1: A Loving Invitation to Black Women: (Re)Connecting to Ourselves Through the Embodiments of Healing Justice

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, continued heartless state-sanctioned murders of marginalized people, and the current political state within the US has only exacerbated the need for marginalized communities to take up healing. While ideologies around wellness have been conceptualized by those in power as an individual journey, Black women have long been countering these harmful, dominant ideologies by naming how transformative healing takes place when we (re)root ourselves in the ancestral traditions of healing justice (Ginwright, 2015; Page & Woodland, 2023). Healing justice requires us to tend to ourselves while we simultaneously engage in the lifelong pursuit of collective liberation (Annamma & Booker, 2020). As a Black woman, I write this self-reflective chapter to remind us that healing justice is an ancestral practice that helps us “return back to ourselves” by centering our holistic well-being. Thus, healing is a radical act of refusal that requires us to pause and care for ourselves in intuitive ways that counter antiblack and white supremacist tactics that encourage us to keep going until we experience racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004). I envision this chapter to be a loving invitation to Black women, who historically and contemporarily have always played an integral role in dreaming and designing more loving and just futures, to also “put the cape down” and recognize how self-preservation is critical to our livelihoods and a way we can actively disrupt white supremacy.