“I Can’t Breathe”: State Sanctioned Police Murders and the Legacy of Racial Trauma
On May 25, George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis, Resmaa Menakem’s hometown. Menakem is a therapist who works with racialized trauma in the body, and how it operates under the surface, shaping our relationships and interactions below the surface in ways that are rarely conscious.
In an earlier interview, Menakem spoke about how this trauma gets passed on between generations, and how we begin to heal. Now, in the wake of yet another killing of an unarmed Black man, we’re releasing previously unpublished parts of the interview that shine a light onto how racialized trauma shows up in interactions between Black civilians and police — interactions where “repeatedly traumatized bodies confronting other repeatedly traumatized bodies,” Menakem writes in his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathways to Mending our Hearts and Bodies.
“When intergenerational trauma lives and breathes in the bodies of both ‘us’ and ‘them,’ almost any encounter can lead to tragedy.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Policing the Black Body
The origins of policing in this country began with slave patrols. Ever since then, the law has been inextricably connected to controlling Black bodies; that is one of its functions.
White bodies have become accustomed to having the law as a tool. And police bodies have become accustomed to being the tool for white bodies.
Any Black body that has the freedom to do what it wants is threatening to the white body. This is not conscious, it’s reflexive. The Black body always knows that a white body has the law at its disposal. And the white body wants to pretend that is not the case.
The reason cops keep shooting unarmed Black people is because the police officer’s body, of any race, contains a complex, embedded relationship to that whole history of what the Black body represents. It doesn’t make any difference what race the cop is. Unless they have an ethic around community policing, unless they’re doing their own somatic work, it doesn’t matter.
White-Body Supremacy
If you’re in a white body, you get tremendous advantages for being part of the “lucky sperm club.” You didn’t get this body because you worked hard. You were born into a system that values your body more than others. To a white body, that’s a pretty good deal. To the black body, or the red body, or the brown body, that’s a loser deal. I may work hard, I may get some benefits from my hard work, and I am intrinsically, innately worthy and beautiful — but structurally I am rendered primate and inhuman.
There is constant dissonance and trauma and pressure on the Black body to deal with white-body supremacy — the idea that the white body is the standard and the indigenous body is invisible and the Black body is the ultimate deviance from that standard. Anti-Blackness is part of the structural apparatus of this land. It was here before the Constitution and before 1776. That foundational ethos is something that Black and brown bodies contend with every day.
That, to me, is where trauma and race intersect: before you do anything else, that ethos is in the water, in the air, in everything that we breathe, see, and think about. The Black child gets infused with these ideas about what’s human and beautiful between the ages of three and five. It is in the structure of our society, of the media, of religion, of economics. It affects our circulatory system, our musculoskeletal system, our nervous system. It is infused.
White Fragility
It’s uncomfortable to go through a racially charged situation. But for the white body, the experience can be more than just uncomfortable. For example, if I’m doing a workshop with white folks, and I raise my voice, there is this activation in the white body that translates as feeling unsafe. Because my Black body has been portrayed as the antithesis of the white body: My body is impure. My body is dangerous. My body is a brute. That belief is in the air of this society.
This is why you have white people like Amy Cooper calling the police on Black men bird-watching in the park, or on Black people barbecuing, or on Black people flying a kite: because my body represents the antithesis of safety.
That is white fragility. But it is also brutality. It presents itself as fragility, but it is actually saying: give yourself up so I can be comfortable. And that is a brutal thing to request of somebody.
For most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to the Black body. That is a problem not just for Black folks; it’s a problem for white folks, too, because white folks feel entitled to have me make them comfortable. And the more I show any self-determination, the more the white body feels that I am taking something from it.
Trauma and the “Police Body”
A few years ago I did a series of workshops with the Minneapolis Police Department to help them manage and settle their own bodies in stressful situations. This was after the Jamar Clark and the Philando Castile shootings. Local activists and community members were marching in the streets, and camping out for days in front of the 4th Precinct, putting pressure on the MPD to do something.
First, I tell them my story: My brother’s been a cop for twenty-nine years. My niece is a cop. My grandfather was in the military. I did two years as a therapist in Afghanistan. I tell them about my trauma and the disorientation that followed. And I connect that to their everyday work. They start to listen because I can describe what they’re experiencing.
One time, after a day-long workshop, an officer came up to me and wanted to talk. This is a white dude — somebody who is not normally going to talk to me. But he tells me about a time six years ago when he’s confronted by a man with a gun, and they both instinctively begin shooting. And as they’re shooting, the sprinklers and the fire alarm go off in the hallway.
Think about this from an embodied place: the water, the smell of the gunpowder, the red lights, the sound of the alarm — and the sound of the guns — it’s overwhelming. The body can’t process all of that. And as he’s telling me this, his face is turning red. In real time, something is being activated in his body.
He doesn’t kill the guy, but after he walks out, he starts feeling “weird.” And nobody helps him process the experience. Nobody tells him that he might get stuck — nothing. So six years down the line, he’s an angry man. And he’s standing there telling me, “I wasn’t always like this.”
“You’re not crazy,” I say. “You’re not defective. You’re stuck. And you need some help to get you unstuck.”
And he starts tearing up. He says, “How come nobody says this to us? If somebody would have said this to me, years ago . . .”
We have to understand that trauma is built into the organizational structure of policing. The business of policing grinds officers into dust. For the first five to seven years, you’re going to be working overnights. You’re going to be seeing gashes in people, babies who’ve been hurt — sights that make your body want to recoil. But in order to do your job, you have to override that recoil impulse. You do that for five to seven years, and you start to override everything. Your wife and your children can’t feel you anymore. Maybe you no longer trust anybody. Maybe there’s rage you never had before. By this time, the biochemicals of chronic stress are in your bloodstream all the time.
And you feel alone, because the organizational structure has no way of taking care of you. They haven’t told you that in five to seven years, you’re going to be stuck. That’s why you have so many more police officers committing suicide. That’s why you have more police officers whose children can’t feel them, or who even become abusive. I’ll ask a group of them, “How many of you are on your second marriage?” and just about all of them raise their hands. “How many of you are drinking?” — because that’s how they manage this energy, this trauma. Most police officers never have to fire their gun, but the ones that do, it’s like firing a bow that’s been pulled back for years.
White Bodies Must Do the Work
I think the advent of the smartphone has helped white people see that a Black man running from the police can get shot in the back, and the police will justify it. White people — not the KKK, but “good” white people — used to brush all this off, saying, “It’s not that bad.” The smartphone has helped everyone see that it is that bad.
White people are starting to understand that there’s work to be done among white people to build what I call “somatic abolitionist communities” — dedicated to the abolition of white-body supremacy through body-based work.
White people are starting to understand that there’s work to be done among white people to build what I call “somatic abolitionist communities”: dedicated to the sustained abolition of white-body supremacy through body-based work. It is my belief that it will take white folks at least nine generations before they have a nuanced skill set and understanding of race, but they must start now — communally.
It is a relatively new development that you and I, a white body and a Black body, could be speaking with each other like this, me talking the way I am talking to you. It is relatively new that this could happen without the threat that a lynch mob is going to show up.
White folks have not even begun to develop a culture that can deal with the moral injuries from participating in enslavement. When Black people talk about reparations, white folks have this reaction: “Well, we don’t need to do that.” They don’t have a culture that can help them acknowledge and process the brutality of participating in the enslavement apparatus. What did your people have to do in order to commit that violence? How does that affect you right now?
Many white liberals want to believe all they have to do is be “Minnesota nice,” and that will deal with these structural problems and everyday horrors. But we all know that what has happened to Black people, and to Indigenous people, did not happen to us as individuals. It happened structurally and communally, as a result of an ideology, an ethos.
The only way to change is for white people to be embodied in the face of racial discomfort, and from then to begin to build somatic abolitionist communities. But if there is no embodiment, there’s nowhere to start.
I think we are also all understanding better the health effects of trauma — the visceral experience that people are having in their bodies and how that’s passed on. In the Indigenous community, they talk about the idea of “blood-born memory.” People are reclaiming worldviews that help explain what’s happening. We are not widgets or flesh machines. We are emergent and evolving and tied to creation and congruence. Part of what we are doing is reclaiming that birthright.
