The masked column that marched through Washington, D.C. on July 4 did not walk through Minneapolis or St. Paul. But for many in Minnesota’s Black community, the images traveled here anyway, landing in a body already carrying generations of the same story.
“That is a reminder that these things are constant and consistent,” said Dr. Resmaa Menakem, therapist and author of “My Grandmother’s Hands,” of the images of white nationalists marching in formation. “It is only when something is so egregious, because we’ve been overriding for so long, that we go, wait a minute, that just happened. But it’s always happening.”
Menakem said the danger isn’t only in the visible, “feral” moments, the marches, the viral images, but in what he calls the “seductive” pieces of white body supremacy: the daily conditioning that teaches Black people to scan a room for exits, to keep their hands visible in a store, to survive by overriding rather than processing. Left untended, he said, that weathering shows up in the body for generations. He traced his own understanding of it back to his grandmother’s hands, thick and calloused from a childhood picking cotton, a story she carried silently for decades before ever telling him why…