Healing for Liberation

Check out Chi-Ante’s piece on healing justice and it’s necessity as communities grapple with predatory relationships and the harm young Black people face.

As a young black femme, I am constantly pushed into conversations about who’s invited to the cookout and whose black card is being revoked. From the #MuteRkelly campaign, the reactions to the Cosby ruling, or the predator nature of Blac Chyna’s relationship with 18-year-old Almighty Jay, I am reminded of the importance of healing justice in the work we all participate in daily around community building.

Being from the Deep South, I was raised in a black working class community, where mobility was limited. Because of this, everyone was taught the importance of community, shared values, and collective justice. It is here that my love and understanding of the true depths of what a free, healing justice oriented and liberated black community could look like. It is in this space that my experience allowed for me to build an understanding of community that has helped sustained me and kept me long after I left the Low Country and pushed me to do black liberation work. As a young black femme, I am constantly pushed into conversations about whose invited to the cookout and whose black card is being revoked. From the #MuteRkelly campaign, the reactions to the Cosby ruling, or the predator nature of Blac Chyna’s relationship with 18-year-old Almighty Jay, I am reminded of the importance of healing justice in the work we all participate in daily around community building.

One of the beautiful things about the Low Country is no matter how bad it gets or how far I have deviated from my upbringing, I am always welcomed back home. I am never somehow less Gullah or less valuable because who I am or the decisions I make. There may be new boundaries for the way I am able to come home or the ways that I am able to exist at home but I am always welcomed. In this day and age of black brilliance and extreme violence, we have to find a way to move away from expelling black people, who displease us, exist outside of our notions of blackness or actively participate in harm against us. We have to actively begin incorporating healing justice and community reimagining if we all going to have the healing we deserve and the liberation we are fighting so hard for.

What does it mean to challenge the way we create space for folks to return to our community and find healing and wholeness rather than shouting at folks as we force them out our community? Recognizing that healing is circular experience, we can uphold our community values while simultaneously having healing justice oriented repercussions for black people who choose not to align with those values. We deserve to have grace extended to us when we have committed violence but it is also our responsibility to ensure that healing happens in a way that doesn’t further perpetuate violence. Healing justice allows me to continue to do my work on a day to day while addressing the large systematic oppressions attacking our community and also allows me to find ways to create healing within my own family and group of friends to build the future I know we deserve.

Healing justice within the larger social imagining of our community is an opportunity for us to create new ways to live and exist with one other while creating boundaries for folks who can’t see themselves in the world we are actively building day by day. It is this commitment to my community that forces me to create and protect healing and joy in my community by not playing R Kelly at family functions and actively working on addressing the ways I have perpetuated and participated in acts of violence against black bodies. Healing ain’t easy, and it don’t always feel good, but damn if it ain’t worth it. Damn if we aren’t worth it.