I have definitely been on a reading binge recently of some extraordinary books. I recently finished Isabel Wilkerson's amazing and life-changing book Caste (https://www.amazon.com/Caste-Origins-Discontents-Isabel-Wilkerson/dp/0593230256). Now I'm deeply immersed in The Undertow (https://www.amazon.com/Undertow-Scenes-Slow-Civil-War/dp/1324006498) by Jeff Sharlet, which is also incredible and excellent. Next will be My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem. All three remarkable books are, to me, interrelated and a gift to us all. — Molly
In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.
The answer to why so many of us have difficulties is because our ancestors spent centuries here under unrelentingly brutal conditions. Generation after generation, our bodies stored trauma and intense survival energy, and passed these on to our children and grandchildren. Most of us also passed down resilience and love, of course. But, as we saw with my grandmother—and as we see with so many other human beings—resilience and love aren’t sufficient to completely heal all trauma. Often, at least some of the trauma continues.
Trauma is not a flaw or a 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 it perceives as potentially dangerous.
Trauma is also a wordless story our body tells itself about what is safe and what is a threat.
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Whenever someone freaks out suddenly or reacts to a small problem as if it were a catastrophe, it’s often a trauma response.
Years as a healer and trauma therapist have taught me that trauma isn’t destiny. The body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and joy, and where we process most of what happens to us. It is also where we do most of our healing, including our emotional and psychological healing. And it is where we experience resilience and a sense of flow.
Recent studies and discoveries increasingly point out that we heal primarily in and through the body, not just through the rational brain. We can all create more room, and more opportunities for growth, in our nervous systems. But we do this primarily through what our bodies experience and do—not through what we think or realize or cognitively figure out.
There’s a way out of this mess, and it requires each of us to begin with our own body. You and your body are important parts of the solution. You will not just read this book; you will experience it in your body. Your body—all of our bodies—are where changing the status quo must begin.
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In 2012, George Zimmerman left his home to follow and accost his neighbor, Trayvon Martin, who was walking through their gated community in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, who brought a gun to the encounter, shot and killed Martin because, as he said in his trial, he feared for his life. Zimmerman was found not guilty by a jury. In 2015, less than a mile from my home, four white men wearing ski masks appeared at a peaceful event protesting the recent killing of Jamar Clark by a white policeman. At least one of the four men, Allen Scarsella, carried a gun, which he allegedly described in a text message as “specially designed by Browning to kill brown people.” Protestors, most of whom were African American, noticed the four men in masks, surrounded them, and asked why they were there. They also demanded that the men remove their masks. Scarsella then drew his gun and shot five protestors. At his trial, Scarsella’s public defender explained that Scarsella fired the shots because he was “scared out of his mind.” These and other similar incidents raise some questions. First, under what circumstances is it legitimate to deliberately precipitate a conflict, shoot one or more people, and be considered guiltless because you were scared? Second, if “I feared for my life” or “I was scared out of my mind” becomes a legitimate defense, then can anyone who fears dark skin guiltlessly shoot any Black body that comes near? What about any Black body he or she seeks out, accosts, and shoots? Does your reflexive, lizard-brain fear of my dark body trump my right to exist? A Minnesota jury provided one answer to these questions in February of 2017: It found Scarsella guilty on all counts. He was given a fifteen-year prison sentence. A different Minnesota jury provided the opposite answer four months later: it found Jeronimo Yanez not guilty.
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Gaslighting: getting people to override their own experience and perceptions by repeating a lie over and over, and then “proving” it with still more lies, denials, and misdirection. Eventually, if the gaslighting is successful, the lies are widely accepted as truth—or even as essential facts of life, like birth, death, and gravity.
The party took a firm, clear stand against the right to vote, the validity of election results, the peaceful and orderly transfer of power, racial justice and equity, the accountability of its leaders, the very process of governance, and truth itself.
Meanwhile, to rally and organize its followers, and to recruit new ones, the Republican Party has been using techniques perfected by the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the German and American Nazi Parties and the South African apartheid government.
Many of these bills proposed limiting or eliminating mail-in ballots, drive-up voting, 24/7 voting, and/or early voting.
In another, parallel GOP initiative, beginning in the summer of 2021—in thousands of towns, cities, counties, and states—huge numbers of pro-authoritarian, pro-Trump, anti-democracy GOP supporters signed up to become election monitors, precinct officers, and poll workers.
Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, sounded an even louder alarm: “Having election deniers run elections is like having arsonists take over the fire department.
This is a great big flashing red warning sign. The officials who fulfilled their legal duty after the last election are now being replaced by people who are pledging to throw a wrench in the gears of the next election. It tells you that they are planning nothing but chaos and that they have a strategy to disrupt the certification of the next election.
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"For the first time since 1860, a major American political party doesn’t believe America is a democracy. No Republican will win a contested primary in 2022 or 2024 who will assert that Biden is a legal president. The effect of this is profound and difficult to predict. But millions of Americans believe the American experiment is ending." — Stuart Stevens
"Two, they’ve doubled down on the idea that violence is a perfectly acceptable means to take power. Three, they’ve decided that the next election will be one where democracy itself is something to attack and beat." — Umair Haque
"It is little wonder that about two-fifths of Republicans (in a poll this year) expressed an openness to political violence, under certain circumstances. People in this group are not being stigmatized. They have the effective, endorsement of a former president and likely GOP presidential nominee in 2024." — Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, September 27, 2021
Paul Gosar killed his colleague in a cartoon. Kevin McCarthy is killing democracy in real life. Matt Gaetz says he might offer Kyle Rittenhouse a job as a congressional intern as jury debates the teen’s case. The Republican effort to govern by threat. Insurrectionists are finally receiving justice. But the GOP is more unhinged than ever. Trust is a key ingredient in “functional institutions”—and Congress is fresh out of it. Man who raped four teenagers gets no jail time; judge says “Incarceration isn’t appropriate.”
After you read each quote, pause briefly. Take note of what emerges in your body.
Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous. The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies.
It’s about preparing your body and community for a civil war—and, if possible, preventing it. It’s also about leaning into our racial reckoning and beginning to create a living, embodied antiracist culture.
If millions of us do this, the shifts in our bodies can shift our culture, our country, and the trajectory of history.
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The cultural operating system of white-body supremacy influences or determines many of the decisions we make, the options we select, the choices open to us, and how we make those decisions and choices. This operating system affects all of us, regardless of the hue of our skin.
We’ve tried to teach our brains to think better about race. But white-body supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.
This means that no matter what we look like, if we were born and raised in America, white-body supremacy and our adaptations to it are in our blood. Our very bodies house the unhealed dissonance and trauma of our ancestors. This is why white-body supremacy continues to persist in America, and why so many African Americans continue to die from it.
A key factor in the perpetuation of white-body supremacy is many people’s refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance and, invariably, prolong the pain.
The deadliest manifestation of white fragility is its reflexive confusion of fear with danger and comfort with safety. When a white body feels frightened by the presence of a Black one—whether or not an actual threat exists—it may lash out at the Black body in what it senses as necessary self-protection. Often this is a fight, flee, or freeze response triggered by the activation of the ancient trauma that began as white-on-white violence in Europe centuries ago.
...Especially want to draw white Americans’ attention to this. White fragility is a lie, a dodge, a myth, and a form of denial. White Americans can create culture that confronts and dismantles white-body supremacy. Any suggestion that they are unable to rise to this challenge is a lie. White Americans are anything but helpless or fragile; they are (of course) precisely as capable as other human beings. But they need to refuse to dodge the responsibility of confronting white-body supremacy—or the responsibility of growing up.
One of the biggest, baddest, most relentless, and best-known alpha males in American history was a woman: the writer Ayn Rand. I have raised my children to be as unlike her as possible.
History matters, and an awareness of it puts our lives into a context. A disdain for history sets us adrift, and makes us victims of ignorance and denial. History lives in and through our bodies right now, and in every moment.
We will not end white-body supremacy- or any other form of human evil- by trying to tear it to peaces. Instead, we can offer people better ways to belong, and better things to belong to. Instead of belonging to a race, we can belong to a culture. Each of us can also build our own capacity for genuine belonging.
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Find a quiet, comfortable place where you can be alone and undistracted for at least fifteen minutes. Now consider these questions. 1. When did your ancestors settle in America? Did they come here voluntarily, or were they refugees, servants, or enslaved people? Were they fleeing brutality, oppression, plague, war, or poverty? Did they come here in search of a better life? How old were they? How healthy were they? Was there a community or a group of relatives here to welcome and assist them? Did your ancestors speak English when they got here? What other language or languages did they speak? What possessions and skills did they bring with them?
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Ideally, America will grow up and out of white-body supremacy; Americans will begin healing their long-held trauma around race; and whiteness will begin to evolve from race to culture, and then to community. The other possibility is that white-body supremacy will continue to be reinforced as the dominant structured form of energy in American culture, in much the same way Aryan supremacy dominated German culture in the 1930s and early 1940s.
All of this suggests that one of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression. In contrast, when we don’t address our trauma, we may pass it on to future generations, along with some of our fear, constriction, and dirty pain.
If you compromise at the expense of bodies of culture, particularly Black and Indigenous bodies, as you have so many times before, you will accelerate our country’s destruction.
Healing is a reminder of what we already are and what we have always been part of.
To repel this assault, we must organize, based on our personal and communal interests, vote in every general election and every primary, and hold those in elected office accountable.
Our Virtues are wrapped inside of our limitations. It is only when we are in close proximity to others that we begin to intimately explore the boundaries of our virtues by slamming into our limitations.
Find and stand with other bodies who care about liberation, justice, and an emancipated democracy.
At its best, activism is a form of healing. It is about what we do and how we show up in the world. It is about learning and expressing regard, compassion and love.
Change culture and you change lives. You can also change the course of history.
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