The One You Feed - Resmaa Menakem on Racialized Trauma

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Resmaa Menakem is a therapist with decades of experience who is currently in private practice in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He specializes in trauma, body-centered psychotherapy, and violence prevention. He has also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil as an expert in conflict and violence. In this episode, Eric and Resmaa discuss his book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Resmaa Menakem and I Discuss Racialized Trauma and …His book, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and BodiesHis definition of Trauma: Something that happened too much, too soon, too fast, or too long without something that was reparativeA sense of stuckness as an indicator of TraumaRacialized TraumaLooking at White and Black Body TraumaWhite body supremacyBeing nice vs. being anti-racistTuning into our bodies to heal racial TraumaCollective healingThe power of not jumping to intellectualizing the wounds that need healingResmaa Menakem Links:Resmaa’s WebsiteTwitterInstagramFacebookVionic Shoes offers comfortable, stylish, and supportive footwear made with their signature Three-Zone comfort with Ultimate Arch Support technology. They offer a 30-day wear test so if you’re not completely satisfied, you can return or exchange after 30 days. Visit vionicshoes.com and enter promo code: WOLF to get free shipping.Skillshare is an online learning community that helps you get better on your creative journey. They have thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Sign up via www.skillshare.com/feed and you’ll get a FREE one-month trial of Skillshare premium membership.If you enjoyed this conversation with Resmaa Menakem on Racialized Trauma, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Deep Transformation with Spring WashamHealing Trauma with Judith BlackstoneSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

before you come out of the womb, before you even are able to understand the word, you are moving into a soup that has the idea that the white body hierarchically is the standard of humanist. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Resmaa Menakem, a therapist with decades of experience and currently in private practice in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He specializes in trauma, body-centered psychotherapy, and violence prevention. He has also appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil as an expert on conflict and violence. Today, Resmaa and Eric discuss his book, My Grandmother's Hands, Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Hi Resmo, welcome to the show. Eric, I really appreciate being on the show with you. It's such a pleasure to have you on. Your book is called My Grandmother's Hands,

Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. And we will get to the book in just a second. But before we do, let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops, and she thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandfather. She says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. So when I think about that parable, I listen to it. I don't think about it as two wolves that are opposed to one another. I don't think about it as competition or versus. I have a tendency to think about it as energy and how the quote-unquote constrictive energy, the quote-unquote bad wolf, is an energy that we must learn to metabolize, an energy that actually brings us to a point to where we have to question who we are, what it is that we're doing, and how do we get to the next place. And so often we couch these things as bad or good without understanding that sometimes

what's being asked of us is to metabolize that energy, be curious about it, and work with it in a way that allows us to use that energy as fuel for our freedom as opposed to fuel that incinerates us or fuel that burns us to use that energy as fuel for our freedom as opposed to fuel that incinerates us or fuel that burns us. I think about it more as like a cooking, that constrictive or blocking energy can actually help us develop more discernment around things if we're able to kind of sit with it, if we have conditioned and tempered ourselves in a way that can actually use that energy as opposed to that energy being used upon us. So that's the way I kind of think about those wolves. I think that's a great take. I've thought a lot about what's the best way for us to kind of find

our way into your work, because it's really profound and there's a lot to cover in a pretty short time frame. But I think we probably should just start with trauma, right? This idea of racialized trauma. So when you're talking about racialized trauma, what do you mean by that? So at first, when I'm talking about just trauma in general, one of the things that I think about with regard to trauma is that it's anything that happens to you that happens too much, too fast, too soon or too long, along with something that was not reparative. Right. And so it's not that bad things happen to people that is necessarily trauma. It is that bad things happen to people. And then there was no reprieve. There was nothing that came in and

was reparative. There was nothing that gave the person a sense that something was going to help them through it, out of it, or around it. And so for me, trauma is this kind of sense of overwhelm and stuckness. I can't quite get it going. I'm trying and I'm trying to do things, but I have these qualities of stuckness either in vibes or quality of stuckness in my cognition, quality of stuckness in my meaning making, right? There's this sense of stuckness. And so for me, when I'm talking about trauma, that's what I'm talking about. Now, when I'm talking about racialized trauma, that is a component that's a part of it. But when I talk about racialized trauma, I start with a organizing rubric. And my organizing rubric is that the white body has deemed and deems itself the supreme standard by

which all bodies, humanity, shall be measured structurally and philosophically. And to any body that is not born in a white body, born into that type of structure, it is traumatizing, right? To live and work and love in a structure that is predicated on the white body being the standard of humanness is off top traumatizing to any body that is not housed in a white body. And so trauma is not just something bad that has happened to people. Trauma is something that shows up that is structural, that is not episodic. It is built into the structural makeup of things. So that's how I move with racialized trauma. One of the things that you talk about in the book that really got my attention right away was you talk very clearly about, sure, we can talk about the trauma of black people. Anybody who's paying attention

can see why, right? But you say that white people also have trauma that they both bring to the situation and in certain cases have been traumatized because of the racial culture that we have. So share a little bit about both those aspects, the trauma that the whites bring and the ways in which a racial structure has traumatized whites. Yeah, think about this, man. Think about that most of the people that are listening, most of the people that are classified as white folks or in white bodies that are listening to us right now, most of them are descended from white people that were fleeing something. Think about that for a second. That they were fleeing some type of persecution, some type of death, some type of hell, right? And what I tell people is that where I started is after the fall of the Roman Empire,

for a thousand years, it's what we call the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages, right? For a thousand years, what you had were elite white bodies putting a boot to less powerful white bodies, either burning them, either stealing their land, brutalizing them, conquering them, all of that different type of stuff. And that level of brutality with regard to elite white bodies or powerful white bodies doing that to less elite and less powerful white bodies, that lasted for a thousand years, just that level of brutality. Then that same body started to begin to move out around the world. That idea of brutality, when we are brutalized, right, we don't just pick up and learn the victim pieces. We also learn the perpetrator pieces,

right? When we are brutalized and things are not resolved, we pick up on both the victim template and the perpetrator template. So when those bodies started to come into contact with bodies like mine or bodies that were brown or bodies that were black or indigenous, those pieces didn't go anywhere, even though some of those people, the white people, the white bodies were fleeing something. So now you fast forward to like the 1500s or the 1600s, and then those bodies come to America or come to this land, right? Where there's Cree and there's Dakota and there's Lakota and all these different types of people. And over time, what begins to happen is that those same people start to begin to enact on those bodies the same way things were enacted on their bodies, right? Now, fast forward a little

bit. Then once you hit the Bacon Rebellion, the Bacon Rebellion is a seminal, when I talk about this idea of racialization, the Bacon Rebellion is a seminal point. Bacon was an aristocrat from England. He came over to America, to the colonies, and he wanted land. But by the time he got here, all of the like waterfront land, all of that type of stuff had been taken already. So he wanted land. But by the time he got here, all of the like waterfront land, all of that type of stuff had been taken already. So he was mad. They kind of like said, you know, you got here too late, right? And so he developed a rebellion of enslaved Africans and poor whites and almost took over Virginia, right? The only thing that stopped him from succeeding was that he caught dysentery and died and that disrupted. But he was about to take over Virginia because the British troops

wouldn't have been able to get here in time because remember, it was still a colony. So when that happened, about 10 to 20 years after that is the first time you see in Virginia law, the words white persons. It's the first time you see it. Not indentured servant, not landowner, not merchant, but white persons. It was to create a cleave between those enslaved Africans and the poor whites, right? Because the rich elite white bodies knew that if they didn't do something, they would be overrun, right? Because it wasn't enough of them to stop it from happening. And so I believe that the first time you see in Virginia law that no enslaved or indigenous savage shall raise a hand to any white persons. shall be judged against. And I believe at that time, what happened was, is that the reason why poor white bodies took that on was because they understood what the brutality was like at the

hands of elite white bodies. And so when elite white bodies said, you want to be white? Poor white bodies said, you damn right. You mean there's a possibility that my children may not have? Yes. Let me get some of that. So all I have to do is be over them and go along with this idea that they are not human because they are not white. Yeah, I'll do that. In order to do that, you have to give a part of your humanity. In order to take that bargain, you have to give a part of that humanity. That giving up part of their humanity, white bodies today do not even have any sense of

how to lean into what was given up, what is causing the pain. And what white bodies are doing now and powerful white bodies are doing now is that they continue to feed, talk about feeding the wolf. They continue to feed poor white bodies that the problem in their lives is me, that the problem in their lives are brown people, that the problems in their lives are indigenous people or Asian people. And January 6th was an example of what that feeding looks like. And so this is why I say white bodies have to begin to develop culture, living embodied anti-racist culture, not just strategy, not just declaring that they're allies, but literally developing a culture that can actually hold that level of charge. There are so many questions there that I would love to dive into. I have

so many, but I'm going to try and keep this from getting too sidetracked. There's a few phrases you use there that I think are really important. And you use the phrase white body supremacy versus white supremacy. And I'm going to summarize a lot of things here in a pretty short time, and you tell me what I get wrong. in healing racism in this country is because these things are happening at a bodily somatic level. And so I, as a white person might say, you know, I think Resmaa is a good guy. I don't think there's any reason for me to be afraid of people like him. I'm on the team, right? All the, all the good stuff. But that at a deeper, more somatic, I don't know if you'd use this word, unconscious level, that my body will respond. You give a great example that I think is really good, where you talk about the murder of Tamir Rice and the white police officer. And you describe and the white police officer. And you describe that regardless of what we think about justice,

what we think about what should have happened there, you describe, let's look at this through the wordless, thoughtless viewpoint of the body, of Timothy Lehman's body. And you say, a white body with centuries of traumatic dissonance in its DNA encountered a black body. The white body experienced reflexive fear. In a fraction of a second, this fear activated the white body's unmetabolized historical trauma, which in turn reflexively triggered a flight, flee, or freeze response. The white body destroyed the black body, a body that it feared was dangerous. And the reason that I like that example is I think it sums up what 50 or 60 pages does very clearly. And it shows why some of these things keep happening, because they're happening at a somatic or pre-conscious level. They're in the body. And

you make the point, and you go through a lot of science on this, how this is happening before it ever gets to the cognitive part of my brain that can say, wait, wait, I don't believe that. I don't believe that black people are dangerous. That there's something happening much more deeply. Again, I'm using the term pre-conscious. By pre-conscious, I just mean it's at a level that's lower than my conscious brain realizes is happening. Exactly. So one of the things, especially when I'm talking to white audiences, that I really want to get across very clearly is that your niceness and your kindness is appreciated. I don't want you to spit in my food. I don't want you to call me the N-word, right? And it's nice that if you don't

do that. But that niceness is not the same thing as a living embodied anti-racist culture and practices, right? It's not the same thing. And I think sometimes what happens is that white bodies Have a tendency to believe that their niceness or their kindness is the same thing As uprooting a system that is brutal on other people simply because they are in other bodies The illustration that I was trying to make in the Tamir Rice piece was that this is one of the reasons why I don't say the words white privilege anymore because Privilege is something you can use or not use. What I say is white advantage, right? That is operationally what white people have in a system

that's predicated on them being the standard of humanness. There is an advantage off top before you come out of the womb, before you even are able to understand the word, you are moving into a soup that has the idea that the white body hierarchically is the standard of humanist. The race question, when Europeans started to begin to talk about the term race, they used the term at the beginning to determine species, right? A race of bird, a race of cat, a race of dog, right? That's the way that they talked about it. And that same idea of race was then applied to human beings. And they began to talk about the idea of how other human beings are actually a race. But the underlying rubric of that is the idea of speciesness, right?

Like when we talk about race, we have a tendency on one level to talk about race as, oh, you know, that's culture or that's how people dress or that's how people talk and things like that. But the rubric or the foundation of race was really about speciesness, right? That's the piece that we miss when we're talking about race. As Eric and Resmaa are sitting here talking, there is a piece around, is Resmaa in the philosophy, in the structure, in the institution, is Resmaa really human? Now, we don't want to say that in Nice Company, right? We don't want to talk about that piece. But that is the soup or the water that we all are born into, that if it is unexamined, if we don't take the time to interrogate it,

examined, if we don't take the time to interrogate it, if we don't take the time to actually look at what it is, we start using and saying things that really, in terms of black people, really has no use or efficacy. Like just saying we live in a colorblind society or we should be colorblind or I don't see color or any of those types of things, saying those types of things is not going to get us out of the mess that we're in. We have to begin to figure out how do we get in our bodies and begin to actually go through the process of examining, of interrogating what actually is showing up and doing it body to body. One of the things I keep getting asked is, well, what should white people do? One of the things I keep getting asked is, well, what should white people do? And one of the things I've been saying is that if white people don't begin to get together with each other's bodies and start to begin to work these pieces, it's going to be very, very difficult to unhook these pieces if we just are talking about cognition. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for

the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love.

All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden and together on the really no really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say often that the most important thing that a white person can do to unravel white body supremacy is to notice what our body does in the presence of an unfamiliar black body,

and then learn to settle our body in the midst of that presence. And I want to kind of spend the rest of our time there. Because I think if you say that's the most important thing that we as white people can do, I want to dive into that. But I have a question for you before that, and one that I'm slightly uncomfortable in asking, but I'm just curious your thought on it. Because I really thought about this question. You have so many great practices in the book, but one of them is to take this piece of string and draw a circle around ourselves and imagine a comfortable presence at the edge of that circle, a threatening presence, you know, a white body, a black body. And I've

noticed this about myself. And I don't know if I'm noticing something that's correct. I don't know if I am deceiving myself. I don't know if this is true and I don't know what might be causing it to be true. I am more frightened bodily by lots of white people than I am by black people. We drive back and forth from Columbus to Atlanta. So we go through the deep South. drive back and forth from Columbus to Atlanta. So we go through the deep South. And when we stop at certain places, my body is more anxious there than I would be in downtown Baltimore. Do you think I'm misperceiving? Is there a cognitive thing there? Or is just I've had some different experiences? I'm just curious, because I noticed it was different than what

you described most white people would have happen. Yeah, yeah. Well, here's what I would say. I would say that you're having the experience, because of some of the things probably that you've been through, you're having an experience that I wish more white folks would have in terms of consciousness. I think white people assume that they are not uncomfortable around other white people, and they actually are, right? I think that that thing that I talked about earlier about the Middle Ages has taught white people to be uncomfortable around each other. But what ends up happening is that the black body and indigenous body

has been used as the conduit for blowing all of that stuff through rather than white bodies actually slowing down long enough to be with other white bodies and say, what is this stuff that's coming up between us? What are these pieces that are showing up between us? Where are these terror responses coming from, right? Where are these horror responses coming from? And not just doing it individually. What you just said, I think, is an individual experience that you're having. That is not a communal experience. And I think that's where white people get this stuff kind of mixed up, is that they think the way to work with this stuff is individually, right? As if what happened to white bodies at the hands of other white bodies only happened individually. It did

not happen individually. It happened communally. It happened with other people, right? And so, white bodies have not even begun to lean into those pieces that when I do my work, I split bodies up. Like if I'm just lecturing, if I'm just lecturing, I have mixed audiences. But when I'm doing this type of work, I do not have white bodies of culture in the same room because the stuff that is embedded is too fast to catch. Right. And the wounding is too fast to catch. So what I do is, is I have people that I've trained, white bodies that I've trained that work with those white bodies. And every time they go into a room by themselves, they start asking, when are we going to get back with the bodies of culture so we can begin to talk? When are we going to get back with the bodies of culture so we can begin to talk?

The white body has been conditioned to see the black body as deferential, to see the black and indigenous body as where they do that dirt. So when you make white bodies stay in a room together and deal with white body supremacy and racialization, a curious thing begins to happen. They start to begin to turn on each other when the race question comes up. They start to begin to show all of those pieces that have never got dealt with. And part of the cooking and part of the work that I do with white bodies or with the people that are trained is to get white bodies to hold that piece, hold that charge long enough to see what else can emerge up, to see what else can come through. But if you have bodies of culture in the room with them, more often than not, those pieces get blown through the bodies of culture as opposed to holding it and see what culture that can be

transformed and developed. So I wouldn't say that you're weird. I would just say that because of some of the shit you done been through in your life, you have been able to examine some of these pieces in a way that says, I know the way that I've been acculturated and I have a different sense of it. But I believe that's because of maybe some of the things personally that you've gone through. That, however, is different than what I'm talking about. I'm talking about is good that you're able to kind of sense in and see the difference in that I think that that's become clearer to me, is that not only if I, as a white person, am around black people, might I, to use your term, spread that dirty pain back through you, but I also will defer to you as the expert on this.

Because I go, well well i'm not black and so i will take a role of being more passive right and saying well what's resmaa thinking that's right that's right tell me what's the right thing to do resmaa right versus what you're saying is when we as white people come together and are forced into this, we don't have anywhere to turn. But either to each other or on each other, right? And see, this is not to say, you know, you can't develop a relationship with me and we develop a relationship and you call me and say, Resmaa, here's a piece, right, that's coming up for me, or here's a piece that's coming up. And if I have time, I can, you know, say, well, here's what I'm thinking about this, right? That presupposes that there's a relationship that has been cultivated, not just

I'm your damn black ass guru that has all of the answers and I came off a mountain and now I'm right. That those pieces around always deferring to black, brown, and indigenous bodies as to how to get through the race thing, let you know that the white collective has really no racial acuity or agility collectively. They don't. That's why it's so easy to kind of throw up your hands and say, okay, let's get a black person to come in here and tell us how to do this thing. Here's the trick though. The trick is that even if black people do or indigenous people do come in and tell you haven't conditioned yourself to be able to hold and withstand what I'm saying and what the charge is. There has been been no reps, no conditioning. And when you defer and when white bodies defer, what they undercut is their ability to know when to disrupt and when to yield, know when to lean into things and when to pull back on things.

If you don't develop it body to body, you never are able to get a sense of nuance, a sense of constriction or discernment, a sense of resource. That doesn't get developed when all you do is pay for a DEI training and have me come in and tell you things about Martin Luther King or some shit like that. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to, but it's a setup so white folks can dodge and check off. Oh, I did that. I did that. I know that, right? Not, ooh, I have committed myself to these other white bodies in a way that will allow me to transform and grow and have some pain attached with it. I realize going up against a system that is predicated on the white body being the supreme standard of humanity,

that if I go against that, I will lose something. I will lose people. I will lose access. I will lose money. I may lose where I live. I may lose people that I love. And because I don't want to pass this down to my children or the children that I love, I must engage in this anyway. That is the commitment that must be made to uprooting this stuff, not just being nice or self-declaring yourself an ally. Yeah. And in the book, you talk about something that was a sort of side point that I thought, well, maybe if we have time, we'd bring it up, which is that healing is not binary. Either we're broken or we're healed from that brokenness, but that's not how healing operates.

And it's almost not how human growth works. I think that's a true statement. I agree with it a hundred percent. I want to reflect it back to you though, a little bit in some of your prescription for what white people have to do to make any difference. And what I mean by that is, you talk about, okay, white people, if you're gonna make any difference, you got to get together for five to seven years, commit deeply to this work, and not turn away from it, not turn away from it when your schedule gets busy, not turn away from it when you got to go to yoga class, not turn away from it. Not turn away from it when your schedule gets busy. Not turn away from it when you got to go to yoga class.

Not turn away from it when your kid's got a baseball game, right? And I hear that. And while I go, well, okay, I'm not an expert. I'm going to believe people who tell me what's the right thing to do. I also look at that as a really high bar. And while I recognize that I have white advantage to even say, I know. Just pause in that. Just pause in what you just said.

Just for a minute, let's just pause on that. I recognize that I have white advantage, but I think, just don't even go any further. Let's just pause on that. I have white advantage, but, let's just pause in it. I have white advantage, but, and notice in that but, what wants to move, what wants to, yeah, what wants to lock down, what wants to push away? What would it be like to not complete this question, this thing that I'm getting ready to say? What would it be like just to hold that myself and have somebody hold, have another white body hold it with me, but not

complete it? It makes me feel sad. See, and see, that's the piece I'm talking about. That was there anyway. And if you hadn't paused, you wouldn't have got at that. That's the embodied pieces that I'm talking about. When we go to only intellect or cognition and we don't begin to pause on it, all of that stuff that's already in there swirling around gets kind of storied over or talked over. But that's why I needed you to pause with it for a minute. Because when I was watching you, I was hearing some other things that was popping up. That's why I wanted you to pause with it. Those pieces and those pieces among white bodies more often than not get just washed over among other white bodies. That's why the pause is so important. So let me ask that question from a more emotional embodied perspective. Boom. I'm afraid I can't live up to that standard. Stay with that and come back to it again and get

another rep in. Come back to it again and scribe and write on it. Come back to it again and share it with your partner. Come back to it again and share it and write on it. Come back to it again and share it with your partner. Come back to it again and share it with your brother. And then scribe on it some more. And then notice what shows up in terms of rocking, in terms of constriction in the throat. And scribe on it some more. Open up my grandmother's hands and read that and be like, I don't believe this shit. And throw it in the corner and then go back and grab it again and read it some more and scribe.

That's the process. And then in the process of that, maybe something else and something new can emerge up out of it, as opposed to saying, I'm afraid I can't live up to that. And therefore, because I'm white, nobody will ever call me to the carpet on it. So f*** it. And what I'm telling you is, is that that is the work that white bodies have to do, that they've been trying to go around in an embodied sense. You can't go around it anymore. Or you can, and you won't suffer necessarily any reprisal, but in your heart of hearts, you will know you have not gone through what you needed to go through. And you're passing this down to your children's children. I don't get to opt out. That heat that you were experiencing that you said, I'm not sure I can live up to that.

I don't get to opt out of that. I can't. There's no way I can opt out of that. And it's nice that you get to opt out of it. But if we're about trying to make sure that white body supremacy gets uprooted and doesn't exist, you can't. This is why I say this is a life commitment. You can't do that. And this is why you have to do this in community because when your own individual resources are tapped and you're like, man, I don't know if I can keep doing this. You now have built over the last three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 years other people that say you don't get to do that. Other white bodies that say you're going to just leave. We've been raising babies together in terms of anti-racism, in terms of an anti-racist culture.

We've been naming each other. We've been burying each other. And now you think you're going to leave? And see, that's what I talk about, cultural cultivation. Now you think you're going to leave? And see, that's what I talk about, cultural cultivation. If you don't have that, when you get your own individual resources tapped, you don't have communal resources to tap into. That's why the individual stuff is not adequate. One of the things we say at the One You Feed a Lot is that there's no shortcut to lasting happiness, right?

We've got to do the work to improve our lives. But this can be really challenging to do without some support. Our lives are busy. There's a lot of things clawing at our attention. And we might have ways of working with our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are not very good for our well-being. So if you'd like help working on any or all of those things, I've got a couple of spots that have just opened up in my one-on-one coaching practice. You can book a free 30-minute call to talk with me, no pressure, and we get to know each other at oneufeed.net slash coach. I'm noticing a thought of like, well, this is the middle of a podcast interview. Do I need to

do something with this? But I'm noticing that anything I want to say feels inadequate in this moment. You know, your point about opting in and opting out is so powerful. And I know that I opt in and out. Let me say something real quick. So as I'm looking at your face and watching your chest not really move, holding your breath and all of that different stuff. So one of the things that's coming to me is this idea of this level of vulnerability is what is needed in the white community. So when this type of stuff shows up, you get held by a community that you're cultivating, that has embodied anti-racist ethos. So when you go through it and other white bodies see you go

through it, when they start to go through it, they experience being held communally. So it is not that you need to come up with an answer. It is that you need to lean into this so you can begin to cultivate this with other bodies so that something new can actually emerge as you guys are doing that together. You said over-intellectualized. When I'm working with white bodies, one of the things that always pops up is this idea of intellectual capital. If I can think my way through this, if I can kind of think about how to get to this particular piece, then I should be all right without understanding that in terms of race and racism and white body

supremacy, it is not necessarily the cognition that's the most important. It is how do you be with each other? How do you be in this moment, in this time with the vulnerability, with the rage, with the urges to pack it in and lay down, and even at times packing it in and laying down and then noticing a week from there, two weeks from there, two months from there, that something is stirring you to get back into the game. And I get my reps in and go. So that place that I'm noticing as I'm interacting with you is this piece around vulnerability is a very important piece to not dissipate. It's an important piece to share. It's an important piece to write on and scribe on. It's an important piece

to explore, to give some curiosity to, right? Because I would venture to say that what was showing up in you right now is happening personally in your body. But I would venture to say there are a lot of people that are listening to me and you talk right now that they recognize that peace. They've been to that place a thousand times and they've opted out and it's created a sense of moral injury in them, right? Because they know it and then begin to think about, okay, how do I have somebody hold this with me? Because I can't continue to try and deal with this communal weight and this communal horror and terror. I can't figure out the key to unlock it individually because it has been communal terror and horror that has happened.

So let me begin to find other white bodies that I can do that with. That's the piece. That's why I say it's not binary. It's not, okay, I opted out. Okay, yeah, you did. Did you get your ass back up and opt back in? Did you go and get your community again? If you didn't, then you're right. You're going to continue to deal with the kind of, as you say, the wolf that is the one that wants to eat you and barking at your door. You're going to have to continue to deal with that one because you're not cultivating anything else. Yep. And I think what you're saying about community is so important, right? Because the work that I do in addition to doing this podcast is around helping people change their behaviors. And we know that to make any sort of behavior change, you can try and go it on your own, but it's a hard way to go and you're probably

not going to succeed. But with community and support and help, you've given yourself a much better chance. And also, you know, what you said there about when I was saying, I don't think I can live up to this, right? It was inhabiting a binary space and the binary space was either I fully live up to it or I don't at all. And we know that sometimes I'm going to do better than other times. You know, when I talk to people about changing their behavior, sometimes you're going to do better than other times, knowing that you're not going to be perfect, knowing that going in allows you every time you get off track, go, oh yeah, of course. I think in the process, when I talk about it as an embodied sense, I think the process,

we think that it's a process of people getting better. But I also think that when you are getting your reps in, when you are confronting these pieces, when you- Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart Series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I

think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're doing this stuff with other community people. The other thing that's being developed is a communal glue, a communal alignment. And many times when people go it alone, they are never

able to develop kind of those pieces around picking up on nuance, picking up on connection, picking up on how do I sense into fields? How do I sense into it in a way that will bring about discernment as well as resource? When we talk about this parable of the good wolf and the bad wolf, right? There's this one white spoken word artist who talked about that white bodies are so busy looking for the shark that they forget that they're soaking in the water of white body supremacy, right? That you're looking for the white supremacy shark, but you don't realize that you're actually soaking in the water of it, right? And one of those things is like even the image that you have on and the one you feed, the black one is the bad one and the white one is the

quote unquote good one, like the wolves, right? Those pieces are so much a part of it. Just like a second, I looked up at it and I was like, wow, okay, that's interesting how this stuff is already in the water. And then we just, unexamined, we just move with it. And so I think my whole thing around white bodies slowing down long enough and not slowing down to do yoga, not slowing down to cook sourdough bread or eat kale or whatever the hell is going on, not slowing down to do that, but actually slowing down to figure out how do we make a living embodied anti-racist culture come up from the white community, which does not exist. Yeah. And that wolf logo, as we're looking at it, it actually started out as a black

and white image. It's now blue. The wolves are shades of blue. Okay. All right. Okay. They're shades of blue, but it started as a black and white image and it took me years. Well, people pointed it out to me and I went, it's wolves. But then I eventually hit a point where I went, you know, if this is making anybody feel uncomfortable, it doesn't matter what my intent. I know what my intention is. You know, my intention is like the Tao symbol, black and white. But I was like, but to your point, so we've gone to blue. But even as you pointed out, there is still, there's a shade into it. Yeah.

I want to say this to you. You've been very gracious to have me on. And so don't want to leave without saying this, that when it comes to white body supremacy, intentionality is really not the most important thing, right? Even for me as a heterosexual black male, right? There are pieces where black women can say something to me and I'll be like, ah, you know, I'm just, you know, it's just dude stuff. You know, I'm not really meaning that. And then what I've learned how to do now is that when I first get ready to do those pieces, something in my throat catches now, right? And I'm able to now drop down into it a little bit more rather than the kind of reflexive swat away. Right. And so my intention on things I've learned is really shaped by some of the things that I have experienced, some of the things that have been passed down to me.

And I need to challenge those pieces when they show up. It may be uncomfortable. It may not be necessarily advantageous for me to do it at that time. But when I look at, and this happened at a talk I was given where a young black woman came up to me and she said something to me. And my first move was to kind of swat it away. And then I said, I hear you. I said, I hear you. I said, I will promise you this, that I will take some time and pause with this and scribe on it.

I can't tell you that I will agree with you when I come out on the other end. But what I will say is I will absolutely give this the attention that it deserves. And I did. And when I got to a place and I checked in with elders and I checked in with people and I got to a place where I said she was 100% right and I need to do better. I love what you said there because I think that it was the I'm willing to go investigate this more deeply for myself. I may not arrive where you arrive because we're not going to all agree and see things the same way. But there was an inherent respect, I think. And for me, at least, I think there's been a lot of lessons as I've been on what I hope is an anti-racist journey. You know, and one of them was that very thing. My intention is to at least deeply consider the impact, how things are landing, you know, what's the impact. You know, what's the impact?

And deeply consider and pause and do the work. And for me, it really is an embodied work. Because I could very easily just change things and go, okay, I'll just, you know, I won't have a logo. I'll have, you know, right? I can do all of that, right? But that is not the investigation that needs to happen for me. People give us an opportunity to investigate, to work with, as I say, to interrogate, to examine these pieces. And we get those, especially in terms of a racialized context, we get those opportunities all the time. And many times, and I said this earlier, many times white folks have the luxury and the advantage of not

having to do that deep dive consistently. Yep. Yep. Well, Resmaa, thank you so much for your work, for agreeing to talk with us, for being willing to meet me and push me. I appreciate that. Hopefully this won't be the last time and I appreciate you having me on. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any

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