We Changed the Law, but We Didn't Change Ourself

Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, we return again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up his intelligence on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towards the transformed reality most of us long to inhabit.

Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP, teaches workshops on Cultural Somatics for audiences of African Americans, European Americans, and police officers. He is also a therapist in private practice, and a senior fellow at The Meadows. His New York Times best-selling book is My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Resmaa Menakem — ‘Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence’." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired June 4, 2020.