The trauma that now lives in the bodies of so many African Americans did not begin when those bodies first encountered white ones. This trauma can be traced back much further, through generation upon generation of white bodies, to medieval Europe.
-- Resmaa Menakem (chapter 4)

Importance: This quote is integral to Menakem's thesis that trauma has a much longer history than we often realize--trauma that lives on now in Black bodies stretches back to medieval Europe and beyond. In time, white bodies used Black bodies to blow their own trauma through.

As I observed earlier, trauma was not invented in the seventeenth century. It is as old as our species. But our concepts of whiteness, Blackness, and race were invented in the seventeenth century.
-- Resmaa Menakem (chapter 4)

Importance: This timeline is part of the underpinning of Menakem's argument that the trauma Black bodies endure today is ancient, and that race was a myth propagated in the seventeenth century. White...