Healing Justice
“We want to make a clear distinction between the healing justice framework explored in this anthology, and other work by the same name rooted in restorative justice, reform, and healing the criminal justice system. The healing justice framework that we speak of is abolitionist and anti-capitalist and does not seek to reform/heal the prison industrial complex.” - Cara Page & Erica Woodland
The Healing Justice we pull on is an epistemological framework which seeks to reclaim the Legacy of rituals, ceremonials, and healing practices of Afrikan Sacred Science and Black Liberation Traditions that have been stolen, distorted, desecrated, reduced, subjected, ignored, and co-opted by the state. Lacking the ideological clarity of THE Afrikan Maafa academic/professional institutional and non profits can not be community based. The concept of Healing Justice is an ancient concept that was re-birthed/re-created in the early 2000s as a remembering process of resurrection.
“In the early 2000’s in the Southeast, we witnessed a rise of anti-Black racism, anti-immigration policies, xenophobia, Islamophobia, criminalization of poverty and homophobic/transphobic violence. We also noticed a climb in suicides among Black youth organizers and immense burnout among organizers, especially within Black, People of Color, Indigenous and Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Trans/Two Spirit/Gender Non-Conforming & Intersex (LGBTSTGNCI) communities in our Southern movements….We incite movements to abolish policing and prisons and the Medical Industrial Complex, to build practice, remedies & actions that will transform the generational traumas that our Southern communities hold in our bones, in our tissues, and in our psyches.” Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective
The Kindred Collective reminds us that the roots of Healing Justice come from previous generations of Black Liberation praxis that honors the long lineage of Southern Black Freedom Fighters Tradition in which elders and ancestors centered care and safety as integral to political liberation. They say the names of ancestors and elders in grassroots movements that come in a good way: Harriet Tubman, to Ella Baker & Fannie Lou Hamer, to Audre Lorde, and Assata Shakur, to the Black Panther survival programs and community clinics, to safety teams and healers who are integrated into grassroots movements such as the Black Liberation Army.
“But we (Black/Oppressed People) were to find out quickly that courage and dedication were not enough. To win any struggle for liberation, you have to have the way as well as the will, an overall ideology and strategy that stems from scientific analysis of history and present conditions” Assata Shakur
Healing Justice is a political strategy and spiritual framework based in collective and (her)historic remembrance of survival and trauma as genetic/cellular memory. Healing Justice is an abolition analysis that is anti-capitalism; a community-led response to interrupt, transform, and intervene in individual/collective violence to sustain our emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, psychic, and environmental well- being (Page and Woodland, 2023). Healing Justice remembers the full story of state violence. Healing JusticeBlack peoples birth-right, knowledge systems, and lineages - built by the people for the people. Healing Justice is Afrikan people’s Legacy!
