The invisibility of the one-two punch
that is Blackness and poverty is brutal.
Mix that with being hungry all the damn time
and it becomes combustible.
—VIOLA DAVIS, FINDING ME
The condition of truth
is to allow suffering to speak.
—CORNEL WEST, SERMON AT HOWARD UNIVERSITY, 2011
Caution: following my suggestion in “Notes to the Reader,” this is a time to take it slow.
Caution (verb): as in to warn; to give notice to beforehand especially of danger or risk.
Synonyms: “warn, alert, advise, forewarn, inform, wake.”1
Consider that violence is a human-generated infection that, if untreated and unacknowledged, creates social, economic, and political chaos. In this chaos, those with all the power can continue to plunder millions of people. Once we understand this, it takes some personal work to understand and take responsibility for how the dynamics of violence have shaped us, and what we can do about it.
People who are victims of violence experience tremendous hurt. But it is also important to recognize that perpetrators of violence hurt themselves in the act of violence. People who hurt other people are very likely people who have, themselves, already been hurt. A common refrain in the therapy world is “hurt people hurt people.” Whether victim or perpetrator, the trauma continues.
Bayo Akomolafe, Nigerian-born philosopher, writer, and CEO of the Emergence Network, describes this two-way dynamic in visceral terms with attention to the lasting impacts of enslavement on those who were enslaved and those who enslaved and tortured others. He writes, “My cells, splintered and traumatized by the fury of your whip, are now stowaway communities hiding in the suburban gloss of your presumably white body. / … Every time you hit me, you will harden up or you will break down. / In other words, even you won’t remain the same. Even you are torn apart.”2 In other words, the white person will never be free from the harm they or their ancestors caused; the damage done returns to haunt, scar, and stain the perpetrator and their descendants. Psychiatrists, scholars, and historians understand that the perpetrator and victim are always embroiled. Akomolafe’s image resonates with W. E. B. Du Bois, who said, “The degradation of men costs something both to the degraded and those who degrade.”3
Akomolafe contends that we will never be able to find a way forward, nor transform the trauma of today that is rooted in enslavement and genocide, unless we bring ourselves back metaphorically and emotionally to the hull of a slave ship and work through it to destroy or transform our political, economic, and cultural systems.4 This is a wound. The wound holds wisdom.
He builds on the groundbreaking work of Christina Sharpe, who insists that to be Black in the United States is to be constantly in the wake or hold of the slave ship, or to be the ship itself.5 Sharpe insists that to be Black is to be constantly affected by the ongoing almost-inescapable harms of enslavement (being stolen, “owned,” or otherwise considered dead, almost dead, or killable) and constantly hindered by the “weather,” which affects the direction and speed of the ship along with the harshness of its wake. As a “total climate,” the weather is the surrounding, penetrating culture of white supremacy; its flip side is anti-Blackness. Making very plain that slavery was and is “the disaster,” Sharpe argues that the past is ever present. By extrapolation, all systems in the United States as well as dominant cultural influences entrap, limit, and harm people who are Black, Indigenous, immigrant, disabled, queer, and so on. Ongoing police brutality and murders, mistreatment by people in the medical profession, and regular, persistent racism and bigotry in schools, workplaces, stores, parks, research, and the media, are part of the weather.
Weathering, a term introduced to the world of public health over twenty years ago by researcher Arline Geronimus, is the wearing down of people’s bodies and organs due to the stress of structural, institutional, and interpersonal racism, classism, and gender discrimination that Black people and poor people experience on the daily. What Geronimus calls weathering some public health researchers call allostatic load, a term used to capture ongoing stress on all human organ systems that can cause poor health. Such stress of racism causes early death and greater health problems among Black people, especially Black women.6 In her most recent book, covering thirty years of research on systemic oppression by race, class, and gender, Geronimus demonstrates how early death, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and so many more injustices in public health are rooted in oppression, or weathering.
To return to Sharpe’s work, weather is not mere metaphor nor a medical term; it is normative. The weather shapes our bodies, pasts, and futures. In the United States, suffering and oppression is a given—as given as the weather. Knowing that Black death and Black suffering (I’ll add hunger and food insecurity) are normative, Sharpe asks, How then does a Black person make a life? How do they breathe freely and deeply? How are they enlivened? How are they nourished?
Giving several meanings to the wake—as a track on the water’s surface made by a ship, or disturbance of a body swimming, flying, or moved; as a gathering around a loved one recently dead to care for them, and in community with others so as to attend to grief and take joy in their life; as in the line of recoil of a gun; as in being alert, conscious, and wakeful—Sharpe explains the necessity of making a way, tending to and caring for each other, in the wake. Such “thinking needs care”; we must take care in our thinking.
Careful thinking: Juleen’s painting, as shared in chapter 1, comes forward through the mist of time and into stark relief.
The barrel is the ship.
She is in the hold.
And we are in her wake.
Though she has since passed on, though her body is in orange, green, and yellow (read weathering, read alloastatic load) and painted in two dimensions, Juleen is very alive, very awake.
She’s still staring at us.
What does she ask of us?
Wake work as described by Sharpe is “hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance.” She insists that though the “wake produces Black death and trauma … we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into and through the wake an insistence on existing, we insist Black being into the wake.”7 To do so is to care for each other with an ethos of mutuality and support.
Though Sharpe is speaking directly to Black people and the Black experience, all of us can learn from this ethic of care and the understanding that the legacy of slavery captures all of us in its wake to varying degrees.
The Middle Passage is a profound, terrifying wound that continues to fester, bleed, and infect us in today’s world. If we do not contend with the emotional shattering of these experiences, Akomolafe says, then any kind of “reform,” any kind of societal “change,” will keep us entrapped in the same hierarchical dynamics of the slave ship. The hierarchy of components of the slave ship are like this: food is deep below the hull at the ship’s bottom, captured African people suffering in chains are above the food, European and European descendants are the sailors on the deck, and the captain’s quarters are up high. Each one of us is on the ship because we are participating (willingly or unwillingly) in the racist, sexist, and capitalist ship of modernity. With this metaphor, Akomolafe outlines our quandary. If we try to be good people and help others through charity or policy change without also working to change our society rooted in enslavement and colonization, then perhaps we have eased some people’s pain and eased some of our shame and guilt. But less pain without a complete revolution of traumatizing systems that uphold modernity means that all we have accomplished is moved a few people up to the deck to get fresh air while millions remain in chains below. Maybe some people have a bit more food or better food and air to breathe on deck. Yet if we are not dismantling the structures that got us to this point—racial capitalism, genocide, patriarchy, whiteness, colonialism, and rape—then we are still on the slave ship or in its wake.
Understanding the dynamics of “the ship” helps us understand how so much “helping” of marginalized and exploited people can often reify the current social structures in place. It is not fully helping. At best it is keeping some people out of trouble and harm’s way, and at worst it is reenacting violence.
Reforming our judicial and prison system? It makes the slave ship more comfortable.
Providing housing subsidies? It is a fancy upgrade with traces of the slave ship.
During our interview in summer 2008, a member of Witnesses, a married Black father of five young children and an entrepreneur who lived in public housing, brought me outside to look at the long rows of homes on either side of the street. From the front stoop, he gestured with a sweep of his arm to all the Philadelphia Housing Authority homes—that is, homes made available at low cost to people experiencing poverty—and said,
Look, Mariana.
Really, really look
at all these houses in a row
with Black family after Black family after Black family.
Public housing is just another slave ship
in different form.
To not repeat the same patterns of colonialism and enslavement, we must find a way to transform the ship. As a metaphor, the ship is a stand-in for what Treva Lindsey calls a “death dealing superstructure,” or what bell hooks refers to as the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy that underlies “the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.”8 What pushes the ship along is what Sharpe calls, simply, the weather. We are steeped in this culture of domination where Black and Indigenous people, queer people, trans people, immigrants, people with disabilities, poor people (regardless of race and gender), and all women—in other words, the vast majority of people in the United States—are discriminated against. How can we possibly make a life in the wake and in this weather?
In a culture of domination, hooks explains, love cannot flourish.9
These are not disembodied systems. They are not outside of us and dismantled easily, as if we are taking apart a ship or home.
Remember how I explained in part II that SNAP’s monthly funding shortages appear in people’s bloodstreams, where they show higher rates of sugar in the blood due to poor nutrition?
The superstructure enters the bloodstream.
Consider how systemic racism, such as state legislators refusing to expand Medicaid, causes greater risk of preterm birth and early death for Black and Brown people.
The superstructure penetrates the womb.
In part I, I described how malnutrition during childhood caused by falsified food shortages alters the structure of the brain.
The superstructure blunts the brain.
Personal experiences of racism are not only associated with food insecurity, housing insecurity, and other manifestations of disinvestment and disrespect. Racism also causes heart disease.10
The superstructure invites itself into the heart.
We embody the death-dealing superstructure. If we are not careful, this “weather” will kill us or we will unwittingly use it to harm others.
Understanding that all of us participate in the weather to some degree, we are obligated to do personal work as well as prevent and undo these harms. To do so requires paying deep attention to how it works in various scenarios.
Attorney and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw reviewed many ways in which Black women are discriminated against. She insisted that US law is incapable of truly comprehending and supporting Black women because it only allows for evidence of racism or gender discrimination, without considering both simultaneously. Crenshaw suggested we change our understanding of discrimination as an experience that cannot be parsed out in singular terms. She proposed we take an intersectional approach. Intersectionality is the intersecting, inseparable experiences of suffering discrimination because a person is Black and female.11 Many have expanded the context of intersectionality to include poverty, gender expression, and disability.
I provide two examples of how racism and sexism enter people’s personal lives and their bodies. The first gets to how interpersonal violence such as child abuse cannot be separated from societal factors that promote or mirror it. The second demonstrates how misogyny and racism intersect, and how our social, political, and economic systems exacerbate and prey on intersectional forms of oppression.
Sarafina, several other members of Witnesses, and I were driving back from recruiting new members of Witnesses in Scranton, Pennsylvania. We were entering another casual conversation over dinner as we had stopped for food during our travel. We regularly exchanged stories about motherhood, child-rearing, and the funny things our kids would do and say. Sarafina and I had a conversation with several others listening in.
Sarafina: Yeah, I pop my son on a regular basis. Teaches him a lesson. Teaches him how to behave.
Me: Really? Why do you do that? Why do you have to pop him?
Sarafina: Don’t tell me you didn’t pop Sam when she was younger!
Me: Nope. Never.
Sarafina: What? That makes no sense. How do you get her to behave? Doesn’t she misbehave?
Me: Yeah sometimes, but I’ve never hit her.
Sarafina: How do you keep her in line?
Me: Uh, I guess through redirecting her or maybe changing my tone. But I would never hit her.
Sarafina: (Eyes wide in shock.) Unbelievable. Did your parents hit you when you were growing up?
Me: Well yes, I got spanked and slapped a few times. But just because my parents did it, doesn’t mean I would. I would never hit my kids. No matter what.
Sarafina: I got hit all the time. Hmph. Black people pop their kids to teach respect.
Me: Really? Why is that a “Black” thing?
Sarafina: O-M-G. Isn’t it obvious?
Me: Not really.
I was used to being reprimanded for knowing nothing about Black life. Through my own behavior, I continued to confirm for members of Witnesses the many pitiful habits of white people. These include, but are not limited to, such things as talking in a tight white-sounding tone, missing the point, asking ridiculous questions, always eating salads, and being snooty and clueless, fragile in character, and book smart but otherwise foolish.
I shrugged my shoulders, indicating a willingness to be schooled as usual. At that moment, I was working hard to suspend judgment, though spanking and other forms of humiliating children made me cringe and deflate.
Sarafina: It’s just Black parenting, Mariana.
Me: Why is that Black parenting? What is Black about it?
Sarafina: (Exasperated.) OK, let me break it down to you.
When I was down south,
I stayed with my aunt.
I was a kid, maybe twelve or thirteen.
We were getting ready to go to the mall.
And my aunt grabbed my little cousin,
and she slapped him hard, and yelled,
“Now, YOU BEHAVE!”
I asked my aunt,
“Why d’you whoop him so much?”
She said, “Girl, I hit him inside
my own house
with my own hand,
so he knows how to behave on the outside.
He’s got to keep in line.
He’s got to behave.
If he steps outta line outside,
they wouldn’t just whoop him,
he’d get lynched.”
See?
Sarafina broke it down: contemporary violence in the home connects to a deep and ongoing history of brutality rooted in white supremacy. Contemporary racist trends were built up over four hundred years of terror perpetrated by white people. In return, these dynamics have deeply affected the child-rearing practices of many Black and white families. Trauma and violence that occur in the home are perpetrated and upheld by our white-dominated society, collective histories, cultural and economic degradation, and active shaming. This pressure of oppression releases stress into the family and onto the children.
Author and educator Joy DeGruy has a name for these dynamics: post-traumatic slave syndrome.12 This syndrome is the result of four hundred years of unaddressed trauma in our society that is playing out in the family. Behaviors such as denigrating a child or not lifting them up with praise were adaptive mechanisms to help people survive the brutality of enslavement and ever-present threat of family separation. DeGruy provided an example of a white overseer remarking on the brilliance of an enslaved woman’s son. A mother would reply, “No, he’s lazy and stupid.” In doing so, maybe the enslaver would not put a price on her son and sell him out from under her arms to another enslaver. These ways of being and doing may have been protective during times of enslavement, and may have protected many from lynchings over multiple generations. But as I’ve mentioned previously, in trauma specialist Menakem’s estimation, these behavioral trauma responses begin to take on an accepted sense of culture.13 This parenting pattern considered to be a cultural norm also slams the trauma deeper into the psyche, into a child’s body and our collective body.
My refusal to hit my children is also based in my whiteness. My sense of ease and freedom stems from a confidence that my children will not be killed for simply breathing—for trying to live, go jogging, walk in a park, or sleep in their own bed. This is because my children and I are white. If my children misbehave a little in public, it is unlikely they will be murdered. My children and I are protected by white supremacy culture reflected everywhere, especially in the police’s cowardly reliance on race to decide whether they will drag out their gun and pull the trigger.
Here’s another illustration that exemplifies how these same dynamics are embroidered into our systems.
Always dead serious, Jewell, a member of Witnesses and a Black mother of two children whom I mentioned before as she talked about the inadequacy of Medicaid, described how she was not allowed to receive Medicaid coverage until she identified the father of her children and provided proof of his paternity. This would supply evidence that Jewell was “poor enough” to receive Medicaid. Caseworkers at the county assistance offices document all sources of income. The children’s father is considered an important source of funds. The state relies on this information to garner men’s wages to ostensibly be reimbursed for providing “child support.” To establish paternity, she would therefore be deemed as telling the truth about her financial conditions. Also, this way the state could garnish his wages.
This was impossible for Jewell, however, as she would be required to get his address, which she did not have. Additionally, she would have to be in contact with him, even though he had assaulted her many times and, as a result, she had filed a formal restraining order on him. She knew well that if her children’s father could locate her, he would kill her.
Already, the misogyny and heteronormativity in the system is apparent as it refuses to provide support unless the biological father is identified. This relegated Jewell and her children as disposable unless somehow connected to a man. The man is also suspect—criminalized and made to pay child support to the state.
But Jewell sees it as even more complicated. She recognizes how Black men are mistreated by public systems and actively denied gainful employment opportunities. They feel hemmed in with few options. Out of frustration and built-up rage, they may take their anger out on those closest to them. The same societal forces that keep Black men down may give rise to their willingness to abuse people around them. So it is not just one man or one institution that keeps people unsafe. It is multiple layers of systems and societal processes that mutually reinforce oppression.
For Jewell, it was challenging to find ways to protect herself while utilizing the current systems. She explained,
They have restraining orders.
They try, but what do you do?
It takes the cops so long to arrive.
’Cause the fight I had with my children’s father …
if he wanted to kill me,
he could’ve killed me
and then been gone by the time the cops came.
I can only testify …
Being a Black man in an urban neighborhood
and not being able to find employment,
they get angry and
they lash out at whoever’s near them.
Who is that?
You.
Jewell showed us how public assistance sought to enforce sexist ideas by requiring her to identify the father of the children to establish her “deservingness” and extract money from the father of her children. She needed health coverage for herself and her children, yet under the guise of needing money to support that by extracting it from the father, this also put Jewell in danger. Her life became disposable and unsafe in the very act of applying for health insurance.
In the meantime, her oldest son became damaged by witnessing the abuse she received from his father. Remember, this is an ACE. He manifested severe behavioral problems, including setting his own bed on fire. This caused a house fire that made it unlivable. As a result, not only were she and her family houseless for a while, but it became clear that her son needed residential treatment for significant, debilitating trauma-related symptoms.
The two examples above demonstrate how racism, sexism, and capitalism intersect. The racism and heteropatriarchy are clear. The capitalism is right there in Jewell’s experience because she was poor in the first place due to low wages necessary to generate corporate profit. The father’s wages were also going to be garnered and sucked back into the state system, thus taking the hard-earned fruits of his low-wage labor. To receive some help and promote her health and right to live, Jewell had to apply for public assistance, which in turn harnessed patriarchal tactics with lethal potential.
As a Black man, Jewell’s former partner is far more likely to be imprisoned than a white man; in fact, despite reduced sentencing laws and other attempts to curb mass incarceration, Black men are still far more likely to be imprisoned than white and Latino men. He is at risk for going to jail for unpaid child support too. When one in three Black men are at risk for being ensnared by police and prisons, our carceral society creates more trauma, disenfranchises communities, robs Black people of voting rights, and truncates their ability to build economic security.
Capitalism relies on inequality. It gained its global might through three harmful processes: colonization (land theft and genocide), the transatlantic slave trade, and truncating women’s rights. Through legal domination, capitalism also relied on criminalizing anyone who resisted or refused to work within this hierarchical structure. It is important to remember that capitalism is not a mere economic structure devoid of social, cultural, and political influences. It relies on them. This is why it is important to take an intersectional approach to understanding capitalism. Building on the work of Du Bois, political theorist Cedric Robinson is credited with creating the term racial capitalism. His investigations show that capitalism and racism are mutually interdependent. Going deeper, he shows that racism helped give rise to capitalism. That is, capitalism itself was developed through human trafficking, enslavement, and genocide to facilitate the land theft that supplied white settlers with plantations to exploit the labor and bodies of millions for profit. Indeed, if one merely considers who constructed the original buildings in almost any East Coast and southern city, we see the interplay of colonization and enslavement as the foundations of America’s supposed economic prowess. This exploitation of people and land was racialized—that is, it was legally justified through the racist lens of white supremacy, where anyone who had a tint in their skin color was deemed subhuman by white people and unworthy of owning land as well as participating in the economy and politics. Their only value to white people was in their service of white people. This racialization was legitimized and strengthened by western European legal systems, which made it possible for people who were exploited in Europe to come to the Americas and build wealth through this hierarchy. Robinson explains that all capital expansion was achieved through the racialization of others to devalue their labor and land, thereby creating the current world economic order.14
While many have adopted this stance in their analyses of capitalism, lesser known but growing in influence is the recognition that not only were colonization and racism foundations of capitalism but so is misogyny—the hatred, mistreatment, and abuse of women. Writer and feminist activist Silvia Federici explains the outrageous details of the third form of mass violence forming the three-legged torture stool of modern capitalism: the state domination of women by forcing them from the commons, limiting their ability to earn wages by disappearing them altogether from the workforce so as to subjugate their bodies and labor to reproduction and caregiving only. Through this process they were reduced to simply reproducing more labor.15 Any woman who lived alone, grew and utilized herbs for healing, including abortion and fertility control, or refused the rising new economic systems was criminalized, and thus under the threat of being tortured to death by burning at the stake or incapacitated through other means. Federici points out that between the 1400s and 1600s as feudalism was breaking down, and many women were joining in social movements in solidarity with serfs, artisans, and merchants to resist feudal lords and protect the commons, the powerful elite were worried about the loss of land, profit, and power. To retain power and profit, they sought to subdue and terrorize women to relegate them to reproduction and housekeeping. Poor women, too, became property, as did slaves. To be property denies one’s humanity. Enslaved people were “thingified.”16 That is, they were denied any opportunity to be the sovereign of their bodies, children, present, and futures. They were therefore disposable, commodified, traded, exploited, tortured, and raped to create more property (not people).
The same forces thrive today under different guises: the unpaid labor of housework and child-rearing, no family leave, no sick leave, the criminalization of abortion and family planning, and rampant intimate partner violence. Federici underscores that throughout history, when there is significant economic downturn and population loss (as happened in Europe due to various famines, including the Great Famine of 1315 and the Black Death), women become further subjugated to produce more bodies for the powerful to control and exploit. With this analysis, it becomes clear that the public hand-wringing by US conservatives in 2022 about low birth rates along with the fickle economy, Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, and concurrent state bans on abortions are a part of this ongoing process. To force women to give birth reduces their power, autonomy, and bodily sovereignty. It simultaneously creates more people for the rich and powerful to plunder.
Overall, the domination and exploitation of Indigenous people, Black people, and women helped capitalism to emerge and to regenerate itself. These intersecting layers of oppression continue to keep women of color down especially. Scholar Susila Gurusami utilizes the term intersectional capitalism to drive this point home. She asserts that “during enslavement, the production of white capital required the literal co-optation of Black women’s wombs for the reproduction of white profit; enslaved black women were dismissed as hypersexual breeders incapable of being good mothers, while white slaveholders simultaneously leveraged Black children to force their mothers into compliance.”17 This process embedded and obscured within it the legal and moral justification for rape (which I will get to soon).
Don’t let this focus on intersectionality, which makes us focus primarily on the victims of intersectional oppression, let you forget that such experiences are also a reflection of ideas, practices, and beliefs about “whiteness.” White people had to be subjugated into these practices as well. As I explained in chapter 5, after the supposed abolition of slavery, white lawmakers installed the Black codes, making it illegal to hire and pay Black people, intermarry with white people, and fraternize or go into business together. So white people were disciplined into this ongoing subjugation. The concept of whiteness justified opportunities to exploit Black and Indigenous people by paying low or no wages, stealing land, restricting educational advancement and health care, and denying access to clean water and air. Concepts of whiteness not only legitimized power and control for white people, especially through the development of the US legal system, but also, in the words of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, today’s ideas of whiteness “enshrines the status quo as a neutral baseline, while masking the maintenance of white privilege and domination.”18 That status quo consists of the unchallenged political, economic, and social systems in the United States.
Once you see the exploitative processes of capitalism and racism that rely on inequality, subjugation, and early death, the contours of whiteness or white supremacy culture become visible.19 Much of the time, white supremacy culture is invisible, most especially to white people who simply consider their way of being as the norm.
White supremacy culture does not just belong to or get harnessed by white people but rather by all kinds of people. It is actually quite common for people of color and marginalized groups to utilize these ways of doing and being to get ahead, or merely survive. The characteristics of white supremacy culture identified by Tema Okun are the tendency toward perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness, appreciation of quantity over quality, outsized worship of the intellect and written word, conviction that there is only one right way to do something, paternalism, either-or thinking, power hoarding, individualism, love of “progress,” insistence on ideas of objectivity, right to comfort, and an emphasis on thinking and writing over emotional wisdom and self-expression.
These characteristics show up in office culture as well as within the culture of politics, business, academia, philanthropy, the judicial system, education, welfare, and health care, and yes, in antihunger spaces. There are many antidotes to whiteness, and hundreds of books and articles developed over decades, along with many organizations that invite people to become more self-aware and get started in changing their assumptions and behaviors about what is appropriate or successful behavior in school, on the job, on the field or court, and in the courtroom.20
But let us not fall into that trap of thinking we can read our way out of white supremacy culture. It takes a reorientation to the world with a deep recognition that our patterns of thought are shaped across many generations. Ultimately, to undo white supremacy culture, it takes a willingness to betray ancestral patterns of owning and controlling other people, and assuming that the way things are at the office, or in government and philanthropy, and so on, are to be accepted and celebrated as professional and socially appropriate. Through discomfort and vulnerability, there is growth and learning; it creates an openness to accepting that all kinds of people have inherent wisdom that should be valued. Undoing whiteness requires solidarity across lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and geography to value our common humanity and power. We should also move beyond false notions of objectivity and encourage the concept of both-and along with shared decision-making. We can begin to recognize how defensiveness may be a cover for fear of losing power and credibility, take more time to ensure decisions are thoughtful and inclusive, and be patient with mistakes. Ultimately, dismantling whiteness is about grounding oneself in humility, gentle curiosity, deep listening, and getting out of the way of Black people, Indigenous people, immigrants, and all people of color who are already taking the lead or trying to.
Viewing white supremacy culture as primarily rooted in a racialized trauma response, Menakem, in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, explains that white supremacy culture keeps us dissociating and disengaging from our emotional depths by staying always busy, running, doing, and thinking rather than feeling what is going on in our bodies.21 True, harnessing white supremacy culture helps many of us to survive and succeed. But when we do so, we cause harm to many people by devaluing emotions as well as people’s desire to be loved and valued, and we do so at tremendous cost to our own emotional well-being.
Those focused on undoing white supremacy culture and its harms insist that we work with our need to express grief; that we build our capacity to feel and express a broad range of emotions without fear and self-loathing. Having depth of emotion allows a person to develop empathy and compassion. It opens us to all sorts of new relationships with different kinds of people. It exposes us to more ways of accepting, empathizing, and having compassion for people who are different from us. Otherwise, we miss out on many nourishing friendships. Almost parallel to the work of Menakem, Larry Ward explains that in order to heal America’s racialized way of being and doing, we need to become “whole again by embracing grief. Our grief work is probably the most important thing we can do at this time of awakening as a society, to heal the places in us and in our country that have not known love.”22
The sound you make
upon awakening
in a time like this
is not “Hallelujah!”
It’s not, “I get it.”
It’s not, “Amen.”
It’s not, “Finally.”
It’s not, “I’m ready.”
It’s a sob.
Sob is not nothing.
Sob is not “what you do”
before you do something.
Sob is an act of subversion.
—STEPHEN JENKINSON, INTERVIEW ON END OF TOURISM (PODCAST)
We cannot move toward love, compassion, and care for others unless we move beyond our intellect. It has to be done in action, and the action forces us to engage our bodies with meaningful emotional awareness.
If one looks underneath indifference, rage, fear, and avoidance, one is likely to find profound grief—the kind that brings forth the sobs when we wake up to the horrible injustices in front of us. If our ancestors allowed such emotions to emerge, our hearts might be more likely to be open to empathy, compassion, and understanding. We would be able to reach out to each other with kindness, fellowship, and solidarity. If the full depth and breadth of emotional awareness were allowed, the current state of the affairs in the United States, where half of all children are born into poverty, would likely not exist.
But many people who have wealth and power in the United States take no time to assess what is really going on. This is the indifference underneath the death-dealing systems. Indifference to one’s own pain and that of others is how people in power have been able to stay “on top” for so long. It is by shutting down their emotions in a traumatic tradition of dissociation. This shuts down their ability to connect with people, especially Black, Indigenous, and Brown people.
It is difficult for many of us to understand when we see and experience indifference around us. I’ve been trying to get a handle on why people are indifferent by observing and listening deeply to the people in my life. I loved my mother dearly, and she did her best to raise my siblings and me with humor and grace, but she was also emotionally shut down, unwilling and unable to process deep emotions. She taught me to do what she did to survive, which is to keep my emotions tucked tightly away, deep inside. As I explained in the introduction, this can be the trauma response of dissociation.
My mother took great care in her relations with strangers. “Say hello and give a firm handshake,” she would coach me. “Look the other person in the eye and stand up straight.” This form of greeting was usually a cool encounter that expressed a slight hint of charm, but that also signaled social status, confidence, top of the hierarchy, and a sense of untouchability.
We sometimes attended the Episcopalian church. After the sermon, the minister would say, “Now it’s time to pass the peace.” Passing the peace is a way of greeting the people around you with a handshake or hug. You say, “Peace” or “Peace be with you,” and smile. It was the only time we took your eyes off the minister and hymnal to acknowledge the shared humanity of the people around us.
This was my favorite part of church. It was as if I was given permission to remember that I belonged to a group beyond my own family. I liked it, too, because it felt like transgressing a strange boundary my mother instilled. In passing the peace, I could talk to other people I didn’t know. When adults I didn’t know smiled at me and shook my hand, saying, “Peace be with you,” it felt equalizing and kind. My heart warmed.
But mom felt differently. She would stiffly turn around to one person behind her, give an equally stiff handshake, smile, and turn around to reinhabit a stone face. On the contrary, I’d pass the peace on my mother’s other side, to three people behind me, a few behind them, and then a few in front.
I was amazed by my mother’s stiffness. Something about touching another stranger and saying “peace” seemed just too intimate for her. It’s possible my mother felt that to greet people with “peace be with you” would open an emotional wound deep inside her that she had been protecting all of her life. To say something emotionally caring to another person she did not know well that indicated intimacy and equity was too threatening to her self-defenses. Being vulnerable with her children was also threatening. She protected her heart from everyone.
In my adulthood, I recognized that my mother had been masking a deep depression that was, in many ways, a response to both her parent’s alcoholism and her low sense of self-worth. In the rare private moments we shared, my mother sometimes talked about the quality of her depression. She explained that perhaps her own sadness was rooted in how her mother treated her. My mother explained that her mother had unaddressed, unprocessed grief, which was passed on from her mother (my great-grandmother). My grandmother, my mother explained, always felt inadequate. She was depressed and devalued because my grandmother’s mother was filled with grief at losing her first two children, both boys. One died as a baby from “crib death” or sudden infant death syndrome. The other died at age fifteen from the flu during the pandemic of 1918. He lied about his age so he could drive an ambulance for flu victims, and did so against his parent’s wishes. He caught the flu and died quickly, it seems, without reconciliation with his parents.
From that moment, my mother explained, her grandmother always wore black to signal she was in mourning for her boys, and never expressed much care and support for her girl children. Her grandmother always favored boys (perhaps unaddressed grief she felt for having lost her boys or internalized sexism, or both), and made her girl children feel inadequate, worthless, and burdensome. This may have been a major cause of my grandmother’s alcoholism, my mother commented. Perhaps this is rooted in my grandmother’s low self-worth as well as limited opportunities for self-expression and actualization. This then, my mother theorized, circled back on itself as a form of self-abuse. My mother picked this up as well. In my mother’s attempts to prevent passing on her own low self-esteem to us, she worked hard to hide her feelings of grief, loss, and sadness. Most of that original grief was not originally hers, but she made it hers by holding her mother’s and grandmother’s grief tight to the chest.
“I’m afraid of my depression,” she said. “I have a deep gaping hole at my center. It’s a dangerous powerful whirlpool that threatens to suck me in if I look at it and try to face it. So to avoid it, what I do is I keep busy, very busy. I do not like to sit down for a second.”
This did not surprise me. During my late childhood in the early morning of summertime, when my siblings and I might be languishing over our Cheerios on the front porch, we could hear her coming around the corner. If we couldn’t scramble away, we would brace ourselves for the inevitable questions,
What are you going to do today?!
What’s your plan?!
Everyone needs a plan!
Not only did it make her nervous to stay in one place or sit still, but anyone else sitting still or simply relaxing without a plan to start running put her on edge. These are the ways she transferred the trauma response in white culture: everything is urgent, so always stay busy to avoid opportunities to feel. Plus always being busy is rewarded by other white people. This makes one feel important and seem important to others.
She continued, “I always stay busy so I can avoid this fear of falling into the hole that has always been there. I am afraid to fall in. So I have to keep running, and running, or stay busy. Because, if I relax and look over the edge, I’m afraid I will get drawn in and never get out. It would be the end of me.” My mother knew her problem but had few resources she could muster up to change herself. As well, she relied on my father, a sexist in his own right, for income and companionship. It seems she could not muster the energy and courage to transform without support of those around her.
My mother’s constant running and doing naturally kept my siblings and me in a constant state of churning. I was always running, striving, and doing. We were never encouraged to stop, take time to feel our emotions, or just relax. We were certainly never provided the tools for looking over the edge into our own gaping holes.
Here you see at least four generations of white women limited by patriarchy and depression. Where is the racism? It’s so embedded in my family’s history as to render itself invisible to my family. Only in 2020, long after the death of both of my parents, was I able to get my siblings and cousins to engage in a conversation about enslavement. Interestingly, I was able to begin that conversation after my cousins sent a group email to my siblings and me with a digital image of a letter from that fifteen-year-old boy, my great uncle who, a few weeks after writing the letter, died of the flu in 1918. I knew that was my opening to start a conversation about it—especially since we were all sheltering in place, feeling vulnerable and anxious. Despite my occasional requests to learn more, it never occurred to my siblings and cousins to investigate enslavement in our family history, despite our grandmother’s drunken rants about our great ancestors of Virginia while she pointed to the white men in scary-looking portraits on her wall. No one ever mentioned our family’s history of enslaving people. Our genteel iciness froze over the deep holes within us and helped us resist attempts to touch that history.
I began the research in earnest in 2020. After a few months of learning how to search the censuses, I found that all four of my grandparents were directly descended from many enslavers. Getting help from an organization called Coming to the Table that supports research, connection, reparations, and many other forms of engagement among descendants of enslavers and people who were enslaved, I built up enough courage to learn how to look. I found more than four hundred people whom my ancestors had enslaved. As I continue to uncover documents, the numbers keep growing. The research is slow and painful, and some of it necessitated talking with my cousins and asking them to go through the dusty boxes they saved with wills and other documents. At the end of my first Zoom meeting with some of my siblings and cousins to discuss our process, my white Virginia cousin, a man around my age, slowly said, “I knew our family had enslaved others, but I guess I never considered till now that our ancestors were rapists.”
Many of us white descendants of enslavers keep running and running around so we don’t have to confront the truth at the center of our comfortable lives, much less allow ourselves opportunities to touch emotions that go generations deep. What are these emotions? They are likely a complex of unaddressed unbearable grief or horror that can shatter the spirit. That deep hole to the past goes all the way back to the ships with thirty million Africans stolen and entrapped by the transatlantic slave trade. And it goes deeper still, to the embers leftover from tens of thousands of women burned at the stake. Yet for many, as a trauma response, it is frozen over by generations of fear, shame, and self-numbing. This is the ice of indifference.
That deep hole of time travel makes a sound. It’s a sob that demands to become a scream.
Since we’re leaning into the sobs and screams, let’s get back to food insecurity and name the depth of the trouble that Juleen, Celeste, Tinisha, and Remi made clear. At the center of the depths of this suffering that manifests on the surface as hunger is rape. Rape, and all the associated trauma responses to it, are a taproot that generates and regenerates the experience of hunger. So to put an end to hunger, we must put an end to rape and rape culture.
Rape is a serious harm experienced by people of all races, ethnicities, and genders. Rape wounds a person so profoundly as to damage the soul. The soul is the deepest aspect of self and identity. Harms to the soul last much longer than physical or emotional injury because, as a sexual violation, rape strikes at the core of our own sense of being human and leads to feelings of deep shame. It is a harsh violation of the sacred.
Sarah Deer, a law professor and member of the Muscogee (Creek) nation of Oklahoma, takes on some of the United States’s hardest cases of violence against Indigenous women. She asserts that decolonizing and promoting Indigenous sovereignty demands that we put an end to rape itself. From Deer’s point of view, colonization is a systemic and complete violation of Indigenous people’s identity and sovereignty.23 Deer explains that colonizers utilized the same tactics that sexual predators use such as humiliation, manipulation, deceit, and physical force. Colonization has the same impact as rape: comprehensive devastation along with the loss of land, place, meaning, and self.
Hence rape is not only an interpersonal act of grave violence and domination but also a political construct that reveals the trauma at the foundation of the United States. Moreover, the reframing of colonization and enslavement as rape brings in the very tangible weight of how patriarchy—the toxic and dangerous ideology as well as actions by men who think and act as if they own the world and everyone in it—wounds the soul. This wound is not metaphoric; it is palpable and real.
Rape culture supports a social, economic, and political environment that allows for and encourages sexual violence against women and children. In the United States, one in four girls and one in thirteen boys have experienced sexual violence.24 In adulthood, one in six women has been a victim of attempted or completed rape. For Indigenous women, it is one in three.25 These numbers may be even worse, however, as we know that most women do not report their experiences of rape to legal authorities for fear of being mistreated by the police and judicial system, and for fear of losing their children.
Such fears are rational. Consistent, unrelenting police violence against women and police entanglement with child protective services are well documented. Why would a woman subject herself to reporting the harms against her by calling men in uniform backed by county, state, and federal government with guns and tasers who themselves are known perpetrators of violence? A Buffalo, New York, news report found that every five days, a police officer is charged with committing sexual assault.26 In their book Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color, Andrea Ritchie and Angela Davis outline the myriad ways in which the police and judicial system actively engage in violence against women. One of those is legalized rape. There are thirty-five states that allow police to “have sex” with people in their custody—that is, while on duty, and while someone is caged or in handcuffs.27 This is not consensual; it is legalized rape by state authorities.
The police are just one official entity with extraordinary powers that partakes in rape culture. Predatory exploits by men reach the highest levels of power in the United States to include numerous presidents, members of the Supreme Court, CEOs of large companies, rock and rap stars, gymnastics coaches buoyed by the International Olympic Committee, movie moguls protected by Hollywood agents, and university deans.
This despicable legitimized behavior and sexual exploitation is not new. The rape culture of today is founded on thousands of years of legal rape and violation that have been mandated and encouraged by people in positions of supreme power.
Consider the pope along with the kings and queens he served.
The papal bulls (official decrees from the Vatican) legitimized rape. They justified and endorsed policies to declare the enslavement of others a “divine right.” In 1452, Pope Nicholas V gave a “directive” to the king of Portugal to go to the west coast of Africa to invade, subdue, and reduce its people to perpetual slavery and take away all of their property. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI said, “It is pleasing to the divine majesty to subjugate Africans and anyone else who does not believe in the Christian god.” In Lenni Lenape historian Steven Newcomb’s analysis, the Latin word for subjugation was deprimanteur, meaning to reduce, cast down, press down, or hold down. The pope declared, “This is how empires succeed.”28 These enslavement edicts were repeated seven times in the years that followed. Considering this historical and legal dynamic, I cannot help but think of Juleen: pressed, held down, and raped by her father-in-law on the sofa, and who, in order to survive another day, had no choice but to shut down all emotion.
The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Swedish, and French were involved in the terror trade. Centuries later, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Randolph (my ancestor), or fill in the list with the white men who signed the US Constitution built this country on rape that was legitimized by racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. These “founding fathers,” most of whom enslaved others, had the legal wherewithal and economic incentive to rape women to produce more slaves and more wealth. This wealth is coupled with the soul-wounding violence on which our country was built.29
Patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism rely fundamentally on the idea that men have a right to control, dominate, and own everything—especially women and children.
What happens to white people’s souls and the souls of men in this process?
Through more and more domination, they cut themselves off from emotional and spiritual bonds. hooks explains that patriarchy is part of a culture of domination and emotional truncation that forces men to fragment themselves and cut themselves off from feeling deep emotions as well as a sense of love and belonging. How this emotional truncation manifests is often through “psychological terrorism and violence.”30
Patriarchy, and as an extension heteronormativity, which refuses to accept and embrace nonbinary, trans, and the full array of gender expressions, is upheld through keeping family secrets about violence in the family. This secrecy allows a culture of domination to continue. Additionally, patriarchal culture conditions many of us to somehow become sucked in to believing that love and connection is women’s work and a woman’s domain. This in turn encourages men to become and remain “emotional cripples,” according to hooks, and cut off from their full emotional well-being.31 As Judith Herman, expert on the trauma of violence against women, explains, there are many men who have committed rape, incest, and other forms of sexual assault who have an utter lack of remorse or tenderness toward the people they harmed.32
Healing from hunger and the culture of domination demands that we begin with the truth of the emotional wounding that millions of people seem so eager to ignore or hide. Continuing to hide it only makes the festering more combustible (to use Viola Davis’s term) in the family and our body politic.33 When I say millions of people, I mean regular people who seem to just “go along to get along.” This is how the violence of racism, colonization, and patriarchy continue.
To address and heal hunger, the US government and formal institutions not only need to bring forth and reckon with the truth about the terror and harms of enslavement and colonization generally but also specifically about the violence against women and children. Our society enables ongoing racism, discrimination, and violence against women. Herman insists that tyranny in the household is a mere reflection of the tyranny tolerated and facilitated by our society. In tyrannical societies, she argues, the rules are simple. They are governed by the rules of dominance and subordination. “The strong do as they will because they can. The weak and vulnerable submit. Bystanders are fearfully silent, willfully blind, or willingly complicit with those in power.”34 Regardless of representatives of the US government proclaiming that the United States is a democracy, the rules of tyranny still apply when entire groups of people such as women, African American people, and Indigenous people are excluded from the full rights of citizenship. Rape, like hunger, is as American as apple pie.
One of the most important ways to resist and dismantle this tyranny is to change the actions of bystanders. Herman insists that in all of her conversations with survivors, what they want first and foremost is help to recover. Second, they want others to know the truth, and to acknowledge the pain and harm caused by the perpetrators. She pays special attention to the witnesses or bystanders, who oftentimes do nothing, say nothing, and provide no acknowledgment. This isolates sexual violence victims even further. Herman has said, “All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”35 Our justice system does hardly anything to provide truth, acknowledgment, and repair, so we must seek out alternative approaches to healing that do not follow the rules of tyranny. There are many examples of communities attempting to stop the violence and acknowledge the harm caused by assault while providing alternatives to justice, which I get to in the next chapter. Public efforts also include memorials such as the Survivors Memorial in downtown Minneapolis, making sexual assault visible and allowing survivors to publicly memorialize their stories so people can witness and attend.
Tarana Burke, a survivor of sexual assault, started the #MeToo movement on social media in 2006 to promote empathy toward survivors and ensure they had spaces to feel seen, heard, and validated. As a Black woman, her work is especially important. Black women are far more likely to be ignored and blamed for their victimization than are white women.36 As well, there is enormous pressure for Black women and girls to not report being raped to protect the collective. That is, to report rape by a Black man, family member, or acquaintance would be considered a form of cultural betrayal, thereby putting Black men at even greater risk in our racist society.37 The #MeToo movement picked up broad support after Harvey Weinstein, notorious Hollywood producer, was finally publicly called to account for raping and assaulting many women after decades of inside knowledge that he was doing so. One of the reasons the #MeToo movement took off again was because most of the women he harmed are white and have public recognition. Many people recognize and publicly insist that when white women call someone out, the world pays attention. Much less so do people pay attention to the suffering and outcry of Black women and girls. Though Weinstein was clearly causing harm over three decades, as soon as white women broke through the silence of the press, the coverage and legal action was swift. On the other hand, Black women and girls had been publicly calling out R. Kelly for rape and sex trafficking for the same amount of time, but few people paid attention. “We are socialized to respond to the vulnerability of white women,” said Burke. “It’s a truth that is hard for some people to look in the face, and they feel uncomfortable when I say things like that.”38
Formerly powerful men like Weinstein and Kelly are in prison now, but that is not the answer, nor is it enough to stem the misogyny in America. Millions of people must publicly denounce this kind of socially sanctioned abuse, speak out against it, and refuse to allow it to happen. And we must do so especially when it comes to the suffering of Black and Indigenous women, even as it makes us uncomfortable and feel exposed.
Herman insists that most of the work that needs to be done to end rape culture is for bystanders to stop being bystanders and instead stand alongside and with victims to help with the truth and healing process. Such action also helps bystanders to reclaim (or claim) their own moral standing. Remember: trauma cannot be faced alone; it is too much for one soul to bear. Having witnesses or bystanders acknowledge and help hold the pain can help relieve it and help make way for healing.
This is hard to do, surely. Yes, it makes us uncomfortable because many of us are afraid to lose family members, financial support, standing in our community, and our sense of belonging. But we can take our cue from thousands of people who have been courageous enough to speak up, resist the tyranny, join with others, and break the chain.
Is this what Juleen asks of us?
1. “Caution,” Merriam-Webster, accessed July 5, 2023, https://
2. Bayo Akomolafe, “Crossroads,” Báyò Akómoláfé (blog), April 18, 2019, https://
3. W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (1909; New York: International Publishers Co., 2014), 16.
4. Bayo Akomolafe, “Grounding VUNJA,” February 13, 2020, https://
5. Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
6. Arline T. Geronimus, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023); Arline T. Geronimus et al., “‘Weathering’ and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 5 (May 2006): 826–833, https://
7. Sharpe, In the Wake, 10, 11.
8. Treva B. Lindsey, America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022); bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 17.
9. bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love, rep. ed. (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2001), 182.
10. LaPrincess C. Brewer and Lisa A. Cooper, “Race, Discrimination, and Cardiovascular Disease,” AMA Journal of Ethics 16, no. 6 (June 1, 2014): 455–460, https://
11. Kimberlé Crenshaw, On Intersectionality: Essential Writings (New York: New Press, 2019).
12. Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Portland, OR: Joy DeGruy Publications, 2017).
13. Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press, 2017).
14. Cedric J. Robinson, Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 2019).
15. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).
16. Martin Luther King Jr., 1967 interview at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, with NBC News’s Sander Vanocur about the “new phase” of the struggle for “genuine equality.” NBC News, “MLK Talks ‘New Phase’ of Civil Rights Struggle, 11 Months before His Assassination,” YouTube, April 4, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xsbt3a7K-8&t=11s.
17. Susila Gurusami, “Working for Redemption: Formerly Incarcerated Black Women and Punishment in the Labor Market,” Gender and Society 31, no. 4 (August 2017): 436, https://
18. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” June 10, 1993, https://
19. Tema Okun, “(Divorcing) White Supremacy Culture: Coming Home to Who We Really Are,” White Supremacy Culture, accessed February 28, 2022, https://
20. Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019); Layla Saad, Me and White Supremacy (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2020); Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk about Race (New York: Seal Press, 2018); Heather C. McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (New York: One World, 2021); “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex,” Indigenous Action Media, May 4, 2014, https://
21. Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands.
22. Larry Ward, America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2020), 70.
23. Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
24. “Child Sexual Abuse,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, December 8, 2021, https://
25. Michele Black et al., The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report (Atlanta: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 2011), https://
26. “Abusing the Law,” Buffalo News, December 2016, https://
27. Albert Samaha, “An 18-Year-Old Said She Was Raped While in Police Custody. The Officers Say She Consented,” BuzzFeed News, accessed October 14, 2022, https://
28. Bill Weiss, “The Doctrine of Discovery—‘Domination,’” YouTube, March 30, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSfG9YMkxBY.
29. Just because the papal bulls are five hundred year old does not mean that the terror they instilled is not still enacted in today’s world. In 2005, Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ruled in favor of the state of New York when the Oneida nation bought its own land back from the state and insisted that it should not pay taxes because it is a sovereign nation. Again, this land was originally the Oneida peoples’. In her decision in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, Ginsburg relied on an 1823 decision by Supreme Court justice John Marshall, which in turn relied on the papal bulls that supported the legality of colonization and land theft. Ginsburg stated that the 1823 decision made sure that the nation could not be capable of “rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.” And thus the repurchase of the Oneida nation’s original land did not restore its sovereignty. As of February 2022, Pope Frances, despite multiple formal requests by Indigenous nations and Catholic leaders, has yet to rescind the papal bulls. Jack Jenkins, “Bishop Denounces ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ Used to Justify Abuse of Indigenous Peoples, and Suggests Pope Francis Do the Same,” America: The Jesuit Review, July 6, 2021, https://
30. hooks, The Will to Change, 18.
31. hooks, The Will to Change, 27.
32. Judith Lewis Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (New York: Basic Books, 2023).
33. Viola Davis, Finding Me (New York: HarperCollins and Ebony Magazine Publishing, 2022), 85.
34. Herman, Truth and Repair, 26.
35. Quoted in “The Memorial,” Survivors Memorial, accessed April 26, 2023, https://
36. Tayo Bero, “If Society Valued Black Women and Girls, Convicting R Kelly Wouldn’t Take So Long,” Guardian, September 29, 2021, Opinion, https://
37. Jennifer M. Gómez and Robyn L. Gobin, “Black Women and Girls & #MeToo: Rape, Cultural Betrayal, & Healing,” Sex Roles 82, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 1–12, https://
38. Tonya Mosley, “‘Me Too’ Founder Tarana Burke Says Black Girls’ Trauma Shouldn’t Be Ignored,” NPR, September 29, 2021, Author Interviews, https://