When Pain Is Dismissed, the Body Keeps Its Own Record: Black Women, Medical Racism, and Somatic Ancestral Memory

Ancestral Wisdom · Health & Wellness · Public Health

The Body as Witness: What Dismissal Actually Does

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American gynecology was not built for Black women — it was built on them. J. Marion Sims developed his surgical techniques by operating on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, operating on the premise — documented in his own writings — that Black people did not feel pain the way white people did. That claim was a lie then. It remains an active lie now, embedded in medical training materials and clinical decision-making across the country.

Historian Deirdre Cooper Owens names three of the women Sims operated on — Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy — because refusing anonymity is itself a form of repair. Anarcha endured thirty operations without anesthesia before Sims perfected the technique that made him famous. Her body did the research. Her name is rarely the one taught alongside his.

A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that half of medical students and residents held false beliefs about biological differences in Black patients’ pain tolerance — and that these beliefs directly shaped their pain management recommendations. This is not history. This is the active present of American medicine, shaping treatment in emergency rooms, obstetric wards, and primary care offices across the country, including in East Harlem.

When Serena Williams told nurses after giving birth that she believed she was experiencing a pulmonary embolism, she was initially dismissed. She was right. She nearly died. Her story is not an exception. Black women in the United States are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. The structural causes are well-documented. The dismissal is the mechanism.

What we are less often asked to examine is what that dismissal does inside the body — not as metaphor, but as physiology. What happens, neurologically and somatically, when a person’s pain is repeatedly denied? When the body’s own signal is returned, again and again, as wrong?

The Body Keeps Its Own Record: Somatic Memory and the Science of Stored Pain

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Trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk’s foundational work established what healers in African and Afro-diasporic traditions have long known: the body does not simply process and release difficult experiences the way a spreadsheet processes data. Trauma — including the chronic, low-grade, cumulative trauma of living in a body that institutions routinely disbelieve — is encoded in the nervous system, in muscle tissue, in breath patterns, in the regulation of the stress-response axis. The body keeps the score because it has no other choice.

Somatic therapist and author Resmaa Menakem takes this further in My Grandmother’s Hands, naming what he calls “racialized trauma” — the specific ways that anti-Black racism becomes embodied, stored in nervous systems across generations, passed not just culturally but somatically from parent to child. This is not merely a metaphor for generational impact. It has a biological mechanism: epigenetics.

Researcher Rachel Yehuda’s landmark studies demonstrated that severe trauma could alter gene expression in ways that were inherited — that the offspring of people who survived atrocity carried measurable epigenetic markers of their parents’ suffering, even without having experienced that suffering directly. The body carries lineage. Healing the body heals more than one life.

The mechanism runs through the body’s stress-response system: cortisol exposure during trauma can chemically mark the genes that regulate how future stress gets metabolized, and that mark can be passed to the next generation before that child has lived a single traumatic day of their own. This does not mean the body is broken. It means the body is listening — to history, to family, to the accumulated weight of what came before — and any healing practice that ignores that listening is treating half a patient.

This is not competing testimony — science confirming spirit, or spirit anticipating science. It is one truth read in two languages. A grandmother’s insistence that grief has to move through the body before it can leave it, and a lab’s methylation assay measuring the same event from a different angle, are describing the same body.

For Black women in particular — who navigate the compounded weight of anti-Black racism and structural misogyny within medical systems that were explicitly designed to exclude them — the stakes of somatic healing are not abstract. They are maternal mortality rates. They are chronic pain undertreated for decades. They are the specific exhaustion of having to perform wellness for institutions that will not witness sickness.

What Ancestral Healing Practices Have Always Known

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Long before Western neuroscience had the vocabulary for somatic memory, healing traditions across Africa and the African diaspora were practicing it. In Yoruba tradition, healing ceremonies engage the body — through rhythm, dance, song, and the physical presence of community — as the primary site of medicine. The Akan concept of sunsum understands illness as a disruption that touches body, soul, and community simultaneously, and demands healing at all three levels.

Among Luo communities in Kenya and Baganda communities in Uganda — where Ubuntu Village partners directly — elders and healers have long known that grief and trauma stored in the body require physical release: through movement, through voice, through hands-on communal care. These are not primitive precursors to clinical psychology. They are sophisticated therapeutic systems that operated without the colonial extraction of knowledge that separated “science” from “spirit” and declared only one of them legitimate.

Among Igbo communities in Nigeria, mourning itself is communal work — a body’s grief does not stay private, and neither does its healing. Age-grade societies and women’s councils have long held the labor of witnessing loss so that no one carries it in isolation, which is precisely what Menakem’s research on nervous-system co-regulation now describes in clinical language: healing happens faster, and more completely, in the presence of a regulated other.

Across East Harlem and the diaspora, Black women are recovering and practicing these somatic traditions — not as an alternative to medical care, but as the bedrock that medical systems have never provided: the experience of being fully witnessed, of having one’s pain named and tended, of healing in community rather than alone in a clinical room where doubt is the ambient condition.

The Healing Is Already Happening

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Ubuntu Village’s approach to community health — in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria — is rooted in a foundational truth: the healing is not something we bring. It is already happening. Our role is to resource, accompany, and support the leadership already present in communities that have been surviving and healing and building through conditions that institutional medicine has largely ignored or exacerbated.

In Kenya, community health workers trained through partner clinics carry both a blood pressure cuff and a working knowledge of which elder in the compound still remembers the old remedies — because the two are not in competition. In Uganda, mobile health outreach reaches households a hospital forty kilometers away cannot, and the visit does not end at the vitals; it includes the question a Western intake form never asks: how is your body carrying what your family has survived. In Nigeria, postpartum support circles convened by community organizers do the work Serena Williams had to demand for herself in a hospital bed — they take a woman’s account of her own body as evidence, not as a symptom to be managed.

The somatic wisdom that Black women carry — in their bodies, in their ancestral lines, in the community circles they build and sustain — is not a workaround for a broken system. It is medicine in its own right. Ancient, sophisticated, community-held medicine that does not require institutional validation to be real.

To dismiss that medicine the way medical institutions dismiss Black women’s pain is to repeat the original error. To witness it — to invest in it, to resource the communities building with it — is what Ubuntu means. I am because we are. The body that heals in community heals more than one body. It heals the lineage.

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.

If this named something you’ve lived, or something someone you love has lived, share it — the record deserves witnesses beyond this page.