't believe that we are. There's no they're there. There's no they're there.

Speaker D
But that's because of the dirty pain. We're apologetic and we're ashamed because we have the dirty pain. White liberals are feckless as fuck. I'll give you a quick example. I'll give you a quick example.

Speaker C
This is why I talk about it as white bodies and not as particular identities, right? So when I do my workshops and stuff like that. Inevitably I'll have a gay white woman that'll come up to me afterwards and say, resume. I don't know exactly what you're talking about, because I'm a gay white woman and I've been right. And they say that.

And I say, hold on, hold on. Please don't compare yourself to me being a heterosexual black. Like, don't do that. Here's what I want to ask you. In the community of gay, let's say we say gay or lesbian women in that community are black lesbian women at the top or the bottom of that community.

And if you say we're all mixing together, I'm gonna say you a fucking lie. You have never talked to a lesbian black woman in your life if you say that to me. So I'm not talking about your identity. Your identity is important. What I'm saying is there's another piece to that, too.

And this pigmentocracy is woven in and around and through every institution, every movement, everything that we are doing, how we interact, are positioning our moorings, is woven in and around and through that. And most white folks, regardless of their identity, are unwilling to examine that. And so for me, when I'm talking about body, the white body, visibly melanated body, the black body, I am talking about philosophy and structure and feral philosophy and structure. And so, you know, it's important to understand that when you're talking about what it takes in order for people to begin white bodies. I'm talking about white bodies.

Now, in order for white bodies to begin to work with and develop a story that their white babies coming later on can have something that is left that will nourish them. So the way that creation works is that if you just look at how creation functions, is that something, a structure or something, has to die in order to create the nutrients for the new structure to emerge from, white bodies don't understand that they want to think about. I think that idea of God has fucked white people because they think about God as a bestowal entity. They think about God as if I just am in alignment. If I just do this, if I just do that, then something will be bestowed on me because I've done that stuff.

That's usually not how it works. It usually works because you do something or something happens and you get to the edges and you become. And something emerges from the grind, and then something emerges through. Right? That's not our understanding of creation.

What I just said is in alignment with creation, not a bestowal. Right? And so, for me, I think white bodies are not interested in going through the emergence. The closest that they can get to it is fucking yoga, right? Like white yoga.

Like. Like white folks will yoga and sourdough bread and kale the fuck out of everything, right? Like, y'all can kale every. But that's. Cause that's individual.

Speaker B
Because we. That's what I'm saying. We wanna purify ourselves. But don't I understand that that's like anorexia defined, right? I wanna purify myself.

I wanna be better. I just don't want to be involved with any other human beings doing it. That's exactly right. I. Then you run around and say, well.

Speaker A
Why can't we do this? Like, why can't we all get together? Motherfucker, you have no interest when that damn 400, 500 years of charge come spring loaded charge. The reason why you don't want to do it. Cause you know it's spring loaded, right?

Speaker C
You know it's spring loaded, so you don't. You know it, right? That's why. That's why. Because you know you are not conditioned to do with that spring.

This is why. I'm one of only two men that have been on this thing. You don't want to deal with white men, you ain't going, fuck you. I got my own motherfucking shit. I got my own podcast.

If I don't want you motherfuckers on here, I'm not gonna have you motherfuckers on here. Right. And by doing that, you don't temper and condition yourself.

And I'm not telling you to bring their asses on. I'm not. But I'm saying not doing it is doing something. That's right. Fuck.

I'm not. See y'all looking at each other. I'm not. Look, this is your podcast. Do what the fuck you want to do.

I'm not telling you what to do. I'm saying there's a certain conditioning that you're doing, but by not doing it, that's right. Maybe you figure out ways to do it by not having them on the pot. Maybe there's some way that you begin, but you're not conditioning yourself to deal with the 500 years of rage that you have that's been passed down through white, quote unquote, female bodies. That shit.

The spring load of that is still there. The spring load is the charge. And the charge. The spring load is the charge. It's 400 years of charge.

This is why when I'm working with people who are addicted and they don't want to deal with race. I'm like, oh, you are in an environment in which the whole construct of this shit was predicated on pigmentocracy. And you think that that's separate from your addiction?

You literally believe that your unwillingness to work with race is not fueling some, at least a little piece of your addiction. The idea that this whole thing in America has been constructed on raping people that look like me for 250 years. Legally. Legally. Legally.

Legally. Legally. Could rape people that looked like me for 250 years. And you don't think that that's fucking with your sobriety? You don't think what's happening in Palestine is fucking with your sobriety?

You don't want to get up out of bed and you just think it's your depression kicking up again, or you just need to put your fucking, you know, sunlight on your face more and take some more vitamin D. That's what you think. We are living on a living entity, right this moment, connected to live other living entities. And we don't believe that our feet sloshing around in indigenous blood is impacting us.

You don't think that's having anything to do? So whenever you're around, urges to deal with your addiction start fucking popping up. You only trying to find out what's happening in the personal. Yeah, that might be, you have no interest in the historical, you have no interest in the intergenerational, you have no interest in the personal, in the persistent institutional. You just go right to what's happening between me and my.

And all of that shit is balled in and you have no way of pulling out a little bit nibbling and working with it so you can get conditioned by it. What's an example of clean pain? Let me ask you this. You said earlier, you said resume. I've started to begin to understand a little bit about how not just my head and thinking about this, but my body.

I understand the different now than I did even the first time I started to read the book. Okay. There's a part of that that when you say that to me, that you experience as resource. Okay, I got a little bit more room with it, right? There's more room to be able to kind of play with the idea that my body is engaged in this, right?

At the same time you say that there's also constriction that says use again too. That fear of, yeah, I got some of it, but there's this other shoe that might drop. Right. And usually our interrogation is, how do I make sure I'm not in this environment. How do I make sure I'm not there?

I'm not around toxic people. I'm not doing this. Then the other. Right. And in that, you can begin to condition yourself.

So that piece becomes fuel for this piece, that in that, you begin to understand the difference between clean and dirty. Not by gorging on it, but by nibbling on it in little bits and then pulling out and going to do something and then come back and nibbling on it a little bit and going out nibbling now, all of it. And then over time, you notice, ooh, there's a little bit more room here that didn't go away. And I'm not, like, busting open the chest and now I'm superwoman. It's just I got a little bit more room with it now than I did.

That's clean and dirty. That's clean and dirty. And most of us are not willing to do that. Most of us want epiphanies. We want something to be bestowed on us, not that constriction.

So one of the things I always say is that constriction, the constriction of little constriction in the body, the constriction anon, the constriction in the face, the constriction, whatever it is, whatever how that constriction is, that's that gnawing, that embodied gnawing can, over time, be cultivated into embodied, not knowing. That's good. Most of us don't want to deal with the gnawing. We want to get rid of the gnawing at any cost.

And the moment you get rid of it is at the moment, you find yourself fucked up. Yep, said addicts everywhere. Yeah, yeah, smart as fuck. Yeah, smart as fuck. And you like, something seems off with you.

Speaker B
Something seems off you, smart as fuck. Something's off with you. I don't know what it is. You got the answer for everything. Something's fucking off with you.

Speaker C
That's creation itself. That's what I'm saying. There are these intelligences that we have that have been crowded out by cognition. Yeah, that's what I mean by understanding it differently. Like, I have found myself in situations where I feel in my body.

Speaker B
Oh, this is the culture I'm being conditioned to. So, for example, Resmaa, I'll say something as a white public person, which people will bring to my attention, is revealing narrow vision. What I have noticed in my body is that after that moment, I think I'm feeling clean pain in that moment. But then this thing happens that I would not have understood unless I was paying more attention to my body, which is that behind the scenes, that thing will happen publicly. And then behind the scenes, there will be a lot of white people, specifically Menta, who email me privately, nothing publicly, and they'll say, we just saw that.

And that is so unfair. And we're all talking about it, and you're here. And, Resma, I will feel in my body, to me, as a white woman, what dirty pain feels like and why it's so hard to identify is because it feels like comfort. Yes. Yes.

It feels like. So can we do something? Right? Let's do something. Let's do something.

Speaker C
So notice when you just told me that story, let's just pause for a second. As you notice that story again, what are the images that are popping through? What are the images? Okay, so what comes to my mind is, is the whole sleeping beauty thing pause.

Stay with the sleeping beauty.

Stay with it. What's the emotional content? As you notice the sleeping beauty images, what's the emotional content?

Speaker B
I just keep. Yeah, right there. Right there. I just keep thinking of death and safety. Pause.

Speaker C
When you notice the death and safety, where do you notice it? In your body or outside of your body, where do you notice death? First, it's all chest for me. Yeah. Notice that.

Notice that. Where do you notice the safety? It's a little bit lower. Yeah. Yeah.

So just land on the lower. Just land on the lower.

As you notice the lower. The little bit of safety. Is there any meaning that shows up? Any urges that show up?

Speaker B
I mean, Resmaa. All I am feeling is the presence of this one picture of sleeping beauty where the, like, man is over her. Pause, pause. Stop, stop. You don't have to keep going into the narrative.

Speaker C
There is this mandev over her. There's this man over her.

She's pure sleeping beauty. White skin. There's this man over her. So at the same time, it's Prince Charming is. At the same time, he's got a fucking axe in his hand.

So both things are happening at the same time. Time. White women haven't dealt with that.

Open your eyes. What we just did was play with the intelligences. We played with the intelligence of image. We played with the intelligence of sensation. We played with the intelligence of meaning, making urges, emotional vibe.

Do you guys understand what I mean? That's all we did. And all of that was happening at the same time. And all we did was just pull it out and nibble on pieces of it for itself. Just not answer.

If you do that enough something begins to move, begins to quake, begins to get it worked with in ways that when you just try and deal with it all at the same time, it can't be worked with because it overwhelms. It's too much. So that image of having this man over this woman like that, and there's been conflicting sensation that goes with it that never gets worked through. So when these white men email you and say, you know, we saw that, and we just think that's unfair, there's a part of you that goes, oh, a white man taking care of me, and then there's part of you that goes, what the fuck is this? At the same time.

Speaker B
That's exactly right. White women don't even know that. That's something they should be working with. Y'all don't even know y'all should be working with that. Wow.

Resmaa. Every interview you do or talk, you do, you just are so generous with yourself and your wisdom and your energy and your mind. It's not me. It's my people. It's not me.

Speaker C
When you hear me talk, you hear my people. You don't just hear me. You hear Professor Makboo del Kati. You hear James Baldwin. You hear, because I'm part of them.

I'm not apart from them. So that's what you hear as generosity. What you hear is radical generosity is because of my people. That's. I've been conditioned by that.

So this is not me myself. I am my people. Wow. Thank you, Resma. You're welcome.

Can I ask somebody? Can I pull up something right platform that's coming out called Black Octopus Society. So it's black octopussociety.com and it's my online piece, subscription and stuff like that. Workshops, all that different type of stuff. So people go there, they want to hook up with me.

Speaker B
We will do that. Black octopus. Yeah. Black Octopus Society. Society.

Speaker C
Cool. We'll put it in the show notes for sure. Black Octopus Society. Thank you, Resma. Thank you.

Speaker B
Thank you, Resma. You're fucking awesome. Appreciate you. Fucking awesome. Thank you.

Oh, that's the only time Abby's ever said that. Okay, bye bye bye.

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Our existence executive producer is Jenna Wise Berman and the show is produced by Lauren Lagrasso, Alison Schott, Deena Kleiner, and Bill Schultz. I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlisle. I walked through fire I came out the other side I chased his eyes I made sure I got what's mine and I continue to believe that I'm the one for me and because I'm mine I walk the line cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks are met a final destination we stopped asking directions some places they've never been and to be loved we need to finally find our way back home and through the joy and pain that our lives bring we can do hard things I hit rock bottom it felt like a brand new star I'm not the problem sometimes things fall. Apart.

E
And I continue to believe the best people are free and it took some time but I'm finally fine cause we're adventurous and heartbreaks are now our final destination we stopped asking directions some places they've never been and to be loved we need to be known we'll finally find our way back home and through the joy and pain that our lives spring we can do a hard day adventurers and heartbreaks are mad we might get lost but we okay with that we stopped asking directions some places they've never been and to be loved we need to be known fight our way back home and through the joy and pain that our lives bring we can do hard things yeah we can do hard things yeah we can do hard birthday.

The Embodied Path to Healing Racialized Trauma with Resmaa Menakem

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1: Introduction to Somatic Abolitionism

2: The Role of Community in Healing

3: Practical Exercises for Healing

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