The Embodied Path to Healing Trauma with Resmaa Menakem
July 2, 2024
GlennonDoyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. You’re not going to want to miss this next hour because it is with Resmaa Menakem, who is an author, agent of change, therapist and licensed clinical worker specializing in racialized trauma, communal healing, and cultural first aid. As the leading proponent of somatic abolitionism, an embodied anti-racist practice for living and culture building, Resmaa is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Somatics Institute. Resmaa is the author of The New York Times bestseller My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, The Quaking of America, and Monsters in Love. You can learn more about Resmaa and his work at resmaa.com.
So, Resmaa, we’re just jumping right in with you.
Resmaa Menakem:
That’s it. Let’s crack. Let’s crack.
GlennonDoyle:
Let’s do it. I read My Grandmother’s Hands a long time ago and it blew my mind, which is, I think, was your point, to be getting people out of their minds. And now I understand it completely differently, because I have been in and out of recovery for 30 years. It just becomes whack-a-mole for me. It becomes something different every few years that I’m addicted to. And I have tried to recover in my mind for 30 years. So, I just keep thinking, “Okay. I got it now. I know how I’m thinking about this. It’s just patriarchy. It’s diet culture. It’s big pharma. It’s wine culture. I’ve got it.”
And then I keep not getting cured. This last round of recovery I have finally, through tons of therapy and whatever, allowed it to drop into my body the recovery and understand that I don’t even know if it’s an understanding, feel that my problem is just in my past, in my parents, in their parents, in their parents, in the culture, and it’s all living in my body.
So, your work, to me, it’s like our world has all of these terrible symptoms, whack-a-mole symptoms, just what we see, the violence, the racism, the wars, the genocides, and we keep trying to solve it by making up new words, intellectually thinking our way out of it. And I know personally that that’s not how it works, that we don’t heal that way. I feel like if we actually had a world that actually wanted to solve racism, you would be the teacher that everybody would put everywhere.
Resmaa Menakem:
Shit. I hope not. Goddamn.
GlennonDoyle:
What is trauma, Resmaa?
Resmaa Menakem:
Well, you did a pretty good description of it. I mean, so I have no interest in being anybody fucking guru. I come from a people that every time we start to begin to talk about liberation and start to begin to talk about ushering in a living and embodied anti-racist, generative culture, start to begin to talk about maybe it’s not the past that we need to be cultivating, maybe it’s the new futures that we need to be going.
Those people coming from … People that look like me, we get bullets in the fucking head. They don’t appreciate us until we’re dead, and then they can quantify us in terms of one speech we shall fucking overcome when you’re the most revolutionary man on the planet at the time. White folks love Dr. King now. He was the most hated man in America at the time.
And so, I hope that God … People don’t start … I got a grandbaby that’s coming in June. I’d really like to see him get to 30. Yeah. I just need to start with that. I’d find it more interesting to have people begin to just, like you said, you understand it differently now than you did when you first started reading it. And I tell people all the time, “My books are not books you read. They’re books you do.” And it takes on average 9 to 13 months for people to get through my book in the first place, if they’re doing the practices.
If they’re fucking just around and just reading it as a Reader’s Digest or something like that, then yeah, you get through it in a couple of days. But if you’re actually doing the practice, it takes you 9 to 13 months. And then when you go over it again, because you’re not the same person when you start it, you actually pick up a just like, “Damn. Did Resmaa come to my bedroom and write some new shit in his book?” Because now I’m picking up on it … Right. And that’s because the practices are most important. It’s not even the reading.
It’s like how you experience revulsion at trying to do the practices and then throwing the book up against the wall. What you do when you get to a certain part and you go, “Oh, that was nice. I’m never fucking doing that practice again.” That’s part of how this stuff works. It’s not I’m giving you the secret or the five tips to giving to a beautiful relationship. And that shit don’t work, because people are a part of creation. We’re not apart from creation. And we so busy trying to find the secret and the answer that we’re missing the emergence.
What needs to happen in order for us to grow the fuck up ain’t a tip that rarely ends up being a tip that we go, “Oh, shit. I’m going to change my whole.” People know that if you meet somebody in a fucking bar and you take them home, you probably should put a condom on, or you probably should have a dental dam or you probably should do fucking something. Most people don’t do that.
We got the knowledge. People have told us to do this shit. The same way with the cigarettes. It says on the side of the cigarette, but if you motherfuckers smoke this, you are going to die.
GlennonDoyle:
And we’re like, “Not me. Not me.”
Resmaa Menakem:
That not me. It is. Then you see a commercial, “I wish that was.” We all know that there’s certain shit. The knowledge has never been a curative element for human beings.
GlennonDoyle:
Yes.
Resmaa Menakem:
Never. Is can they develop the capacity to tolerate what it takes to grow the fuck up? And you have to temper and condition your body, especially when we’re talking about race, and especially when we’re talking about white folks. White folks, white bodies have no communal efficacy when it comes to race. None. None. I’m telling you two and all three of y’all, if you come up to me or send me a thing after this fucking thing and you say, “Well, that’s find. I had a friend and we used to do and we marched in into shit.”
Your fucking racial resume is not communal tempering. It’s not conditioning. What’s happening to me and my people is not happening because individual white people are nice or not nice. That is not what’s happening. It is because it is a structure, a philosophy that emerges and evolves and most white folks benefit from it. They’re advantaged to buy it. That’s the piece. So, I’m sorry. What was your first … What is your question?
GlennonDoyle:
What is trauma?
Amanda Doyle:
Doesn’t matter.
GlennonDoyle:
But that works.
Resmaa Menakem:
Okay. Okay.
GlennonDoyle:
But yes. What is trauma and what do people need to do to grow the fuck up? What is the equivalent of wearing the condom in life?
Resmaa Menakem:
So, the way that my brain works, my agent and friends, always … Those that know supposedly, when I first started writing my first book. So, the way that I write … So, let me tell you the way that I write first of all. So, the way that I write is that I’ll usually go to his house or go to somebody else’s house and I stumbled on this. Is that what I do is we record it, we record whatever I write or whatever I want to talk about, and then we get enough of those together and then create the book.
So, that’s why my books sound like I’m talking, is because we do that and then we edit them, I get it back from the transcriptionist and then we add and we add other things in and stuff like that. So, that’s how I write all my books. The only way that that was able to happen, the reason why we stumbled on that is because my agent calls me a polymath. And what that means is that … And this is the way that my brain is always … When people are asking me things, my brain is thinking about it in seven different levels.
I’m thinking about the sensory pieces. I’m thinking about the vibratory piece. My body is reacting to the, meaning, making the urges. So, that’s all happening for me at the same time. And so, when you ask me a question around what’s trauma? So, for me, basically, trauma is what happens. And this is from Brother Gabor, is what happens inside of you when what happens, happened. And so, it is a move that happens. It’s not conscious. It’s not a like, “Oh, I’m going to do that.”
It’s just your body says this particular thing is too much, too fast, too soon or too long. There wasn’t enough reparative stuff that happens, which is mostly what fucks people. And when that happened, your sense of yourself and your sense of yourself in the world shifted and got stuck. That’s trauma. And so, it can be anything that happens that’s too much, too fast, too soon or too long along with something that reparative that should have happened that didn’t.
And most people when we talk about trauma, they can go into therapy and they can say, “This happened. My uncle did this. My daddy did this. My mom did this, da, da, da.” But what they can’t usually articulate is what should have happened that didn’t.
GlennonDoyle:
That’s good. Repair.
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah.
GlennonDoyle:
So, what is the significance of that, that they can’t actually say it? Is that the equivalent of imagining the world differently?
Resmaa Menakem:
Well, it’s not even the saying it. It’s how your body and how you position yourself once you can’t get at that. You start to organize yourself around. This should have happened, but it didn’t. You start to organize, “Well, fuck it then. Fuck you. If that’s the way it is, then this is how I’m going to get down.” And it’s not conscious. So, here’s one of the things that I say when I’m doing my practices in my workshop is I say that just the march of time, time decontextualizes trauma. Time, just time.
So, if we’re on a call right now and somebody comes in and y’all see some shit go down and they put a gun to the back of my head and I supposed to start fighting, they beat the fuck out of me, and then something happened and everything’s happening and everything. And then a month from now, y’all say, “Okay. We got to check back in with Resmaa.” And then we do a Zoom call. And the Zoom call comes on and I’m on the call with y’all and I’m butt-ass naked babbling. I’m just … I’m crazy.
There’s not one person on this call that wouldn’t say something happened to him. I saw it. We experienced it. We got to get Resmaa some help. Do we have his wife’s number? We got it. There would be no doubt in my mind that you would say, “We know and we saw what happened to him.” You will contextualize it. You’ll say, “This happened and now he’s acting in these particular ways.” What if you never saw it?
Abby Wambach:
Whoa.
GlennonDoyle:
Then we just think you’re crazy.
Resmaa Menakem:
Right. So, here’s what I always say. When trauma happens in the person, decontextualize, and it goes unattended to. What happens is, is that the march of time can make that look like personality. Trauma that happens in the body in a person over time can look like personality. Trauma that happens in the family over time look like family traits. Trauma that happens in the people can look like culture. Trauma that in the culture can look intrinsic or natural.
GlennonDoyle:
So, is this why when people, families or cultures refuse to witness, have accountability, face the truth, then all of our stories go haywire and we think everybody’s crazy?
Resmaa Menakem:
They collapse. It collapses. It collapses into personality. It collapses into family traits. It collapses into culture. And then when we go to talk about it, all of the charge comes into the room before the resolution. The resolution can’t happen because people are contending with the charge in the body. This is why when people say, “Well, we need to have an intervention. When that happened and we need to sit there and talk.” And people go, “Yeah. We may need to do that, and you’re probably right. But this is going to be some bullshit. Why? Because it’s 400 years of charge, 500 years of charge, 30 years of charge, and nobody is tempered and conditioned to deal with the charge.”
We think, “Let’s just talk about it. Let’s just get together and do a reconciliation. Let’s get together and do” … Right? And the charge burns. So, one of the contracts that I have is I’m working with the Meadows. I do work with the Meadows, treatment facility. And one of the things I’ve been trying to get in working with the therapists on is that if you can’t work with the charge first, then when people come into the room and they tell you about their use, they tell you about the sexual stuff that happened to them, they tell you about all of this shit. You give them advice about how to deal with it.
But you don’t understand that the advice that you’re giving them is not giving at the charge. They’re asking you a question, “Well, how do we do this? How to do it?” And you say, “Well, you do it like this and you do it like that.” And they go, “Okay.” And then they say, “Yeah. I got.” And then you can see the charge behind their eyes and we don’t know how to address that. As therapists and I’m going to tell you this. This is the silly little fucking joke. Therapists are no more conditioned to deal with the charge than the people that they’re talking to. They are not.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Resmaa Menakem:
We don’t go to school to learn how to deal with the charge. Here’s the thing. I got my master’s degree. I learned more about charge being fucking married than I did, kidding. My master’s degree. I learned more about the charge dealing with my drug-addicted daddy than I did in the master’s degree, because I had to learn it and grow up and begin to work with the shit and nibble on it and use it as ways to condition.
Listen, we’re all friends. Let’s say we’re all friends, and I come to y’all and I say, “Check it out. Hey, y’all thinking about playing piano?” The normal question, “Oh, that’s really cool. I’m thinking about running a marathon.” Y’all all go, “Yeah. That’s cool. It’s cool. I knew a friend that actually ran a marathon. I can get you hooked up with them so they can talk to you about it and da, da, da, da.” And you’d give me resources and there’s this, that and the other.
And then if I said to you, and then if you got the right idea to ask me the question, “When am I thinking about running this marathon?” You guys would go … And I looked at you in all straight and I said, “Tomorrow.” Exactly. Exactly. You smiled. You giggled. You like, “Okay. I got to ask another fucking question now.” There’s something else, because I wasn’t prepared for that.
And your question would be, “Well, I get it, but have you run a block for it first? Do you understand that your fucking nipples are going to bleed, your toenails are going to fall? What’s happening here?” And I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Don’t worry about it.” I listened to a podcast on running a marathon. I read it. But if I said that to you every time I assured you that I got it handled, you would go, “You don’t have this handled.”
Both things would be happening at the same time because you know I’m unconditioned and not tempered to be able to tolerate what I’m getting ready to go through. And why do we think race is any fucking different? Why do we think that your opinion or your understanding of that that’s as important as temper and conditioning. And race in this structure is traumatizing to any visibly melanated body. It is a traumatizing structure, experience, and philosophy.
And if you don’t understand that, you think your ideas and your opinion is as important as the temper and conditioning that my body has had to go through in order to navigate this shit.
GlennonDoyle:
I was going to do an interview last year or a couple years ago with a Black woman and she wrote to me and said, “We have all the same ideas. I’ve listened to all of your things.” Like, “Yes. Yes. Yes. I cannot do this interview with you because I cannot be my most vulnerable in the same room as a white woman who looks like you.” And at the time I had bleach blonde hair. I was a certain visually looking white woman. And I think about that all the time and I thought it was so beautiful of her just to say it that way.
But I think what she’s saying is what you’re saying, “Our minds might have the same ideas, but our bodies are charged when we get into the room in a way that will make me unable to be vulnerable.”
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah. I am so glad she said that to you, not for you, but for her. For her to understand the texture of what this was and not override it for you, I think whether you got something out of it or not, I think for her to recognize that this had the potential to be extracted and she didn’t want to put herself, and for most of our history, especially the Black woman’s body, for most of our … is relatively knew that a Black woman can say that to a white woman and be somewhat sure she’s not going to get raped.
For most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to every aspect of my body. For most of our history. For most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to every orifice, every idea, every understanding of my body. It is relatively … And this an obvious, has been an obvious problem for visibly melanated bodies. But it’s also a problem for white folks because white folks don’t understand the urges around why they expect my deference and that they’re willing to murder me when I’m not deferential. They’re willing to limit and thwart access an opportunity when I’m not deferential.
Dr. King said that part of the problem is that white bodies have been put through a mass education around who the Black person is and what the Black body is. They’ve been put through a mass education. They refuse to develop a mass de-education and a mass re-education as it relates to the Black body. They refuse. That’s part of what the problem is. They don’t even … That shit. They don’t even know it’s a thing.
Even good white folks have this recoiled when a Black body says, “You don’t have access to me. I will not allow you access to me.” There’s something that happens to white bodies where that happens. I don’t care how good you are. I don’t care how nice you are. That is irrelevant to the level of ferality that Black bodies invisibly male bodies have to contend with. That is irrelevant. Your niceness and your kindness is irrelevant, is not communal. You have tempered this with other white bodies and you developed a sense of this communally.
GlennonDoyle:
Is there something about that that is the heart of the millions of what we now call Karen moments? Like when a white body sees, bodies of culture, the thing that seems to be the common denominator in those moments where a white person calls in the police is there seems to be a body of culture experiencing some freedom or joy in public that causes some reaction in a white person’s body that is not happening in anyone’s mind. You can’t think your way into that being logical. So, explain to us body to body.
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah. So, for me, Karen and the Ken moments, people look at them as Karen. I mean you can go on Instagram, you can go on YouTube, and you can pull up hours and hours of videos of white folks acting fucking bananas at barbecues, at churches. And we look at those as events and incidences. What if we didn’t look at it like that? What if we said, “This was structural.” That it is woven into the reflexive response in white bodies in general, not a Karen, but Karen’s as philosophy, Karenism as a philosophy. What if we did that?
What if we stopped looking at this as events and started looking at it as structure, as philosophy, as the, what I call it plantation ethos, that the most enduring organizing structure in American is the plantation. The plantation literally organized white people. It organized their sense of relationships with each other. It organized their sense of hierarchy. It organized their sense of religion. It organized their sense of pigmentocracy. It organized their sense of sex roles. It organized this … Did you guys understand what I mean? The plantation organized white people.
When the plantation came into existence, America was the 13 colonies. Here’s the thing that we forget. Colonies are filled with colonized white people, colonized white folks that were fleeing something, that has never been dealt with. This is why the white woman is so fucking mad at the white man and doesn’t understand why.
GlennonDoyle:
This is why I tell white men, “I’m sorry. I can’t do your interview.” I do what the woman did. You’re the second man we’ve had on in 300 episodes because I can’t be in the same room. I understand that.
Resmaa Menakem:
Listen, let me say this. When white women were walking around their towns, their churches and all of that, and every place that they could go, and they started walking around seeing little Black childrens with their husbands faces on them, that never got dealt with. Rape is part of the way that this country got wealthy. Land theft is how this … When people say, “Well, how did America get so wealthy.” Free land and free labor. And the philosophy is to try and get back there. When we talk about conservative, that’s what they’re saying. They’ll never say it because it ain’t good to say, well, that’s what they mean.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s the again part.
Resmaa Menakem:
That’s the again part. Yeah. We want to get it back to free land and free labor. And if we can’t get it back to that, we’re going to want to get as close as fucking humanly possible. We don’t want to pay for your labor. I’ll give you another one. I said this the other day. Can you believe that we … And this is why I believe that America when it comes to race, doesn’t have a liberatory bone in its fucking body, is that we allowed people, we allowed rich, primarily rich white men to, at one point, pay us for at least as close to our labor as possible.
So, you paid me $20 an hour, but you take $25 an hour because you know my labor’s actually work $45 an hour. You take 25 of that and you put it in a pension and hold it. So, when I’m old, I can actually do some other things. That was their fucking deal. And we allowed these motherfuckers to tell us about a 401(k). We allowed them to say, “Now you get to contribute.” “What, motherfuck, I am contributing. I gave you $45 worth of labor. Your job was to take 25 of that and put it over here.”
And we said, “Yeah. That sounds like a good idea. Let me contribute of the 20. Let me contribute $5 of that.” And we took it. That’s what I mean by free land, by genociding the indigenous people and free labor, by enslaving African people and Black people. And white women wearing pussy hats in Washington, DC ain’t going to do a damn thing about that. This whole thing is white folks’ refusal to deal and can temper themselves so they can actually begin to create a living embodied anti-racist, generative culture.
They have no appetite for what it takes to condition themselves and not condition themselves, but condition themselves so their babies can access. So, most of us, our kids don’t learn from just our instruction. They learn from what our bodies recoil from and lean into. And conditioning ourselves to be able to say, “I have to do some conditioning and tempering. So, my babies experience more room around race. Not just instruction around race.”
But they actually experienced, “Oh, mama can work with that. Mamas can work with. They know.” You know what I mean? This is why the whole CRT and the reflexive stuff and the burning of the books and all. All of that shit is really about what they’re telling you is that white folks have no appetite for conditioning when it comes to race. None.
Amanda Doyle:
Tell us what you mean by conditioning. When we don’t have an appetite for conditioning, we don’t have the appetite for the discomfort of its settling in our bodies for the … What is the conditioning?
Resmaa Menakem:
We don’t have no appetite. So, Amanda, if I came to you, like I said earlier about the marathon, it goes right to … That’s it. If I tell you that I’m going to run a marathon tomorrow and then I convince you, I keep saying, “No. I did everything that I’m supposed to do. I read a book. I did this.” Every time I say that, you go, “I can’t trust his judgment. I don’t trust his judgment.”
Amanda Doyle:
So, when I told you I read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, so I’m all set. That’s the equivalent of the …
Resmaa Menakem:
I don’t trust your fucking judgment.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah. Got it.
Resmaa Menakem:
There’s nothing about that that means anything. I know you put it up there like it means. And me and Robin are tight.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, I know, I know.
Resmaa Menakem:
I love Robin.
Amanda Doyle:
I’m just saying probably half the people that are listening to this read that book.
Resmaa Menakem:
That’s what I’m saying. They read it and it was good and they ain’t read it again since.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Resmaa Menakem:
They haven’t grabbed another white body and said, “For the next 30 years, me and you going to roll around race specifically, and we are going to cultivate between ourselves a different way of understanding this and we may not be able to get to where we think we need to get to, but at least we’re going to nibble on this. At least we’re going to put the road work in. I’m not just going to read a book. I’m not like I am going to body to body. We’re going to raise babies in this shit. We are going to get divorced in this shit.”
Do you guys understand what I mean? This is my life. This is how we get down. Most white folks ain’t talking about it like that. Most white folks is talking about it, I read White Fragility and it changed my life. Well, fuck, I can’t tell. I can only tell because you told me. But that’s the only way I get that. You said it and that’s supposed to be enough.
If I put all of my stock in what white people say as opposed to what white people do, I’d be fucked up. I’d be really fucked up. So, that’s what I mean. When I say temper and conditioning, I’m saying if you’re going to do anything that pushes you up against your adult developmental edges, if you’re going to do something, you going to experience it as a sensation piece. You’re going to experience it in terms of imagination. You’re going to experience it in terms of quaking and twisting and gnarliness and images that pop up that you’ve been trying to tamp down and get the fuck out of your head.
You’re going to experience what it takes to metabolize that and use that shit as fuel for your growth as opposed to fuel that burns you the fuck up. It’s the same fuel. It’s the same fuel. It’s the same thing. When people come into my office and they say, “Rest my … I really need to get this out of me.” And I said, “If I was able to actually do that and remove that from you, what you would need in order to be the person that you think you want to be or get to, I’d just remove the fuel for that.”
Amanda Doyle:
Does that have the connection to dirty pain and clean pain?
Resmaa Menakem:
That’s dirty paint and clean paint.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Resmaa Menakem:
Most of us … Let me ask you question. I’m going to ask you a question. Y’all all adult people. So, we’re all adults.
Amanda Doyle:
Ish, ish.
Resmaa Menakem:
Adult-ish.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Resmaa Menakem:
We’re adult-ish. So, let me ask you, if I said, have you ever been with somebody and you’ve been with him and you and y’all are having a good time, and you fucking good. You’re eating good. You’re doing all of the things that you do. But in your belly, something says, “God, I shouldn’t be with this. God.”
Amanda Doyle:
Almost exclusively.
Resmaa Menakem:
You know what I mean? Like, “Goddamn. But I love these nasty draws. But goddamn, I know they ain’t good for me.” You know what I mean?
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Resmaa Menakem:
And your boys and your friends and your girlfriends and your mama and your daddy and everybody are like, “What the fuck you doing?” And you go, “Ah. I don’t know. But I can’t stop. I don’t know. What the fuck that is.” What I tell people is that we know dirty pain. We know dirty. And if you’re lucky, after you do that for a while, something begins to move in the way that you go. “Yeah. I don’t know what I’m do, but I know I can’t do this no more. I can’t do this no more. I need the blocker. I need the blocker. I got a blocker.” I blocked her and everything says, “Unblock her. Just one more time.” You know what I mean?
That you’re playing with clean and dirty. There’s a part of you that’s tied to your integrity, that’s tied to creation itself, that gnaws at you that says, “If you go through this, it’s going to be painful. If you stay with this, it’s going to be painful. You get to choose which pain you want to contend with you.” As adults, we don’t get to choice between pain and no pain most of the time. As adults, we get the choice between clean and dirty. And most of us want a choice between pain and no pain. You don’t fucking get that as an adult. That’s not what you get.
GlennonDoyle:
That’s right.
Resmaa Menakem:
You get to choose between am I going to do this clean and painful and dirty and painful? Those are the choices.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s nice. I thought about that so much that when I was painfully watching the rebuttal to the State of the Union where Katie Britt came on and sat in a kitchen, small white woman wearing a tiny cross, close to fake tears, crying about a fake threat in the form of these violent immigrant bodies just crying and lying that I just was like “Dirty.”
Resmaa Menakem:
Dirty.
Glennon Doyle:
Dirty.
Resmaa Menakem:
Dirty, dirty. I don’t watch that shit no more, honestly. And I’m not saying the white folks that listening to you, I’m not saying y’all shouldn’t watch it. I’m saying for me, I’m not playing, I’m not asking you, I don’t need to see your performative shit. And I’m talking about liberals too. I’m writing a book right now and there’s a chapter in it where I call the feckless and the fascist.
I think liberals are some of the most feckless. They don’t understand that these motherfuckers are not trying to reach across the aisle, that this shit ain’t that … this ain’t that. And you keep trying to find the middle road and the middle ground. These motherfuckers tell you, “We will murder your children in Sandy Hook and you motherfuckers won’t do a goddamn thing about it.” You won’t do a thing about it. 21 white babies were murdered and y’all do a motherfucking thing about it. You didn’t bust a grape in the motherfucking fruit fight. So, if you ain’t going to do nothing about that, I know you ain’t going to do nothing about my babies. That’s the conditioning and the tempering that I’m talking about.
I read this thing one time. People said the idea right-wing and left-wing are all part of the same racist bird. And if you don’t understand that, you get confused about that type of shit. It’s like when white people are sitting up there crying and then other white bodies, liberal white bodies are just aghast at the lying and stuff like that. But you ain’t going to do nothing about it. You’re going to be upset about it. But there is a thing around your own dirtiness that is dovetailing with that dirtiness.
Amanda Doyle:
So, it’s like the thoughts and prayers?
Resmaa Menakem:
Just thoughts and prayer. That’s exactly what it is. And white folks are not interested in developing a living embodied anti-racist, generative culture with each other. They’re so busy looking for the brown guru, the Black guru, the indigenous guru. They’re so busy looking for them that they don’t realize they have to literally start with each other and they have to do it and create a communal ethos around ushering in and emerging a different way of being.
Glennon Doyle:
This is the culture piece that is so strong. This is the why you talk about how alluring the cultures are that are being created in the hate world. Talk about what they have and why our anemic offering on the other side is not bringing anyone in.
Resmaa Menakem:
No. And it ain’t going to. Listen. Listen. Think about this. Close your eyes. Let me close your eyes. White people, white bodies started from nothing and they tilled the soil and they were faithful to God and they were the chosen people and they spread the gospel of the one true God, Jesus Christ, across the world. And they have created things that did not exist before their purity and their whiteness came on the scene and it is their job to make sure that God exists on this planet and that anything that white people do, there’s mistake, it is already washed away by God and their dominion over everything in creation.
Now, keep your eyes closed. That’s the story. That story, even if you don’t like it has a beginning, a middle, and the end. It says what you should be doing and not doing. It tells you your positioning. Now, open your eyes. Tell me an equivalent story from liberals.
Glennon Doyle:
The story is find the right words. Say them on Instagram.
Resmaa Menakem:
That’s it. There is no glue. So, if I got symbols of the swastika, if I got symbols of hoods, if I got symbols that are 100 years old, hundreds of years old, and you’re going to come and talk to me about a fucking bill, you’re going to come and talk to me about, “We need to get out and vote.” But if I’m a white person, that’s already available. The symbols of that are all … And it’s got a whole story and it’s steeped in hundreds of … But yet I’m trying to convince you of what’s right and what’s wrong. There’s no they’re there.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And then you’ve got the hate groups with their uniforms and their rules of belonging and their offering of togetherness and their fucking uniforms and all the things.
Resmaa Menakem:
It organizes the body.
Amanda Doyle:
They also believe that they’re great.
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Liberals we’re always wimpy. It’s like we don’t believe that we are …
Resmaa Menakem:
There’s no they’re there.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Glennnon Menakem:
There’s no they’re there. There’s nothing …
Amanda Doyle:
But that’s because of the dirty pain. We’re apologetic and we’re ashamed because we have the dirty pain.
Resmaa Menakem:
White liberals are feckless as fuck. I’ll give you a quick example. I’ll give you a quick example. This is why I talk about it as white bodies and not as particular identities. So, when I do my workshops and stuff like that, inevitably I’ll have a gay white woman that’ll come up to me afterwards and say, “Resmaa, I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about because I’m a gay white woman and I’ve been writing.” And I say, “Hold on. Please don’t compare yourself to me being a heterosexual Black. Don’t do that. Here’s what I want to ask you.”
In the community of gay, let’s say we say gay or lesbian women, in that community are Black lesbian women at the top or the bottom of that community. And if you say we’re all mixed in together, I’m going to say, “You’re a fucking liar. You have never talked to a lesbian Black woman in your life. If you say that to me. So, I’m not talking about your identity. Your identity is important. What I’m saying is there’s another piece to that too. And this pigmentocracy is woven in and around and through every institution, every movement, everything that we are doing, how we interact, our positioning, our mores, it’s woven in and around and through that. And most white folks, regardless of their identity, are unwilling to examine that.”
And so, for me, when I’m talking about body, the white body, visibly melanated body, the Black body, I am talking about philosophy and structure and feral philosophy and structure. And so, it’s important to understand that when you’re talking about what it takes in order for people to begin … White bodies. I’m talking about white bodies now. In order for white bodies to begin to work with and develop a story that their white babies coming later on can have something that is left that will nourish them.
So, the way that creation works is that … If you just look at how creation functions, is that something, a structure or something has to die in order to create the nutrients for the new structure to emerge from. White bodies don’t understand that. They want to think about … I think that the idea of God has fucked white people because they think about God as a bestowal entity. They think about God as if I just am in alignment, if I just do this, if I just do that, then something will be bestowed on me because I’ve done that stuff. That’s usually not how it works.
It usually works because you do something or something happens and you get to the edges and you become and something emerges from the grind and then something emerges through. That’s not our understanding of creation. What I just said is in alignment with creation, not a bestowal. And so, for me, I think white bodies are not interested in going through the emergence.
The closest that they can get to it is fucking yoga. Like white yoga, white folks will yoga and sourdough bread and kale the fuck out of everything. Y’all can kale everything.
Glennon Doyle:
But that’s because that’s individual, because we …
Resmaa Menakem:
That’s what I’m saying.
Glennon Doyle:
We want to purify ourselves. But I understand that. That’s like anorexia defined. I want to purify myself. I want to be better. I just don’t want to be involved with any other human beings doing it.
Resmaa Menakem:
That’s exactly right. And then you run around and say, “Well, why can’t we do this? Why can’t we all get together. Motherfucker, you have no interest.” When that damn 400, 500 years of charge come, spring-loaded charge. The reason why you don’t want to do it, because you know it’s spring-loaded. You know spring-loaded. So, you know it. That’s why. That’s why.
Because you know you are not conditioned to deal with that spring. This is why I’m one of only two men that have been on this thing. You don’t want to deal with white men. You ain’t going … Fuck you. I got my own motherfucker shit. I got my own podcast. If I don’t want put motherfucker on here, I’m not going to have you motherfucker on here. And by doing that, you don’t temper and condition yourself. And I’m not telling you to bring, they asses on. But I’m saying not doing it is doing something.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Resmaa Menakem:
Fuck. I’m not. See y’all looking at each other. I’m not … Look, this is your podcast. Do what the fuck you want to do. I’m not telling you what to do. I’m saying there’s a certain conditioning that you’re doing, but by not doing it.
GlennonDoyle:
That’s right.
Resmaa Menakem:
Maybe you figure out ways to do it by not having them on the pipe. Maybe there’s some way that you begin, but you’re not conditioning yourself to deal with the 500 years of rage that you have that’s been passed down through white “female bodies.” That shit, the spring-load of that is still there.
Amanda Doyle:
The spring-load is the charge. And the charge …
Resmaa Menakem:
The spring-load is the charge.
Amanda Doyle:
And the charge …
Resmaa Menakem:
It’s 400 years of charge. This is why when I’m working with people who are addicted and they don’t want to deal with race, I’m like, “Oh, you are in an environment in which the whole construct of this shit was predicated on pigmentocracy. And you think that that’s separate from your addiction? You literally believe that your unwillingness to work with race is not fueling some at least little piece of your addiction. The idea that this whole thing in America has been constructed on raping people that look like me for 250 years legally, legally, legally, legally could rape people that looked like me for 250 years.”
And you don’t think that that’s fucking with your sobriety? You don’t think what’s happening in Palestine is with fucking your sobriety. You don’t want to get up out of bed and you just think it’s your depression kicking up again. Or you just need to put your fucking sunlight on your face more, it take some more vitamin D. That’s what you think. We are living on a living entity right this moment, connected to other living entities and we don’t believe that our feet sloshing around in indigenous blood is impacting us. You don’t think that’s having anything to do. So, whenever your urges to deal with your addiction start fucking popping up, you’ll only trying to find out what’s happening in the personal realm.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah.
Resmaa Menakem:
That might be you have no interest in the historical. You have no interest in the intergenerational. You have no interest in the personal, in the persistent institutional. You just go right to what’s happening between me and all of that is balled in and you have no way of pulling out a little bit nibbling and working with it so you can get conditioned by it.
Glennon Doyle:
What’s an example of clean pain?
Resmaa Menakem:
Let me ask you this. You said earlier, you said, “Resmaa, I’ve started to begin to understand a little bit about how,” not just my head and thinking about this, but my body. “I understand it differently now than I did even the first time I started to read the book.” Okay. There’s a part of that that when you say that to me that you experience as resource. Okay. I got a little bit more room with it. There’s more room to be able to play with the idea that my body is engaged in this.
At the same time you say that, there’s also constriction that says, “I might use again too.” That fear of, yeah, I got some of it. But there’s this other shoe that might drop. And usually, our interrogation is to say, “How do I make sure I’m not in this environment? How do I make sure I’m not in. I’m not around toxic people. I’m not doing this, then the other.”
And in that, you can begin to condition yourself. So, that piece becomes fuel for this piece. That in that you begin to understand the difference between clean and dirty. Not by gorging on it, but by nibbling on it in little bits and then pulling out and going to do something and then come back and nibbling on it in little bits and then going out nibbling. And then over time, you notice, ooh, there’s a little bit more room here.
That didn’t go away and I’m not busting open the chest and now I’m superwoman. It’s just I got a little bit more room with it now than I did. That’s clean and dirty. That’s clean and dirty. And most of us are not willing to do that. Most of us want epiphanies. We want something to be bestowed on us. Not that constriction. So, one of the things I always say is that constriction, the constriction of little constriction in the body, the constriction of knowing, the constriction in the face, the constriction … whatever it is, whatever how that constriction is, that’s that gnawing, that embodied gnawing can over time be cultivated into embodied not gnawing.
GlennonDoyle:
That’s good.
Resmaa Menakem:
Most of us don’t want to deal with the gnawing. We want to get rid of the gnawing, at any cost. And the moment you get rid of it is that the moment you find yourself fucked up.
GlennonDoyle:
Yep. Said addicts everywhere.
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah. Yep. Smart as fucked. Smart as fucked. And you like, “Something seems off with you.”
Amanda Doyle:
Something seems off.
Resmaa Menakem:
You smart as fucked. Something’s off with you. I don’t know what it is. You got the answer for everything. Something’s fucking off with you. That’s creation itself. That’s what I’m saying. There are these intelligences that we have that have been crowded out by cognition.
GlennonDoyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s what I mean by understanding it differently. I have found myself in situations where I feel in my body, “Oh, this is the culture I’m being conditioned to.” So, for example, Resmaa, I’ll say something as a white public person, which people will bring to my attention, is revealing a narrow vision. What I have noticed in my body is that after that moment, I think I’m feeling clean pain in that moment.
But then this thing happens that I would not have understood unless I was paying more attention to my body, which is that behind the scenes that thing will happen publicly. And then behind the scenes there will be a lot of white people, specifically men who email me privately, nothing publicly, and they’ll say, “We just saw that and that is so unfair and we’re all talking about it and you’re here.”
And Resmaa, I will feel in my body, to me as a white woman, what dirty pain feels like and why it’s so hard to identify is because it feels like comfort.
Resmaa Menakem:
Yes. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
It feels like …
Resmaa Menakem:
So, can we do something right quick? Let’s do something. Let’s do something. So, notice when you just told me that story, let’s just pause for a second. As you notice that story, what are the images that are popping through? What are the images?
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So, what comes to my mind is the whole sleeping beauty thing.
Resmaa Menakem:
Pause. Stay with The Sleeping Beauty. Stay with it. What’s the emotional content? As you notice The Sleeping Beauty images, what’s the emotional content?
Glennon Doyle:
I just keep …
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah. Right there. Right there.
Glennon Doyle:
I just keep thinking of death and safety.
Resmaa Menakem:
Pause. When you notice the death and safety, where do you notice it in your body or outside of your body? Where do you notice death first?
Glennon Doyle:
It’s all chest for me.
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah. Notice that. Notice that. Where did you notice the safety?
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a little bit lower.
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah. Yeah. So, just land on the lower, just land on the lower. As you notice, the lower, the little bit of safety. Is there any meaning that shows up? Any urges that show up?
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, Resmaa, all I am feeling is the presence of this one picture sleeping beauty where the man is over her.
Resmaa Menakem:
Pause. Pause. Stop. Stop. You don’t have to keep going into the narrative. There is this man over her. There’s this man over her. She’s pure sleeping beauty, white skin. There’s this man over her. So, at the same time, it’s Prince Charming, is at the same time, he’s got a fucking ax in his hand. So, both things are happening at the same time. White women haven’t dealt with that.
Open your eyes. What we just did was play with the intelligences. We played with the intelligence of image. We played with the intelligence of sensation. We played with the intelligence of meaning-making, urges, emotionality, vibe. Do you guys understand what I mean?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Resmaa Menakem:
That’s all we did. And all of that was happening at the same time. And all we did was just pull it out and nibble on pieces of it for itself. Just not answer. If you do that enough, something begins to move, begins to quake. Begins to get worked with in ways that when you just try and deal with it all at the same time, it can’t be worked with because it overwhelms. It’s too much.
So, that image of having this man over this woman like that, and there’s been conflicting sensation that goes with it, that never gets worked through. So, when these white men email you and say, “We saw that and we just think that’s unfair.” There’s a part of you that goes, “Oh, a white man taking care of me.” And there’s part of you that goes, “What the fuck is this?” at the same time.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s exactly right.
Resmaa Menakem:
White women don’t even know that that’s something they should be working with. Don’t even know y’all should be working with that.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
Resmaa, every interview you do or talk you do, you just are so generous with yourself and your wisdom and your energy and your mind.
Resmaa Menakem:
It’s not me. It’s my people. It’s not me. When you hear me talk, you hear my people. You don’t just hear me. You hear Professor Mahmood Al Khati, you hear James Baldwin, you hear … because I’m part of them. I’m not apart from them. So, that’s what you hear is generosity. What you hear is radical generosity is because of my people. I’ve been conditioned by that. So, this is not me, myself. I am my people.
GlennonDoyle:
Wow.
Amanda Doyle:
Thank you, Resmaa.
Resmaa Menakem:
You’re welcome. Can I ask? Can I pull up something right quick?
Amanda Doyle:
You can do whatever you want.
Resmaa Menakem:
I got a new platform that’s coming out.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Resmaa Menakem:
Called Black Octopus Society. So, it’s blackoctopussociety.com, and it’s my online piece, subscription and stuff like that, workshops, all that different type of stuff. So, people go there, they want to hook up with me.
Amanda Doyle:
We will do that. Black Octopus.
Resmaa Menakem:
Yeah. Black Octopus Society.
Amanda Doyle:
Society. Cool. We’ll put it in the show notes for sure. Black Octopus Society.
Resmaa Menakem:
Thank you.
Amanda Doyle:
Resmaa, thank you.
Resmaa Menakem:
Thank you all.
Amanda Doyle:
Appreciate. Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
Resmaa, you’re fucking awesome.
Resmaa Menakem:
Appreciate y’all.
Abby Wambach:
You’re fucking awesome. Thank you.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, that’s the only time Abby’s ever said that. Okay. Bye.
Resmaa Menakem:
Bye. Bye-bye, y’all.
Glennon Doyle:
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things, following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on Follow. This is the most important thing for the pod.
While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, GlennonDoyle and Amanda Doyle, in partnership with Odyssey.
Our executive producer is Jenna Wise Berman and the show is produced by Lauren LoGrasso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner and Bill Schultz. I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlisle.