Author Resmaa Menakem introduces the reader to his titular relative by way of childhood recollections of his grandmother’s stories about picking cotton in the sharecropper fields of Dixie. These memories of hard labor trace back to the same age that the author was when his grandmother was telling him the stories while they watched afternoon television together. The title of the tome traces back to these memories in which he recalls his grandmother’s hands significantly being physically different from his own by virtue of being “stout, with broad fingers and thick pads below each thumb.”
This difference in the hands of a black child forced to work long hours in the hot sun from the hands of a child endowed with changes in a society that allowed him to sit indoors and watch television is the guiding force behind the central premise of the book: white-body supremacy. This term refers to all the various aspects of trauma upon the body of those who have been systemically oppressed by a ruling white majority. It references everything from the actual physical trauma made palpable, such as physical appearance of the grandmother’s hands, to the psychological anxieties that are both manifested physically, as well as those which remain hidden within the minds of those who have suffered. From this premise, the book will split into three distinct and separate parts.
Part I: Unarmed and Dismembered
Unarmed and dismembered is essentially a historical overview of the history of oppression suffered by African Americans over the course of not just American history, but European history as well. This overview focuses not exclusively upon the Confederacy, but also pushes backward in time to implicate Puritan morality as one of the chief engines driving acceptance of slavery among so-called Christians in both the South and the North. This historical overview also seeks to explain the prevalence of systemic racism in American law enforcement as an outgrowth of the devising of an ideological approach to slavery which saw Black people as essentially existing for one single purpose: To serve white society. In order to maintain this ideological acceptance of purely racist thinking, protection was mandated, and the policing of America was quite formally organized around the “necessity” to protect white society from violent uprising by those the Puritan's god had clearly intended to be nothing more than servants.
Part II: Remembering Ourselves
Part II focuses on the vagus nerve, which the author reinvents as the “soul nerve.” The thematic point of the soul nerve is that it is seen as the connection to the brainstem, otherwise known as the “lizard brain” which is the oldest and most primitive part of consciousness that seems to survive. This middle section is essentially a series of activities through which one can learn to control their higher critical thinking skills by manipulating basic life-centered functions like breathing, body awareness, meditation, prayer, diet, memory control, sleeping, etc. The basic premise here is that if one can learn to master those aspects of the body one genuinely needs simply to survive—to literally make it to the next day—then with that mastery eventually comes an ability to confront the trauma of the past and master it rather than letting it master you.
Part III: Mending our Collective Body
As the title of the final section of the book indicates, Part III focuses on the healing process once the trauma of the past is finally able to be recognized, admitted, and confronted. Just as Part II was primarily comprised of a series of steps involving activities to control the body, Part III is dominated by advice on how to take things from the individual outward into the collective of society. Advice is offered on various ways to engage in activism that helps to generate greater healing processes that teach white society about oppressive history and the white-body supremacy of racism. There is also advisory information explaining how true change within a collective society only comes about through cultural change that fixes outdated modes of thinking by forcing recognition of changes taking place at the bottom and the middle of society by the power structures at the top. Needless to say, a central element in this section of the book focuses on the absolute requirement of reinventing the entire law enforcement culture in the US, which, remember, was constructed specifically upon an ideological approach to normalizing racist thinking as part of the lizard brain survival instinct.
While some may automatically leap to the conclusion that this aspect of the book is nothing but calls for defunding and disarming police officers, keep in mind that the centerpiece of this activist approach is one that actually puts the onus on the civilian community at large with advice for becoming more actively engaged in such simple neighborly tasks, such as picking up an overturned trash can that is not your own, or following up on a request for simple street improvements that have gone unaddressed in a timely manner since first bringing the problem to the attention of municipal authorities.
The final chapter of this section and the book as a whole is titled “The Reckoning” and it is nothing more than an urgent call to action for white society to simply recognize and admit that racism does exist, admit that it remains a systemic problem, and agree to stop willfully ignoring the situation.
