What is Racial Healing?
Written by RRC Co-Directors, Taquelia Washington and Jo Brownson
What does racial healing mean for us as individuals; for us in a cross racial partnership? What does it mean to call forth this type of healing inside the organizations with whom we partner? These questions plus so many more have been in the forefront of our minds as we birthed Radicle Root Collective, LLC (RRC). This process has led to more questions than answers. Questions that aren’t meant to be answered alone, but explored collectively. In this first blog post, we strive to give you a glimpse at the ways that we have been grappling with, making meaning of, and practicing racial healing together. As you, our community follow along, we invite you into this practice with us.
We feel the confines of words as we start to talk about something as deep and as personal as healing, let alone racial healing. A concept that we can feel in our bodies, at times so deep that it is felt on a spiritual level. A concept that we each strive to actualize in our own life journeys. A concept that expands past our own lifetimes and into the lifetimes of all that came before us and all that will come after us.
We are inspired by Sonya Renee Taylor’s work on Radical Self Love in her book and website The Body is Not an Apology. The practice of radical self love can be a guide into fully experiencing and seeing ourselves as whole. We fundamentally believe that all people are born as whole, beautiful and magical beings. Systems of oppression are built to create a fragmented sense of self that disconnects us from our wholeness - and then seeks to profit off of that disconnection. Learning to tap back into one’s own wholeness is a key piece of the healing puzzle. The other key piece is rooted in belonging. Systems of oppression, particularly White supremacy, attempt to socialize us into individualized beings that are fractured from others. While we commonly understand how harmful this fracturing can be for folks of color, we also believe that this is harmful for white people as well.
Below, we have included some of our thoughts and dialogue that led to the creation of RRC’s working definition of racial healing. In offering a window into our experiences, through the skin we live in, our hope is to continuously make our learning visible to our larger community.
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Taquelia: For me, reading Sonya Renee Taylor’s book helped to put language to the metaphorical key that unlocked the door in my own healing journey. As a Black queer woman, the practice of loving myself deeply and fully in a society that has tried to teach me otherwise has been an act of healing in and of itself. To love myself, in all my parts, allows me to tap into my wholeness and when I am tapped in...ooohweee….straight magic begins to happen. I am deeply aware that this place of magic within myself belongs to not only me but all those that came before me. Despite the ways that white supremacy has attempted to strip and disconnect me from this, it is through conscious awareness of interconnection and intentionally seeking out community with my people that I am able to anchor into a sense of belonging-ness that allows me to tap even more deeply into my wholeness.
When I hold space for other BIPOC people, particularly leaders, I am constantly struck by the ways in which the trauma of white supremacy shows up in our spaces. It often takes us time to decenter whiteness and to unapologetically center ourselves. When this shift happens, BIPOC spaces often become healing spaces as it allows folks a sacred space to be outside of the White gaze, a gaze that is deeply exhausting to our spirits. In these BIPOC spaces, I have been able to witness people remember their own wholeness and to foster strategies to be in more alignment with this wholeness even when moving back into predominantly white spaces. In BIPOC groups, people are able to build community and foster a sense of belonging that can also help to serve as an anchor. Through these conditions, moments of healing occur in beautiful and magical ways. People rediscover their voices, they find community, and re-experience what it is like to be in their own power. It’s EVERYTHING to watch unfold.
Jo: Growing up as a white, tomboy, preacher’s kid in the south and the midwest, I was taught very young to distrust what my body was telling me is good, right and life giving. All the information that would make me whole existed outside of myself - in the media, in school, in my church, and in the authorities who looked like me. The world was built to “protect” me from the messy and painful truths about race, racism and the role I was playing in White supremacy. “Ignore the pit in your stomach and laugh along to racist taunts and innuendos” “Don’t question why your mom makes herself cry when she is pulled over by a cop for speeding and doesn’t get a ticket”. Every day, in ways big and small, I am enlisted into the violence of White supremacy masquerading as the promise of wholeness. The wholeness promised me and my people by White supremacy is an illusion. It requires us to protect our own goodness at the expense of other people’s lives, health and truths. Am I good or am I racist? I was taught I cannot be both. Racial healing for me is about facing and integrating into my sense of self, the pain of my and my ancestor’s (past and present) active participation in the death culture of White supremacy. It’s about holding the truth of my capacity to be an agent of violence with the truth of my magical humanity, dignity and interdependence with all living things. It’s about feeling it all.
For White folks, our training in protecting our own innocence through policing the bodies and behaviors of BIPOC doesn’t turn off when we are surrounded by only White bodies. Our resistance to practicing belonging with one another is rooted in our need to maintain that we are normal, individual, good people void of a collective experience of race. I often ask White folks to interrogate that void, that absence. Each of the people now called White in the United States were once called by another name (as was every other “race”). A name that evoked belonging in its specificity. We don’t grieve that absence together because we were told we got something better in its place: power, wealth and an insatiable appetite for more. To belong to White supremacy is to belong to no one. Bearing witness to White folks reckoning with this loneliness together and taking different action is healing. In finding our way back to belonging as our birth right, we have no choice but to rethink what accountability looks like in our relationships with each other and across racial difference. If I no longer need to protect my own innocence at all costs, I no longer need to dehumanize you when you tell me I hurt you. If I no longer believe that I am an individual who has earned everything I have with no collective experience of privilege, I no longer need to hoard resources to convince myself otherwise. Damn, imagine what we could do with all that wasted energy that we pour into protecting a lie?
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The above represents a slice of our deeper reflections into the themes of wholeness and belonging as it relates to our own personal and professional journeys. From these reflections, RRC has arrived at the following working definition of racial healing:
Racial healing is an intensely personal AND collective practice involving the recovery of a sense of wholeness and belonging that has been stolen, obscured or coopted by the system of White supremacy
- Taquelia Washington and Jo Brownson (2021)
We are curious, as you read this:
What feelings and sensations do you experience in your body?
What words stand out to you?
How would you describe your current connection to your own sense of wholeness?
How does the theme of belonging show up in your personal healing journey?
How do the themes of wholeness and belonging show up in your work toward racial healing?