Somewhere between anti-Black executive orders coming from the White House, the relentless attacks on diversity, the attempted erasure of Black history and the daily grind of navigating a country that keeps making it clear it’s not built for Black people, fatigue sets in — and not the kind a good night’s sleep or a long beach weekend can fix.
Black folks are exhausted. But if we want to get better, how do we heal when our society is sick?
That was the overarching question of the latest “Wellness Wednesday” livestream hosted by scholar and “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” author Joy DeGruy and Bahia Cross Overton, executive director of the Black Parent Initiative. Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier, managing director of Word In Black, joined the conversation alongside deputy managing director Joseph Williams and racial healing correspondent Aaliyah Amos.
Data tells part of the story. Last December, Word In Black’s Insights & Research Division surveyed nearly 700 Black adults nationwide about racial healing. One finding stood out: nearly 95% of respondents said that the concept — repairing the damage that anti-Black systems do to individuals and communities, transforming societal structures in the process — is important.
READ MORE: Racial Healing in Black America: What the Data Tells Us
“Literally, the global African world is feeling things,” DeGruy said. “We are at a point in the evolution of our experiences here that we are literally centering ourselves in our own healing. We are not looking for outward folks to come in and save us or ‘get this.’ This is something that’s fully within our power to do, and we must do it.”
At the same time, many survey respondents also said they’re not sure racial healing is actually possible in the United States right now.
Indeed, Overton described what many people in her community are grappling with: the sense that systemic racism is a machine that cannot be stopped, no matter how hard we fight it.
“It’s like somebody continues to inject people with poison and we’re like, ‘We’ve got to heal ourselves,’” she says. “But the injection keeps happening.”
Williams was more direct: “[We] try to climb out of the muck. But then somebody might shove you back in.”
Revival, Not Just Survival
Amos, who has written about different racial healing initiatives for the last year, brought a word to the discussion that the panel leaned into: revival.
Through her reporting on poets and artists doing the work of racial healing, she’s seen how Black communities are moving beyond survival. She pointed to Birmingham, Alabama, where Salaam Green, the city’s poet laureate and founder of Literary Healing Arts nonprofit, brought together descendants of slave owners and descendants of enslaved people. The goal went beyond reconciliation to ask what it would look like to build a shared community rooted in truth and justice.
In that sense, revival is “not trying to restore what is ‘broken,’” Amos says. “We’re trying to create something new that will serve both of our descendants equally.”
It’s important to note “we are not a one-dimensional people,” DeGruy explains. “We are healed while we are also healing, and we have to embrace that truth, because we wouldn’t be here having this conversation otherwise.”
Williams found his own version of healing and revival during a suburban Maryland trail race — looking around and spotting other Black runners in an overwhelmingly white space.
He finished dead last, but it didn’t matter because the Black runners “all started talking to each other,” he said. “It became clear that this was a moment of healing.”
A Vision Board for Racial Healing
When the conversation turned to imagining what a healed Black community would actually look and feel like, Courquet-Lesaulnier pointed to something Overton returns to again and again: the idea of beaming love and light onto Black children.
“I often think about what would my life have looked like if my whole entire existence had that happening,” Courquet-Lesaulnier said. “If from the first time I stepped out of my house — in a school, in a bank, trying out for a sports team — people were beaming love and light instead of anti-Blackness at you.”
Overton knows exactly what that kind of intentional love can do.
“There’s something so transformative when you look at a person and you just project all of your love and happiness and joy and your good wishes for them,” she said. “It does something to their spirit.”
For DeGruy, the answer can be found in the small, everyday moments of recognition between Black people — the stranger across the street who catches your eye and nods.
“If nobody saw you today, I see you,” she said. “That, to me, is what it looks like in a normal, common, everyday movement through life.”
In other words, anti-Blackness isn’t going away any time soon. But the healing? It’s already here.