Author: To read Ninueequa Blanding's article, please click here.
What strategies will enable us to understand our interconnectedness, leverage our shared power, and heal from the trauma caused by structural racism?
A movement is underway to create spaces that allow for an exploration of practices to transform oppression—within our bodies, our communities, and the systems that perpetuate it. Even longtime freedom activist and scholar Angela Davis—who has more than 50 years of experience leading social justice movements—highlights such healing-based transformation in her work. Davis says, “Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension—all of this is now a part of radical social justice struggles.”
In part, this shift in the social justice struggles that Davis references is the emergence of healing justice, launched in 2007 by the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective (The Kindred Collective). Cara Page, one of the leading architects of healing justice, defines this work as one “that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on intergenerational trauma and violence.” This movement, which is quickly gaining momentum, draws upon the historic ways that communities have resisted systemic oppression and thrived.
The Kindred Collective states, “we do not seek to promote single healers as one model, nor models of healing as singular, nor to build individualized care; but to build mechanisms and systems that build collective wellness; transform generational trauma and violence; and build quality care that is accessible to all.”
Thus, healing justice work honors ancestral and indigenous wisdom in an effort to respond to generational trauma, facilitate collective healing, and transform systemic oppression. It proposes that healing and joy are essential elements of liberation.
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