In Resma Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands, we learn that racialized trauma lives in the bodies of White Americans. Not Europeans. Not Asians. Not Russians. White Americans. There’s evidence that the DNA of Black African Americans and, in a different way, of White Americans, has changed as the result of enslaving Black Africans within the past four centuries. If you’re a White American, the trauma has been passed down from your White ancestors and will be passed along to your White progeny.
Reading this introduction, I paused. For a long while. Did I want to go this deep in recognizing and ridding myself of my own racism? Not really. I’m exhausted by introspection on racism, which I’ve been drawn to and stuck on since the murder of George Floyd. But my book group is engaged in a six-week study and I like them.
Its unclear whether certain strings of DNA draws generational traumatized people to law enforcement. Or, do we all have the same traits, and then police work brings out reptilian responses managing Black bodies? In White neighborhoods, policemen jump to a heightened state of control and figure out a way (legal or not) to remove Black people, well, really young Black men, especially when they’re sighted walking down the street hooded and slouched.
When the police go to court to defend these arrests, they say, “residents were afraid for their lives.” If they’ve roughed up, maimed or killed a Black defendant during the arrest or in the jail cell, the judge and jury are persuaded it was self defense with the simple words, “I was afraid for my life.”
This chapter in the book, “White-body Supremacy and the Police Body” seemingly had nothing to do with me. As an old White woman, I have little interaction with the police. But during the meditation exercises at the end of the chapter a memory busted out of my subconscious.
In the mid-1990s I answered a knock at the door to two White policemen. They questioned me about an altercation I had that morning with my car and a new BMW. Both of us were squeezing into one lane of an off-ramp and I banged into her car. She rolled down her window, screaming obscenities, yelling at me to pull over. I did not. I sped up, drove straight home, closed all the curtains and dove into a pint of ice cream. The police plainly stated my actions could be a hit and run. My lizard brain impulsively launched into a devious defense.
“Did you see her?”
“Well, you must see how afraid I was? She scared me to death. I was afraid to pull over. What if she had a gun?”
She was Black. The policemen backed up, put away their notebooks.
“We understand. Don’t worry. She doesn’t have your address. We won’t pursue it.”
The book begins with a quote from Charles M. Blow: “One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding is sufficient.”
MLK Jr teaches this. So does Jesus. And now, reminded of that ugly part of me, I have to learn the practice of empathy and understanding.
Someday.
Regan Burke 