It was said by Resmaa Menakem, and the full quote is: “Trauma decontextualized in a person can look like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family can look like family traits. Trauma in a people can look like culture.”
This quote was taken from a podcast interview which Menakem participated in, which you can find here.
I highly recommend “My Grandmother’s Hands” for more of his thoughtful and nuanced words.
ooo ooo this feels like the same flavor of thing as that story about:
except that in the version i read, it was a guy asking the generations of women in a family why they cut off the ends, and the great grandma answered that it was because when she was young her family was so poor and didn’t have a big enough oven to fit the entire ham in
the point was that often if you go back far enough, the origin of bizarre, backwards and even harmful traditions/rules of society were often the result of people in that time period making the best of what they had, not because they thought it was the “right” way
the family in this story now has a big enough oven to fit the whole ass ham but its tradition to cut off the ends, its just how its done and the crazy part is that two fucking generations removed don’t even know why but they do it without questioning it because thats. how. we’ve. always. done. it.
so yeah i feel like this melds very nicely with the whole “Trauma in a people can look like culture” thing
So, like, this is going to heal very much like I’m boasting or something, but genuinely: this is why self-reflection and inventory-taking is so important. When we stop and ask ourselves “…why, though?” We can really start to deconstruct the things that don’t make sense for us.
A lot of the things I do in my life - or, more importantly, *don’t* do are explicitly because I have spent a fuckload of years doing personal inventory, thinking about “why am I doing this? Is this valid? Does this make sense to me to do?” And, subsequently, discarding shit that I think is dumb and doing shit other people might not because it is important *to me*
