My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
by Resmaa Menakem (Author)
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This book is witchcraft! His so called Body Practice instructs you to “call up your dead ancestors!”
On page 53, Mencken leads you to call up your dead ancestors. No different than going to a seance or playing with a Ouija board! Pure witchcraft and unlike the 2 prior things I mentioned, he isn’t brave enough to call it what it is. He tries to trick you into it.
Unsupported psychobabble
Like many Americans waking up to my white conditioning, I’ve been reading many books on racism. I couldn’t finish “My Grandmother’s Hands”. Everyone is raving about it, but I couldn’t buy the author’s premise about centuries old trauma living in my dna, and all of the touchy-feely psychobabble. Why did no one warn me? I tried, I really did.
Chapter 16 should come with a trigger warning at minimum, undermined his message as a “healer”…
…chapter 16 needs a serious TRIGGER WARNING!!! Really? A “healer” draws his readers into a trusting relationship and then leads us in his chapter entitled “Mending the White Heart and Body” into a thought experiment in which he brutalizes a puppy after establishing a heart connection between the puppy and the reader. And then he blithely tells the readers to take 1/2 hour and go and settle their bodies. Really? Toxic masculinity at minimum. I have to ask myself what he got out of writing that and how he thought that might “mend white hearts”. Notable that he has in previous chapters successfully delegitimized white bodies in feeling overwhelmed emotions and told us to “grow up”. And so he has set up white readers to feel shame about their upset emotions. We are told that expressing upset emotions through tears indicates that we are too “fragile”. He then leads readers into a gratuitously violent thought experiment… Not constructive. … I felt that he gets more aggressive and angry in tone as the book progresses. Unfortunately I do feel he enjoyed some toxic masculinity.