Here are some extra thoughts I didn't post on instagram:

My Grandmother's Hands: Stop treating The Body Keeps the Score as required reading. For readers learning about racialized trauma and their responsibilities within white supremacy, My Grandmother’s Hands offers a more relevant place to begin. Here are just a few reasons why.

Van der Kolk’s reported workplace conduct raises accountability concerns. There have been multiple allegations of bullying and creating a hostile workplace. I have also heard from college professors during grad school and colleagues that he has dismissed health crises during trainings and lectures and refused to stop the trainings to let EMTs do their work.

Also, on a research and clinical level, the book’s scientific authority deserves scrutiny.

I think the most important thing here is, why are we listening to white men in 2026.

Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands is a much better read and appropriate replacement because it centers racialized trauma, white supremacy, historical violence, and their effects on relationships and bodily responses. He gives white readers responsibility for examining their own reactions and participating in change. This makes the book relevant to readers seeking to connect trauma awareness with antiracist practice.

Its exercises also move readers toward participation. Readers practice noticing sensations, slowing reactions, and remaining present with discomfort. This offers a useful starting point for examining defensiveness, avoidance, and accountability. The exercises support reflection. Structural change still requires action beyond personal regulation.

Black AF History: Black AF History is an approachable starting point if dense historical nonfiction feels intimidating. Michael Harriot brings humor, conversational storytelling, and a clear point of view to American history, making the book feel less like a textbook without avoiding difficult truths. Stamped from the Beginning and The 1619 Project are both must-reads. Harriot offers a more reader-friendly introduction to questioning the history you were taught and recognizing whose stories were excluded.

Black Evidence: Black Evidence is a must-read because access to information and whose testimony is deemed credible are connected. Candis Watts Smith traces how American institutions have dismissed Black people’s accounts of violence, discrimination, and suffering across generations. Her warning concerns what follows when a society learns to disregard those experiences: greater tolerance for cruelty and less resistance to authoritarianism.

This concern is especially relevant today. Researchers have documented the Trump administration’s removal of federal information, deletion of demographic variables, and delays in releasing data. Some information has been restored, but these disruptions make it harder to track inequality and hold institutions accountable.

When coverage of a Black person’s death is absent, brief, or dominated by official statements, readers need to ask whose account receives attention. Were relatives and witnesses interviewed? Were initial claims independently checked? Did the outlet follow up after new evidence emerged? Did law enforcement actually follow up with leads? In an interview about her book, Smith asks why video evidence was necessary to prompt belief in violence Black communities had already described for years.

For us white readers, the responsibility extends beyond feeling disturbed. Read Black journalists. Follow local reporting beyond the first headline. Examine corrections and primary records. Listen to families without requiring public circulation of someone’s final moments before taking their concerns seriously.

Black Evidence asks you to examine what you accept as proof, whom you instinctively doubt, and what your disbelief allows institutions to leave unanswered.