Healing Our Nation From the Inside Out
January 20, 2021
[Image Description: A vignetted photograph of a single hens and chicks succulent with a green leaves rimmed in purple.]
Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash
“The challenge is that we are all the inheritors of previous systems of oppression that have shaped our current perceptions of reality. It is quite difficult to be fully aware of the current moment and our existing ‘limited-situations’ without intentionally noticing and reflecting in order to act in the world for our own liberation.”
For 25 years, the National Equity Project has centered healing as a necessary and essential ingredient for transformation and racial justice. Despite this truth, our team has wrestled to reconcile the injustices, pain and loss of the last year with the calls for healing now. The events of the last year and even the last weeks are painful reminders of the work we have yet to do to acknowledge and dismantle racism, White supremacy ideology, and all of its harms and demonstrate the real accountability necessary to begin collective healing and true racial reconciliation.
We are in the midst of collective trauma: a global pandemic, increasing economic inequality and the racial violence of our past still wreaking havoc in the present. Today, President Biden’s new administration ushers in another historic precedent - the swearing in of the first woman, and the first African American and Indian American person to hold the office of the Vice-President of the United States of America. A hopeful symbol against the backdrop of political divisiveness, racial terror, and hate.
Executive Orders that will swiftly reverse egregiously dehumanizing public policy may mitigate some of the harm of the past four years, creating some repair and restoring some optimism that change in service of justice is possible. But how do we heal the 400+ year pandemic of racialized violence and White supremacy ideology? How do we set our collective path towards healing from and dismantling racism - our deepest and most pervasive wound? We believe that racism exists at every level of our system, so healing must take place at every level as well.
[Image Description:
Column 1: Left - Handrawn are five wooden figures with images of broken hearts on their bodies looking at a plant growing on the center of the table they are surrounding.
Beneath the illustration is text as follows:
Heading: Attend to Healing
Body: Doing equity work includes on-going healing from the effects of oppression to increase our agency for liberatory design.
Column 2: Right -
Heading: Why
Body: We must attend to healing from both past and current traumas to be able to stay in this work, engender a sense of well-being, collaborate in truly liberatory ways and build authentic relationships. Status quo culture pressures us to be constantly executing, working through pain and discomfort in order to be efficient and productive. We believe this brings toxicity into teams and fuels inequitable work. We instead believe that healing is a critical element of this work. We also acknowledge that healing is a never-ending state of being and not something to be “resolved.”
Heading: How
Body:
Establish protocols for how to name when someone is feeling pain or there is opportunity for healing.
Identify regular methods to practice healing in group and private settings (poetry, check-ins, somatic body work, work retreats, mental health support, etc).
Include time and space for healing in all project planning timelines.
Explore existing framework for managing conflict, equitability, for example restorative justice practices.]
Individual Healing
“In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.”
“Essence exists before trauma.”
At the individual level, we must commit to an ongoing process of healing from personal harm and internalized oppression. Internalized oppression manifests in many forms. It can lead to self-doubt and believing the stereotypes you hear about yourself and your family, your racial, cultural, or ethnic group. It can undermine your confidence, your agency, and your willingness to bring your full self to school, work, and other endeavors that matter to you. The chronic stress of living in oppressive systems that don’t see, value, or protect you limits your emotional range and your ability to think intelligently. Healing at the individual level is about regaining access to your full capability and promise as a human.
“You are strong enough. Strong enough to feel everything and still carry on.”
Healing from internalized oppression can feel scary, because you have to go there - you must unpack varying levels of trauma that almost always begin in childhood. There are many ways for individuals to work through their racialized trauma to engage in their own healing: journaling, meditation, therapy, body and breath work, art, music, etc. But at some point, healing from racial trauma cannot be accomplished in isolation; we are social beings who need to connect and be listened to in community. What is an early memory of race that pained or confused you? Where does that experience, those feelings, live in your body? How did this experience disconnect you from your humanity? What do you need to metabolize, release, or shed to be free? Sharing your story - including your pain and trauma - with others in a brave space that allows for meaning-making, acceptance, forgiveness, and surrender; fosters agency and promotes healing at both the individual and interpersonal levels.
Interpersonal Healing
“Whatever the problem, community is the answer. How we are together in our relationships is the solution. When people are anxious and scared, we withdraw from one another. Listening helps us lean in and hold one another.”
At the interpersonal level, healing is facilitated by storytelling, listening to and believing one another. It is a conscious intention to reconnect to our ancestors, to Mother Earth, to one another and to ourselves. Feeling separate and cut-off from the interdependent ecosystem of our world is a byproduct of white supremacy ideology and a source of trauma. Our most profound need is to belong, we cannot flourish without experiencing a sense of belonging to a whole. Mother Teresa long warned us that “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Creating conditions for sharing personal narratives and deep listening, a container strong enough to hold the emotional charge of racism, first within racial affinity and then across differences (age, race, socioeconomic class, gender, and sexual identities, etc.) is necessary to build deep relationships that support our continued healing.
As people share their stories, their relationships change and deepen. We learn we have all been impacted by systemic oppression, some of us have perpetuated it and caused harm, and we all have healing to do. Practices like constructivist listening allow people to be available to each other as they process and heal. Holding space for people to listen and be listened to and share their stories without question or interruption is fundamental to our collective healing.
Creating the conditions for deeper and more authentic interpersonal relationships across differences sets the stage for institutional healing.
“We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”
Institutional Healing
Healing at an institutional level involves an intentional, shared and explicit commitment to creating a more loving, just and resilient system. Healing at the institutional level is about acknowledging harm and restoring agency throughout the system. Most people are keenly aware of who has control, authority, voice - who makes decisions. Institutional healing involves generating and implementing policies and practices that proactively disrupt historical patterns of racialized and gendered power and participation and catalyze new ways of working together.
A consensus-driven process for constructing and committing to core organizational values and developing community agreements can be powerful mechanisms for institutional healing. The articulation of an organization’s core values and community agreements cohere people around a collective vision of what we stand for and how we want to be in relationship with one another to do our work. These values and agreements are explicitly developed and brought to life by the group, not by an external authority. Staying together through the (often-messy) process of co-creation can set the groundwork for truth-telling, reconciliation and healing at the institutional level.
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
Structural Healing
If we create conditions for healing within institutions, we set the stage for the inter-institutional truth telling and organizing necessary for structural healing. This requires us to take a clear eyed look at how we got here and understand and acknowledge that our laws, policies, and practices inequitably distribute society’s burdens and opportunities (education, healthcare, housing, policing, food access, voting, etc) and hold in place racial inequity and harm. They were not designed to serve all people. Who they benefit and who they harm is racialized by design. We did not get here by accident and we will not create equity by chance.
Interrupting historical patterns of inequity and racialized outcomes within and across communities requires leaders who can see and connect the ways in which structures work to create or delimit opportunity across sector and across institutions. Leaders who understand the power of structures focus on the outcomes structures produce, not the intentions of people within them.
“Being a rebel leader is not just about confronting injustice, pain and struggle, it is also about thriving in the midst of it and not letting current conditions steal your mind, heart or joy.”
We are not talking about single charismatic leaders who act in isolation. We don’t need heros, we need hosts. Host leaders invite everyone to the table to create multi-racial coalitions of change makers. Conveners, facilitators, listeners, healers - we need rebel leaders who are willing to take personal risks to speak truth, who catalyze and influence structural change even when it isn’t popular and the path is unclear.
Rebel leaders take responsibility for disrupting and dismantling oppressive systems that do not work for everyone and are willing to endure the pushback for the sake of a greater collective good. They host spaces for communities to co-create new, liberated systems and structures - which lead to ever-expanding networks of people who see and value each other’s voice, experience, and humanity across differences.
Healing is capacity building - it expands our ability for ourselves, our organizations, and our movements to evolve and grow, and it ensures that change is sustainable, grounded, and rooted in community needs, desires, and dreams.
We need rebel leaders to develop local networks of belonging and mattering where everyone is included in what john powell calls “the circle of human concern.” As these networks expand, our capacity for healing our nation expands. Our notions of what is needed for a national healing practice expand - reparations, rematriation, reckoning and reconciliation all become possible when we heal our collective racialized trauma.
The way we heal our nation is by healing at the local level: creating conditions for people to notice and reflect, regain their agency, to speak and hear hard truths, to repair harm, build trust. If all politics is local - all healing is local. A core tenet of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy is “Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)” We can heal our nation when we heal from the inside-out.
“When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished…
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it”
Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman recites "The Hill We Climb" at the inauguration of President Joe Biden on Jan. 20, 2021.