As early as the co-design phase for this case study project, REACH cohort members reinforced the significance of tending to trauma and healing in racial equity work. The work of fighting injustice can trigger past trauma, especially for BIPOC staff. Johana Bencomo, a city councilor in Las Cruces, New Mexico who also co-leads the Women’s Democracy Lab (a client partner of Change Elemental), says, “I feel like spaces in which we are serving were not created for us [women of color]. In New Mexico, it wasn’t until a decade or two ago that they built a women’s restroom on the Senate’s side. Literally, these structures were not built for us. So we have to be bold, progressive, outspoken leaders. We’re disruptors. And when you disrupt a system, it fights back.” So any work that tries to undo white supremacy needs to include some healing components. One cohort member references the American Indian Movement, where healing is integral as people move towards justice.
Healing within the organizational setting has to be about modeling liberation from the inside out. People in movement organizations bring some degree of trauma into the work—we are all subject to historical and systemic racism and other oppressions in the broader society. Trauma might be our fire for social justice. That lived experience of oppression, as traumatic as it may be, is also an asset to antiracist work. In fact, movements should be led by those who have direct experience of the social justice issue at hand. But when unattended, trauma might cause us to replicate white supremacy in our organizational culture.
Mainstream American culture tends to privatize both trauma and healing. Asking difficult questions about the structural causes of trauma could be overwhelming. Or we shy away from talking about trauma publicly to avoid feeling or making others feel uncomfortable. All this avoidance might lead some to blame individuals for not transcending their trauma and reinforce its stigma and shame. Western forms of healing that focus on individuals like talk therapy might be challenging to some cultures or financially inaccessible. RE practitioners reason that, if white supremacy is the root cause of our trauma, it only makes sense that healing should also be collective.
Elissa Sloan Perry at Change Elemental says, “The work requires shifting from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ In order to make that shift, we have to do our own inner work, both individually and collectively. That’s the healing part. That’s the trauma-informed part. The focus is on healing, but not by way of bypassing the trauma.”
Cultivating that connection and building authentic relationships are the crux of many healing practices. A key approach to racial equity organizational development is to cultivate these spaces for honest, delicate, and complex conversations. Cynthia Silva Parker at Interaction Institute for Social Change says, “If you want people to make progress on all the -isms, you’ve got to be able to sit together, to hear each other, to wrestle through. There has to be an openness and a willingness to be vulnerable.”
Openness and vulnerability may not be possible for organizations on the first day. It is also challenging to do this work in a large group, especially when there is distrust and power imbalance. As Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz at RoadMap Consulting says, “In order to move any client forward or deepen any movement ecosystem, you have to build trust and you have to have very honest conversations about race and power. Unfortunately, what often leads to implosion is that those things are not on the table in the cleanest and most direct way that they could be.”
J. Miakoda Taylor at Fierce Allies says, “One of the biggest challenges that I see in movement building work is the inability of people to get real about the tensions between those of us in the movement. Not enough groups are creating the relationship agreements and structure necessary for us to have fiercely honest and deeply vulnerable dialogues about the many ways we are all complicit in the harms we need to heal from, the harms we perpetuate when we project blame onto one another and utilize retributive forms of justice instead of restorative ones to address the tensions we have with one another. This further erodes our ability to leverage collective power. We understandably avoid these conversations because they are high-risk and are often highly volatile. And the cost of that avoidance is high, very, very high. Fierce Allies’ work is designed to build the practices, agreements, containers, and trust necessary for people to not only feel safe but feel compelled to take the risks of actually getting vulnerable with each other, saying things that are uncomfortable and awkward. They feel compelled because the trust and relationship resilience that results, is like no other. Our work facilitates the personal healing necessary to do this interpersonal healing, within our collectives and movements.”
“We call this Fierce Allies, not Fuzzy Allies, for a reason,” quips Taylor. “The work is hard.”
One way RE practitioners cultivate vulnerable spaces is to design and facilitate affinity groups, usually based on racial identities or positional power, for people with similar subjectivities to articulate how they experience inequities based on past trauma or how they unconsciously reify inequities, or both. For instance, in an affinity group for non-Black people of color, members might both trace their trauma to a history of discrimination against people of color in this country and interrogate their complicity in anti-Black racism.
To hone vulnerable spaces, RE practitioners take great care to scaffold conversations and facilitate strategic discussion in different groups to build people’s muscles to move towards self-examination, empathy, shared understanding, and specific strategies to undo white supremacy habits in an organization. Weiner-Mahfuz likens this to “any organizing project, where you are trying to mobilize everybody.”
As a RE practitioner and facilitator, Elissa Sloan Perry tries to practice that vulnerability to create a space where others can bring their full selves to the conversation. “I go to that modeling a lot,” she says, “like telling stories about when I have made a mistake or when systems of oppression have landed on me, or when I have landed them on other people. I model some of that risk-taking.” Sloan Perry also believes that organizational leaders have to be equal participants in the same way. If they do not, RE practitioners may be exposing staff to harm. She says, “We’re asking people to take risks, whether it’s because we’re asking them to name a truth or because we’ve shared a truth and we’re asking if this actually is true. Ideally, people in positions of titular power also model that kind of vulnerability. We have to be intentional and thoughtful about when we’re asking for too much vulnerability, especially if the power situation is unwell.”
There’s a point in the process where you feel deep alignment and integrity with your values. That’s when you’re walking with integrity. You can feel it in your body. It’s a somatic experience.
Mala Nagarajan, Vega Mala Consulting
Sloan Perry uses different storytelling techniques to “lower the level of risk” for participants, “but still get at truth-telling about the subject at hand.” She explains, “Sometimes I ask people to name stories from other places in their lives. Or we might use a guided writing activity.” In a gathering of queer Black organizers after the election of Trump, Sloan Perry brought in the works of Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs and leveraged this queer Black lineage for participants’ healing. In a later case study on networked relationships, a client talks about Sloan Perry’s use of ancestral ceremonies to create brave spaces.
Racial Healing as an Embodied Practice
Another common liberatory healing strategy is somatic practice. According to many REACH cohort members, a lot of racial equity work is about learning to listen to your body. As Mala Nagarajan at Vega Mala Consulting says, “There’s a point in the process where you feel deep alignment and integrity with your values. That’s when you’re walking with integrity. You can feel it in your body. It’s a somatic experience.”
Many of us have a hard time understanding that feeling because we have been too steeped in Western rational thinking that devalues other ways of knowing. “People always want the bibliography,” says Heidi Lopez at Latinx Racial Equality Project. “Equity work that’s happening in a very intellectual way does not create the deep transformation that’s needed. To me, that’s apolitical and it’s replicating white supremacy. It’s a very powerful [harmful] narrative that you can read your way out of racism.”
Taylor agrees. “Conventional American capitalist culture trains and rewards people for being so disembodied. It’s almost a prerequisite for being smart and successful. This makes it even more challenging for people to actually drop from the head into the body. For lots of folks, it’s a very smart and effective survival strategy to not feel things.”
It is not impossible to unlearn this resistance to listening to one’s body. Taylor continues, “I generally don’t experience people’s resistance as conscious. Dominant culture has trained us to believe that feeling makes us vulnerable, and being vulnerable makes us unsafe. People of color in general, and women in particular, are punished for expressing their emotions. They are called crazy, weak, unprofessional, or worse. As a result, very few of us have any meaningful practice being vulnerable in ways that do not feel like, or that are not perceived, as if we’re spiraling out of control, especially in professional and public spaces. And that’s where the healing comes in. People have to see the opportunity of feeling, the liability of not feeling, and be in an environment where we can practice and model vulnerable leadership. This is the gateway to our movements being informed by more holistic and embodied relationships.”
Kyla Hartsfield, Project Director at CompassPoint, believes that “organizations who are committed to pro-Blackness have to have a healing justice lens. They can’t be separated.” As a Black Southern woman, Hartsfield remembers an experience from attending a train-the-trainer workshop for Black women: “We got to lay eyes on each other, we got to break bread, we got to laugh with each other, we got to see each other cry and really heal in that way of being in person and be seen. And I remember physically feeling my shoulders, like lower a little bit, my back straightened up and leaned back. It was just a transformation that I’ll never forget as well as it feels so good to be able to put your shoulders down and to not have to always look behind your back and try to be the next step ahead of people.”
Sloan Perry says that “getting people out of their [work] element” helps them build their muscle memory for embodiment experiences. She explains, “The kind of teamwork and process that isn’t about an organizational outcome, like cooking together, can get at some stuff in ways that are less fraught. Being in nature is another helpful way.”
The work is not possible if people are not recognizing the way in which trauma informs their behaviors, their thinking, their history, their vision, their ability to see what’s possible, their willingness to take risks and to dream something that’s not yet in existence.
J. Miakoda Taylor, Fierce Allies
The care that the RE practitioners put into the logistics of bringing people together is also an important aspect of healing as well. This can include care packages, nourishing food at the gathering, stipends, reiki or massages, and music. One RE practitioner gives participants “tasks where they can add sparkle to them, like adding songs to a collective playlist.”
Johana Bencomo says, “When we gather everyone, Women’s Democracy Lab pays for everything: flights, room and board, so that the women feel taken care of and supported. A lot of us already feel underpaid. Our intent is to create a place of rest and joy and community. We’re very intentional about how we take care of them.”
Simone Thelemaque at CompassPoint says, “I take a lot of pride in making sure the food is nourishing and the space is safe. All of that mindfulness is deeply, deeply, deeply healing for folks who are often not offered spaciousness to feel or to just be. I happen to love taking care of my people. It just becomes such a labor of love.” This level of care and accommodations are often expected or taken for granted by white leaders. Especially for Black women who have been denied them, both professionally and personally, even when they are in leadership or executive positions, these “labor of love” gestures from the practitioners can be both healing and validating.
Toward a Healthier Relationship to Power
As Anouska Bhattacharyya at YWCA Boston says, “Our previous trauma can prevent us from being inclusive or feeling included.” J. Miakoda Taylor at Fierce Allies agrees, “The work is not possible if people are not recognizing the way in which trauma informs their behaviors, their thinking, their history, their vision, their ability to see what’s possible, their willingness to take risks and to dream something that’s not yet in existence.” Because a lot of RE organizational development work, as demonstrated in the next section on “inclusive governance,” is about sharing power, a significant part of healing and repair is about building a healthier relationship to power. And that could look different for white people and people of color (or other communities that have been denied self-determination historically). According to Yee Won Chong at Western States Center, people, white or BIPOC, sometimes avoid power, because of past trauma from being on either side of power-wielding. He says, “But we have all these people who are working on equity in government and larger nonprofits and there’s a lot of power. So how do we not leave power on the table? How do we leverage that? And we then realize we actually have to first have a conversation of how do we view power?” Unlearning unhealthy relationships cannot happen, says Chong, if we cannot have honest discussions about that trauma.
Credit: Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Caption: People protest in the street outside a protest to defund the police in a place they are calling the “City Hall Autonomous Zone” in support of “Black Lives Matter” in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., June 30, 2020.
White people, especially organizational leaders, are not bystanders in this healing process, but active participants. White people, because of their racial and sometimes their positional privilege, often replicate the trauma for people of color. For instance, while Bhattacharyya believes that leadership development for women of color is worthwhile, its impact could be limited without some intervention from white leaders in power. She says, “People think we just need to give these women [of color] more opportunities, right? It’s the system that we need to change. The places where we’ve seen the greatest achievement in gender parity are where we have not only focused on folks with marginalized gendered identities but where we’ve thought about the folks who have the greatest power in the room. If we only focus on women of color in our programs, we’re actually missing an opportunity to influence a lot of power that already exists.” Some RE practitioners cite similar examples of white-led organizations putting their DEI initiatives on the backs of people of color, especially Black women, while their white leaders are not putting in the work of self-examination and transformation.
Ron White at Humboldt Area Foundation says, “I don’t really believe in centering white people in racial justice struggle, but white people need to see themselves as part of the story. Doing the right thing because it’s the right thing only takes people so far. One of the things I learned from organizing is that self-interest rules.” White refers to john a. powell’s approach of targeted universalism—the idea that processes that target specific populations, especially the most marginalized, can bring universal benefits. To White, white people need to see how they can benefit from racial equity, lest they become saviors or martyrs. This is especially relevant to places like Humboldt County where white people still make up a supermajority of the region. White says, “If they didn’t do the work, it wasn’t gonna get done.”
Bhattacharyya agrees, “Very candidly I think one of the most harmful narratives when it comes to racial equity is the idea that white people need to save people of color, that this is sort of a saviorism or a charitable thing. But your liberation is tied to mine, which is tied to others, so this is not a charity effort. I think it’s really dangerous precisely because people have really great intentions. But when they see racial equity in terms of charity, they’ve divided a line in the sand. And that actually reduces the humanity of the folks that you might be trying to reach out to. But it also dehumanizes yourself and limits the ways in which you will benefit from increased racial equity.”
Healing is often cast as the work of those who suffer from trauma; that is, those who need to heal. But healing is also the work of those who have caused harm. Healing is not complete when those who have caused harm do not change their behavior and stop the hurting. Illustrating some of the strategies covered in this section, the case study below discusses how Fierce Allies has used an embodied healing practice with one of their client partners, “to resource [them]selves to navigate tension and conflict.” This somatic tool has helped the white leaders examine and reimagine their relationship to power.