White comfort trumps my liberation. Even bodies of culture genuflect to white comfort, because we know, when white people get nervous, people lose their jobs. When white people get nervous, people get hung from trees. when white people get nervous, babies get put in cages. 

Trauma and resilience can cross generations—14 generations.

It’s always been there. There’s always been this kind of resonant knowing that something’s there.
I didn’t have a language for it, but there was a knowing that “this ain’t right.” ...but that the angst and the anguish was decontextualized.  

Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality.           Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits.            Trauma in a people looks like culture.

The trauma in Black bodies is born not just of white bodies and white people, but with the history of trauma that white people have inflicted on themselves and each other.

It’s such a revelation, to join those dots.

Land theft, enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, genocide — all of that.

So many things pass between us at an animal level, before any words are spoken or before the first sentence is complete. You can’t fake — you can pretend to be curious; you can ask a curious question — if you’re not actually curious, the other person will respond appropriately.

We’re hardwired to try and pick up on what’s authentic or not.

I’m trying to reclaim the idea that I’m actually a human.

you’re formed by the culture, physically —

Bodies of culture. That’s right. And so one of the things that happens with the vagal nerve — there’s two. There’s the vagal nerve — I call that the soul nerve — and then there’s a muscle, the psoas muscle. That psoas is a beast, because the psoas, what it does is, it connects the top part of the body with the bottom part of the body. It also — if you’re braced, it also manages whether or not you mobilize or immobilize. And if you’re born to people who are already braced, you pick up in your psoas this kind of locking down, this kind of bracing, decontextualized.

Absurd, right? You might as well just listen to Krista tippett, her voice is beautiful, soulful and soothing, talking to Resmaa Menakem— On Being, what i'm going to continue doing now.