Book Review: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. By Resmaa Menakem, Central Recovery Press (CRP) 2017

Abstract

I spent most of the summer and fall of 2020 reading over a dozen books about racism, anti-racism, and mindfulness and racism. One of the most riveting, eye-opening, and ultimately most hopeful was Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Menakem’s lens into the issue of racism is fascinating and worthy of serious reflection. Instead of seeing the lack of racial harmony as a failure of will or moral inadequacy, Menakem explains that racism cannot be eradicated until we deal with a vexing underlying problem; namely, recovery from the body’s held trauma.