There is a loud “NO!” being shouted by so many in our country right now. “NO!” to entrenched prejudice, oppression, and inequity; “NO!” to the pain of unrelenting insecurity, violence, and murder; and “NO!” to a culture that accepts a hierarchy of people based on the color of their skin, and tolerates the humiliation and denigration of sacred human lives.

I am hearing these shouts loud and clear: The time to wake up to both the overt and subtle injustice woven securely into the fiber of our culture is long overdue. I know I must participate in the process of ushering in transformation and healing, not just wait with my head in the sand, hoping that things will improve or that other people will stand up for change.

As the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, I often reflect upon the role bystanders played during World War II—ordinary citizens who turned a blind eye to the Nazi genocide and simply went on with their lives. By their inaction, by not shouting “NO,” these bystanders communicated that the brutal murder of six million men, women and children—and the disenfranchisement, torture and abuse of millions more—was an acceptable occurrence. They did not feel enough outrage to take a stand or lend a hand.

It’s easy to fall into apathy and despair, to believe that our voices and actions can’t make a difference. But while researching the Holocaust, I discovered that the few countries that stood in solidarity with the Jews were actually able to protect them—that people united in courageous defiance, moral strength, and generosity triumphed over extreme and powerful evil.

In Denmark, citizens rose up in unison to save the Jewish population when the Nazis ordered their deportation. Danes from every walk of life hid Jewish neighbors in homes, hospitals and churches, and then smuggled them to safety in neutral Sweden, which generously welcomed the refugees. Finland also refused to deliver its Jewish population to the Germans, and almost every Finnish Jew was saved. In Bulgaria, the highest-ranking church official made a public statement saying that trains to deport the Jews would have to pass over his body. Farmers threatened to lie down on the railway tracks to stop the trains. In response to this huge public outcry, the Jewish deportations in Bulgaria were halted. These beautiful examples give me hope about the situation in our country today.

Mendek with his cousin Simon and sister Bronia, c.1946

My father, Mendek Rubin, survived three years as a slave laborer in Nazi concentration camps while almost his entire family was murdered in Auschwitz because they had been singled out for “racial cleansing.” When he immigrated to America in 1946, he felt excited and hopeful about the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and was eager to live in a country that viewed all people as equal, endowed with the same inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But as a young refugee, he quickly learned that those ideals were a long way from being actualized.

Fifty years later he wrote, “When it comes to the workings of the mind, we still live in the dark ages. Our demons are as old as history, and our inner world has hardly changed over the past centuries. Neither science, money, education, nor government has proved capable of eliminating fear, hate, greed, or indifference.”

My father discovered how hard it is to break free from the beliefs that have been passed down from generation to generation, but that if we are committed to shining the light of self-awareness on ourselves, we can eventually come to view one another with eyes that are unclouded by prejudice.

One of the first books I read about about trauma is called, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearths and Bodies. Written by Resmaa Menakem— a black psychotherapist, activist, and well-known expert on racial conflict— it examines white body supremacy in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. Resmaa created HIPP Theory, which stands for Historical, Inter-generation, Persistent, Institutional and Personal traumas.

Resmaa explains how when all these types of trauma are coupled together and are de-contextualized, we can’t trace where our symptoms came from, so we think they are personality traits. When trauma isn’t recognized or healed, it gets stuck in our system and keeps getting passed forward, from one generation to the next. If trauma is stuck in activation mode (fight or flight), the resulting symptoms are often hypervigilance or rage. If it’s stuck in the settling domain (freeze mode), it often looks like depression, apathy, or dissociation.

I was thrilled to discover that Resmaa is offering a free online course in racialized trauma that gives a great overview of the content he shares in his book. There are five short videos that, in total, take only one hour to view. It covers trauma basics, black body trauma, white body trauma, police body trauma, and communal body trauma. If you visit Resmaa’s website, you will see information about his free class just below his bio.

Here is a link to a podcast interview with Resmaa on the Be Here Now Network from August 2019, where he talks about HIPP Theory and white body supremacy. He also discusses how we must learn to tolerate uncomfortable emotions, which I have learned is essential to trauma healing, as well as to growing our emotional capacity to witness the world as it is. Additionally, Krista Tippett just announced to keep an eye out for her upcoming interview with Resmaa on her On Being podcast.

Michelle Obama recently spoke out, saying that if we ever hope to make progress in combating a culture of prejudice, the task can’t fall only on people of color. “It’s up to all of us—black, white, everyone—no matter how well-meaning we think we might be, to do the honest, uncomfortable work of rooting it out. It starts with self-examination and listening to those whose lives are different from our own. It ends with justice, compassion, and empathy that manifests in our lives and on our streets.”

It feels like right now we are living through a critical era in history where the wounds of the world have been laid bare—external wounds that in many ways are a reflection of our inner wounds. The time for radical healing and transformation is upon us.

Wishing everyone peace, good health, and open hearts,

— Myra

Healing Racialized Trauma