embodiment
embodiment
Prioritizing embodiment in anti-oppression work does not discount the existence of oppression inside our social structures. Instead, it moves the possibility for change within harmful systems into our actual hands. Embodiment does not only refer to the bounds of the “human” body; it speaks to the interconnectedness of bodies and beings, as we are all differently impacted by white supremacy in the web of our shared existence.
I don’t want to lose one second off of my life, like so many who have come before me, to white supremacy, and I don’t want that for you either. These are the stakes of this work: Saving your life and mine because white supremacy is a lived experience that causes heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, and high cortisol production. We’re losing sleep, developing PTSD, and battling depression and anxiety and more. The antidote to all this is being together, resting and remembering how to take care of ourselves in the face of systems that want us to forget. When we bring sensation and awareness to the ways white supremacy lives in all of our bodies, we have an opportunity to change our relationship to it, to know it, and eventually dismantle it.
— KAI
White Supremacy is a system of desensitization. Enabled by generations and encoded into bodies, white supremacy shuts down the feeling-sensing body of people benefiting from white supremacy in order to weaponize that body as a soldier for racism. Thus, the work of anti-racisting necessarily engages the body; through a series of embodied practices that sensitize the feelings, experiences, and habits of racism happening inside us and all around us, anti-racisting allows us to claim our bodies and actions as our own. When we can lucidly sense white supremacy in the body we can, in effect, practice laying down our weapons.
— SARAH
Alice Sheppard of Kinetic Light
“But all our phrasing- race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy- serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, ripes muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth….You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence upon the body.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
QUOTES
“Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous. The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies.”
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (2017)