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Racial trauma lives in our bodies first: Black bodies carry slavery's terror, white bodies hoard supremacy's armor, police bodies weaponize fear—Menakem maps this "clean pain" versus "dirty pain" of denial. He offers body-led practices (vagus nerve resets, "soul nibbling," settling the pelvis) to discharge historical stress, interrupting cycles where one group's trauma triggers another's without talk therapy or blame.​

What you can get from reading it

• Body-specific exercises for Black bodies (pelvic release from ancestral rage), white bodies (dissolving fragility armor), and police bodies (de-armoring aggression triggers)—no intellectualizing required.​
• Distinction between "clean pain" (felt grief/release) and "dirty pain" (suppressed rage/blame), with somatic tools to stay present instead of exploding or freezing.​
• "White-body supremacy" framework: how centuries of intra-white violence seeded anti-Black dominance, now stored somatically—practices to interrupt without guilt spirals.​
• Group healing rituals (body-to-body witnessing, shared quaking) for families, teams, communities to co-regulate across racial lines.​
• Somatic abolitionism vision: culture change starts embodied, not argued—daily practices building collective nervous-system resilience for justice work.​

About the author

Resmaa Menakem, MSW and leading somatic abolitionism pioneer, spent decades in therapy & justice work before creating body-centered racial healing tools used by therapists, police, and activists worldwide. Raised between Black Panther militancy and therapy training, his dual insider-outsider lens — feeling racial trauma's cellular legacy firsthand — makes him uniquely equipped to guide all bodies toward embodied reckoning.