Grandmother
The title character is the author’s grandmother. Early on he recalls that though not a big woman overall, she possessed surprisingly robust hands with broad fingers and thumbs characterized by the thickness of their pads. She explains that physical feature is the result having picked cotton when she was as young as four. This story becomes the stimulus for the author’s central thesis that effects of and response to racism is rooted in the body.
Dr. Joy DeGruy
DuGruy is the author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome which the author identifies as a significant source of inspiration behind the development of his own ideas. Notably, however, DeGruy’s book maintains the focus of the trauma on racism within the sphere of the mental and emotional and also traces the historical lineage of American racism only back to the now-famous year 1619. This book builds upon the foundation of emotional trauma by explaining how it becomes a force impacting the body while also tracing the evolution of slavery back beyond the establishment of the slave trade in the colonies.
Philando Castile
Philando Castile is a young black man pulled over by police in 2016 while driving with his girlfriend and her daughter. Castile voluntarily supplied to the officer that he was in possession of a gun in inside the car and that he had on his person the permit required to do so. As he reached for his ID and insurance card that the officer had requested, he was shot to death. That officer becomes the personification of the go-to excuse that cops inevitably settle upon when there is no other evidence justifying their fatal actions: he feared for his life in the moment that Castile decided to reach for the very thing that the officer has asked him to produce.
Brent Staples
Staples is an author and editorialist for the New York Times. He also happens to be a black man. Put together those two things and one can fairly well imagine what Staples does not look like if not necessarily what he does look like. Imagining what a black man who writes editorials for the New York Times looks like is important because he is referenced here for an essay he wrote about his experiences walking the sidewalks of the city and how white people would react upon seeing him: crossing streets, repositioning shopping bags and purses, muscular constriction, etc. In response, he began a habit of whistling a very recognizable piece of classical musical by Vivaldi known as “Four Seasons.” The transformation was also notable: hearing those familiar strains issuing forth from a black man resulted in a reduction of previously experienced responses on the part of white sidewalk walkers. This anecdote is central the book’s examination of “white fragility.”
