Healing Ourselves to Heal the Village
Why rigorous self-reflection and self-healing is the necessary first step in creating a healthy village of social justice warriors
By Shamm Petros
“Tell your story. Heal the village.”
Sometimes, when we’re doing the work of Lion’s Story, we’re asked, “What do you mean by ‘healing the village?’”
To put it succinctly, when we talk about healing the village, we mean looking deep within ourselves to identify the coping mechanisms we’ve developed as a result of racial incidents in our lives. We believe that by examining how we react in these (often stressful) times, we are better equipped to uncover why we react in a certain way and, if necessary, break patterns that we’ve developed since we were children.
For example, when children see their parents react in a certain way to a racial event, they internalize this and learn from it, eventually using it as an adult as a coping mechanism when faced with similar events. These coping mechanisms help people manage stressful situations, but may not be the healthiest method of coping over long periods of time.
One of the most ubiquitous coping mechanisms we see in our racial literacy work is avoidance. No one wants to talk about how race impacts their daily lives — especially in groups comprised of Black, brown and…
