Emotional Justice

Book excerpt: It is time for an emotional reckoning on our path to racial healing, sustainable equity, and the future of DEI. Here’s the tool to help us navigate it. In this groundbreaking book, Esther Armah argues that the crucial missing piece to racial healing and sustainable equity is emotional justice—a new racial healing language to help us do our emotional work. This work is part of the emotional reckoning we must navigate if racial healing is to be more than a dream. We all—white, Black, Brown—have our emotional work that we need to do. But that work is not the same for all of us. This emotional work means unlearning the language of whiteness, a narrative that centers white people, particularly white men, no matter the deadly cost and consequence to all women and to global Black and Brown people. That’s why a new racial healing language is crucial. Emotional Justice grapples with how a legacy of untreated trauma from oppressive systems has created and sustained dual deadly fictions: white superiority and Black inferiority that shape—and wound—all of us. These systems must be dismantled to build a future that serves justice to everyone, not just some of us. We are the dismantlers we have been waiting for, and emotional justice is the game changer for a just future that benefits all of us.