Resmaa Menakem

It's showing now as the opening production of Penumbra Theatre's 50th anniversary season.

Resmaa Menakem joins me now in the studio.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you so much for being here.

This I will never forget this.

And it's been six years because this was in 2020, the summer of 2020 that I had signed up to go see Resmaa Menakem speak online virtual a virtual thing he was doing online.

I don't think his new book was out.

I think it was still in support of my grandmother's hands.

So there was so much of this kind of programming out there.

And I had read my grandmother's hands.

I love Resmaa Menakem's work.

I was really excited to see him speak.

As I said earlier, misogyny is not the only system who decides whose work gets read.

We have Resmaa, who is the author of My Grandmother's Hands, and they are naming a lot of what I am exploring in this episode.

Their work brings questions.

Their work brings acknowledgement to race and gender together.

Um, so some of the resources and books that you can read.

So books that you can begin to grab your hands on would be My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem, Me and White Supremacy by Layla F- S-A-A-D, so Saad, um, Decolonizing Therapy by Dr. Jennifer Mullan.

Um, and I'm sorry if I'm butchering some of these last names and names, but, um, yeah.

Um, another book is So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, The Future Is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Coaching For Equity by Elena Aguilar, NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman, Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devin Price.

... somatic level.

Um, and at the neurological level, I bring in polyvagal theory, the work of Stephen Porges, but also somatic, um, practitioners, Resma Menakem, uh, Prentis Samuel.

Then I also bring in the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, who writes about kind of like the, the allostatic approaches to, to learning, right? We learn from the environmental cues we get, and the more, the more repeated experiences we have of threat, the more we are already perceiving threat before we realize we're perceiving threat.

Our body has already done the hard work of saying, "We're not safe here.

about our collective visions, I'd say, for a better future, a trauma-informed future.

And one of the things I was saying to Katie before we started recording is folks often ask me, because I use the language of late-stage capitalism often, I use it as a hopeful term because naming it as late-stage reminds us that it is both not inevitable and there is a future beyond it.

But when I say that, I think one of the things capitalism has done is it's narrowed our imagination of what's possible.

So people go, well, if not this, then what? And trauma informed is a pillar of how I imagine a post-capitalist future.

So before we dive into it even further, I think it's beautiful to carry everyone along with us.

So would you like to tell us, I'm saying trauma-informed, but as the thought leader of the X version trauma-informed practices, can you tell us a bit more what you mean when you say that, Katie?

Absolutely.

Trauma-informed is an approach.