Resmaa Menakem on Racialized Trauma

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. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Resuma Menicum, 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, Resuma and Eric discuss his book My Grandmother's Hands, Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Hi, Resuma,

welcome to the show. Eric. I really appreciate being on a 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 and just a set it, 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 listened 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 of 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 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 feel for our freedom, as opposed to feel that incinerates us, a 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 condition and temperate 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 happened to people that is necessarily trauma. It is that bad things happened 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 throw it out of it or around it. And so for me, trauma is this kind of sense of overwhelmed 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 an 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 any 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's paying attention and 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, I 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 saying that they were fleeing some type of persecution, some type of death, some type of hell. Right. And what I tell people that where I started is after the fall of the Roman Empire. For a thousand years,

it's what we call the Middle Ages of 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 learned the perpetrator pieces. Right when we're brutalizing 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 mind 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 fifteen hundreds or the sixteen hundreds, and then those bodies come to America or come to this land right where there, or there's Cree and there's Dakota and there's Lakota, and all 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 seminar. When I talk about this, 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 was mad. They kind of like said, you know, you know, you got here too late, right, And 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 I remember it was still a colony.

So when that happened about ten to twenty 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 land on a lot 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, that is at the moment that the white body became the standard of humanists, the standard by which humanity 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 the elite white body said you want to be white, poor white body said, you damn right. You mean there's a possibility that my children may not have. Yes, let let me, 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 up 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. To talk about feeding the wolf, they can, they continue to feed poor white bodies that the problem in their lives is meant that the problem in their lives are brown people, that the problems in their lives

are indigenous people, are Asian people. And uh in January six 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 in bodied 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 to

two side tracked. 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. But I think your point is that part of the reason that we have not made more progress 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 Resume 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 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 sphere activated the white bodies 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 fifty or sixty pages does very clearly, and it shows why some of these things keep happening, because they're happening at a semantic or pre conscious level there 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. If 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 in 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 is 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 two mirr 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. But were you even able to understand where you are moving into a soup that has the idea that the white body hierarchically is the standard of humanists? 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 species nous. 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 species nous. Right, that's the piece that we miss when we're talking about race. As Eric and Resuma are sitting here talking, there is a piece around is resume in the philosophy, in the structure, in the institution, Is resume really human? Now we don't want to say that in a 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, 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 the color blind society, or we should be color blind, 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 the body. One of the things that 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 start talking about cognition. 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, and when we stop at certain places, my body is more

anxious there then I would be in downtown Baltimore. Do you think I'm miss perceiving. 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 describe most white people would have happened. Yeah. Yeah, Well here's what I would say. I would say that you're having an 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 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 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 mix 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. 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 at So what I do is is I have people that have trained white bodies, that have 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. 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 the 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 the white bodies or or 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, though, 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 ship you'd have been through in your life, you have been able to examine some of these pieces in a way that says, mmm, 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, But that piece has to also be cultivated communally in order for it to become a culture. Yeah, And I think your point you say over and over again, you're not alone in this, although I would say I felt it more emphasized in your work that white people

need to get with other white people. And what I've realized a reason that I think that that's become clearer to me is that not only if I, as a white person around black people might I to use your term, you know, spread that dirty pain back through you. But I also will defer to you as the expert because I go, well, I'm not black, and so I will take a role of being more passive and saying, well, what's resume? Thinking that's right? Tell me what's the right

thing to do resuma right? Versus what you're saying is when we as white people come together and we're forced into this, we don't have anywhere to turn but either to each other or on each other. Right, and and and see this is not to say, you know, you can't develop a relationship with me. And we develop a

relationship and you called me to see a resume. 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 the answers. And I came up, I came up from mountain, and now I'm sure right that those pieces around always deferring to black, brown and indigenous bodies asked 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 charges you, there has been been no reps, no conditioning. And when you defer, and when white bodies differ, 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 new ones, a sense of constriction or discernment, a sense of resource that doesn't get developed when all you do is pay for a d I training and have me come in and tell you things about Martin Luther King or something like that. I'm not sure if I'm supposed because but but it's a set up so white folks can dodge and check off. Oh, I did that. I did that. I know that right.

Not Oh, 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 realized, 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 buyinary. 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. 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've 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 when your kids got a baseball game. Right. And I hear that, And while I go, well, okay,

I'm not an expert. I'm gonna believe people 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 just father, what you just what you just said, Just let's just just for a minute, let's just pause on that. I recognize that I have white advantage, but I think I just just don't even go any further. 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? How what would it be like to not complete this question, this this thing that I'm getting ready to say, What would it be like just to hold that myself and have somebody holds, to have another white body hold it with me, but not complete it

makes me feel sad. See and and see that's the piece I'm talking about that was there anyway, And if you hadn't a paused, you wouldn't have got at that that those are, 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 uh

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, I was hearing some other things that was popping up. That's why I wanted you to pause with it. Those pieces and and and and those pieces among white bodies more often than not get get get just washed over among other white bodies. That's why the pause are 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 band, come back to it again, subscribe and write on it, come back to again and share it with your partner, come back to it again and share it with your brother, and then subscribe on it some more. And then notice what shows up in terms of rocking,

in terms of constriction in the throat. Inscribe on it some more, open up my grandmother's hands and read that and be like, I don't believe this ship and throw it in the corner, and then go back and grab it again and read it some more. Inscribe. 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, 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, and 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 the opt out that heat that you were experiencing, that you said, I, I'm not sure I can live up to that. I don't get the opt out of that. I 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 could keep doing this. You now have built over the last three four or five, six, seven, eight, nineteen eleven, twelve, fifteen years, other people that say, uh, you don't get to do that. Other white bodies that

say you're gonna just eve. We've been raising babies together in terms of anti racism, in terms of anti racist culture. We've been naming each other. We've been bearing each other and now you think you're gonna 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 thirty minute call to talk with me, no pressure, and we get to know each other at one you Feed dot net slash coach. I'm noticing a thought of like, well, this is the middle of a podcast interview. Do I need to 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 like quick so as I'm looking at your face and watching your chest not really move, holding your breath and all of that different times. 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 it 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 that 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 by the 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 repsending up. 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, inscribe on. It's an important piece to explore, to give some curiosity to write because I would venture to say that what with 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 piece 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 in, 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 mass back up and opted 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 embarking at your door. You're gonna have to continue to deal with that one because you're not cultivating anything else. And I think what you're saying about community is so important, right because the world that I do, in addition to do in 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 they're 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 are 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? Um, 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 uh 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 it's 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 an 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 body is slowing down long enough and not slowing down to do yoga, not slowing down to cook sour dough bread or eat kale or whatever the hell is going to, 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. All right, Okay, there there are shades of blue. But 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 intention. I know what my intention is. Yeah, you know, my intention is like the Doo symbol, black and white.

But I was like, but but to your point, So we've gone to blue, but even as you pointed out, there is still there's a shade too. Yeah. I want to say this to you. You've been very gracious to have me on, and so I don't want to leave what I was 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, you know, I'm just I'm just you know, 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 just 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 ever

kind of reflective suat 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 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 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, inscribe 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 and 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 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 gonna 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, and deeply consider and pause and do the work, do the and 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 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 early, many times. White folks have the luxury and the advantage of not having to do that deep dive consistently. Yeah. Yea. Well, Resma, 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. Well, hopefully it won't be the last time. And uh, 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

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