2

The Unfinished Journey of Racial Healing

It is 1997. I travel to Ghana, Philadelphia, and South Africa. These three assignments form the foundation and lead to the naming of Emotional Justice. In making my journey, I discover that racial healing has its own journey. I learn what that journey looks like and, crucially, what it lacks. I learn that the journey is unfinished. In fact, a racial healing journey doesn’t have an arrival destination; I learn that it must be a practice, developed, sustained, and engaged by us and by generations that come after us.

Ghana, 1997

I am here to cover forty years of independence from British colonial rule. My dad was an activist in pre-Independence Ghana, a fierce pan-Africanist with equally fierce sideburns who would go on and become a diplomat and a minister serving in the government of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah.

During this assignment, my mother breaks her twenty-plus-year silence about Ghana’s first military coup in February 1966. She reveals that she faced the tanks, the soldiers, and their violence.

My mother is a woman of tribe and faith—proudly Christian and Ashanti. The 1966 coup incarcerated my dad, turned us out of our home and our nation. Three in the morning my mother tells me. That’s when the tanks roll up to our front door, soldiers in battle fatigues and black boots stomping, breaking down our door, and ransacking our home. They smash all the windows, break cupboards, turn out drawers. They put a gun to her head. They terrify and terrorize us. One night is followed by two years under house arrest. Soldiers’ battle fatigues become part of our home.

I have no memory of the night or the following two years. For over twenty years I am haunted by night terrors where I am dragged awake at 3 a.m. hearing black boots stomping all around my head. When my mother broke her silence, it was a discovery for me.

The discovery was about naming what is hidden, and the power of what is hidden to shape you in ways that you cannot understand until and unless what is hidden is both named and put into context. It is in this naming and contextualizing that I begin to think about who I am as an emotional human being, outside of profession and education. I am an educated, professional young woman who is struggling and does not understand why. I learn you cannot PhD your way out of trauma.

I speak with others. Kwame Nkrumah’s eldest son shares his story and memory. Later, when I return to London I speak with Paul Boateng, the UK’s first Black cabinet minister, and he shares his memory. Their memories are versions of my own, of boots, of homes turned battleground, of soldiers and guns, of home turned horror.

From each of these stories, I explore more about the world of the emotional and its power. I learn how the emotional—your relationship to yourself—is shaped, and how that shaping is not necessarily changed or healed by just intellectual focus or educational achievement.

I learn that the emotional has a power unconnected to the intellectual, the professional, and the educational. This discovery is a signpost pointing to the power of naming, of finding language to identify what has been hidden. It marks the beginning of a journey to recognize the power of the emotional. It’s step 1 in the research process.

Philadelphia, 1997

I am here to cover the October 1997 Million Woman March. I meet Winnie Mandela, the march’s keynote speaker—a celebrated and, for some, controversial choice.

I had never been to Philadelphia—or the US at that point. I stay with a nice white liberal woman who has kindly opened up her home to Black women traveling to Philadelphia for the march. Her home is large, and other nice white liberal folks rent rooms from her. She, and they, are deeply upset by the choice of Winnie Mandela as the keynote speaker.

There are multiple conversations about their concern. I am struck by how angry they are, and I am especially struck by how much they think their anger should be considered—wrong word, actually; they feel that it should be centered—by Black women at an event that is about Black women. This is where I really notice how whiteness centers itself and expects the emotions of white people to be not simply acknowledged but centered and acted on, overriding how those emotions impact a Black woman and something that matters to that Black woman.

The question my host consistently asks me is, What are you doing here? At first I am puzzled by the question. She had opened up her home for a Black woman. And ain’t I a Black woman? She asks the question again and again. Eventually I ask if there was an issue. Immediately defensive, she shushes me. I am more surprised than annoyed. I end up meeting her dad, who, it turns out, is a real-life missionary who worked in Ghana. He asks me the same question: What are you doing here? He elaborates. He was told that my family is from Ghana, from Africa, and I was born and live in Britain. To him, I don’t look like I need help. Weird, I thought. I explain—as I had done many, many times to his daughter—that I am a journalist, covering the march, and need accommodation, that I am Black British, and that yes, my family is from Ghana. Father and daughter exchange looks. Weird, I thought. Discomfort hangs in the air. It lingers. So weird. I learn that to this father and daughter I don’t look like a “needy” Black woman. I don’t look wretched, and I don’t seem poor. Their attitude is ludicrous to me. And it leads me to a realization. Their relationship to Blackness—particularly one that derived from Africa—is about a certain wretchedness, an inability, a body needing saving. I don’t fit the narrative.

This experience helps me explore the emotional power of the language of whiteness as a narrative of how the world is, our place in it as white and Black people, and how that language shapes how we may see each other.

I am at Philadelphia’s Eakins Oval, both a historical site of slave auctions and the Million Woman March stage. It is where Winnie Mandela delivers her keynote to thousands and thousands of women stretched from Benjamin Franklin Parkway right down to Penn’s Landing and spilling over to City Hall.

I share with Winnie Mandela a story Pa shared with me. He welcomed to Ghana Umkontho we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. They came to train, fight, and take up armed struggle as resistance to apartheid’s white supremacist terror that was destroying Black people.

I tell Mrs. Mandela about Ma, her broken silence and the night the tanks came. I tell her I am headed to her home nation of South Africa to engage the global narrative and conversation on forgiveness, as part of an assignment on the globally renowned Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Mama Winnie—as she is affectionately called in South Africa and by global Black folk—reminds me that as I travel in South Africa, I need to center my mother’s broken silence and to think more deeply about what she endured. She reminds me to connect Ma’s silence as a Black woman in thinking through and exploring forgiveness by Black people of white racist violence.

That begins a journey to center Black women in understanding how a nation’s narrative is shaped, whom it centers, and whom it excludes, and how that exclusion shapes the story of who they are as a people.

This assignment—meeting and speaking with Winnie, the exchanges with the nice white liberal woman and her dad—was a consciousness-raising moment. I hadn’t thought deeply about gender and whiteness in a conscious way. I hadn’t really thought critically about gender, Blackness, and healing until then either. I was beginning to.

South Africa, 1997

I report on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the body set up following South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. The commission’s focus: tell the full truth about the atrocities you committed during apartheid, and in return, you get amnesty. I meet and interview Archbishop Desmond Tutu (now deceased), the commission’s architect and an antiapartheid warrior; and Ntsiki Biko, the widow of Steve Biko, a beloved figure known as South Africa’s Black Father of Consciousness. It is November 1997.

Covering the TRC, I, like the global media, watch this wrenching truth-telling process of an outpouring of Black trauma against white legislated violence. It is here that I explore and develop the language of whiteness and name two of its pillars, emotional patriarchy and racialized emotionality. These first two pillars become integral parts of unlearning this language of whiteness. Naming these two pillars occurs after two encounters: the first is a pivotal interview with Desmond Tutu; the second is after listening to Ntsiki Biko, the widow of Steve Biko.

I am ushered into Archbishop Tutu’s office in Cape Town. He prays before our interview. I ask him about this process of forgiveness between white and Black people.

“South Africa will be a Mecca for whites, just like Kenya!” declares Tutu. I ask him why there’s so much focus on how white people feel. His answer is evasive. I ask again. And again. I ask why there is so much focus on how white people feel in a nation healing from so much horror and harm perpetrated against Black bodies by a system that enshrined the false superiority of whiteness. He gets uncomfortable and then angry.

He tells me that when it comes to repair, Black South Africans shouldn’t ask for too much. I ask him what “too much” means, given the extent, weight, and depth of pain caused to Black South Africans and their families. He goes on to explain that if someone needs particular assistance—say, a wheelchair—because of apartheid violence, then the person could get that. The TRC would find someone to help them with that. I am struck by how limited the language of repair is, but also how individual it is. Even though the TRC body is about forgiving an entire people, the repair seems to be about forgetting that an entire people had been subject to apartheid.

I continue to ask about Black people’s needs, and their healing. Tutu then says, “The whites are beginning to take this offer of forgiveness for granted.” I am especially struck by this. The interview comes to an end—honestly, it was cut short by Archbishop Tutu’s team. I leave with a sharpened focus on this centralizing and soothing of whiteness and a neglect of Blackness.

Archbishop Tutu mentioned Kenya. A mecca for whites just like Kenya, he said. Kenya fought the British for its independence. During colonial rule in Kenya, the British committed violent atrocities. They tortured, raped, and murdered. They imprisoned 1.6 million Kikuyu—an entire population—in a violent attempt to suppress the growing battle for independence. Jomo Kenyatta was Kenya’s first post-Independence president. After Kenya gained its independence, in 1964, Kenyatta would tell the British, let’s forgive and forget. There are archival images, articles, and interviews of him reassuring white Britons that Kenya forgives them, and that this land continues to be their home.

I have familial connection in Kenya too. My dad had been an advisor to Jomo Kenyatta. He too was an advocate of reconciliation. In our home in Ghana, there are black-and-white images of my dad with Kenyatta. Years later, I travel to Kenya on an assignment that deepens my understanding of a history of racial healing that firmly centers whiteness.

Forgive and Forget: Race and the Language of Whiteness

Nelson Mandela would echo Jomo Kenyatta’s words of forgiveness. “Let bygones be bygones. Let what has happened pass as something unfortunate which we must forget,” he said, speaking of South Africa’s future in one of several interviews following his release from twenty-seven years in prison.

What was Mandela asking South Africa to forget, to forgive? The laws enshrining false notions of white superiority and Black inferiority. That included laws such as the Urban Areas Act of 1923, which created what became exclusive African slums. The 1926 Color Bar Act, which banned Africans from practicing skilled trades and forced a poverty that Black South Africans continue to struggle with today. The 1936 Representation of Natives Act, which removed Black voters from the common voters’ roll in Cape Town, thereby denouncing their citizenhood.

What Mandela was asking to let pass was the water cannons, the truncheons, the torture, and the killing and terrorizing of children, robbing them of their innocence, their childhood, making violence their normal. There was the killing and raping of women, the murder of men’s souls, the murder of men’s bodies. There was the emasculation of Black men, the humiliation of Black women, the wholesale thievery of land. There was racializing and dehumanizing Black bodies and then targeting them with ongoing violence.

Forgiveness, then, took on a color, a context, a direction, and a meaning. Apartheid was terrorism and white supremacy. Forgiveness was Black emotional labor, and it was absolution for whiteness. It was a one-and-done healing scenario. It did not account for legacy, and didn’t center those who had been harmed and what was necessary for their healing. That meant white people did no emotional work, but received amnesty and forgiveness.

It is in my realization of this context of forgiveness that I coin the term racialized emotionality—describing a world where we racialize emotions, where we insert color, context, and consequence to emotions—and where doing so changes how we see those bodies in whom the emotions have been racialized.

Years later, I connect this history of racial healing, of emotional labor by Black folk in service of white supremacist violence, to the US and the UK.

Creating a Racial Healing Roadmap

South Africa’s racial healing model, one that is emulated and lauded by countries all over the world, was not constructed centering—or really even fully acknowledging—Black and Brown people and the breadth and depth of the harm, the toll, and the legacy of that harm on them and their communities. Because of that, this was not a roadmap for racial healing. Instead, it was a model that privileges one group and exacts emotional labor from another. It was political, it was structural, and it was inequitable. It was an unfinished journey.

No national or global conversation about forgiveness centered Black people forgiving themselves and one another for what they had endured, for what they became, for how this shaped how they loved, for the self-hate that survival may have triggered, and for the toll that eternally fighting took on their sense of self.

One of the most powerful examples is in the treatment of Winnie Mandela. South African writer Sisonke Msimang wrote, “This was a nation with a narrative of forgiveness, but it wouldn’t forgive Winnie Mandela.” There was public humiliation and global castigation of a Black woman, while De Klerk, a white man who never stood on a global platform professing the horrors perpetrated by South African governments on its Black citizens, received a Nobel Peace Prize.

In saying let bygones be bygones, what Nelson Mandela and the TRC did was ask Black people, brutalized and beaten, to privilege the fears, insecurities, and feelings of white folk over their own sacrifice, story, and struggles and those of their families. And the world applauded, in awe of this capacity for forgiveness, and turned Mandela into an icon of forgiveness.

This model of racial healing—both in South Africa and in Kenya—is an emotional apartheid. It separates white and Black people. It is a model that entrenches inequity by centering whiteness and reinforcing emotional labor as the work of Black folk, and white folks as the recipients of that emotional labor. It timelines and deadlines the trauma for those harmed, treating the emotional as if it were an economy, to be moved and manipulated.

It is this inequity that strengthens already existing labor disparities around race. From physical labor to emotional labor by Black people in service of whiteness, this was emotional injustice. And in this time, we cannot take that approach if we are to achieve a racial healing that serves a full humanity.

Ntsiki Biko and a Journey of Deeper Understanding

A pivotal exchange with Ntsiki Biko creates the term Emotional Justice and, for me, solidifies the need, the work, and the roadmap. She stood before the world’s predominantly white media and invited them to better understand what happened to her husband, Steve Biko. She told them that, for her, there was no question of forgiveness.

Ten former members of the security branch of the South Africa police sought amnesty for Steve Biko’s death. They said that Steve Biko, in the presence of the white policemen, had “gone berserk” during a “scuffle,” which led to his death.

Addressing the Truth and Reconciliation hearing, one said: “Your honor, we have said that during the scuffle, he bumped his head against the wall.”

“Scuffle” and “bumped”? The so-called scuffle was a twenty-two-hour interrogation involving ten officers. Biko was shackled, and his legs were put in leg irons. The “bump” resulted in a battered and bruised body, left naked, then transported to Pretoria, rather than given medical treatment. It was a Black body they then put in a cell naked, and left to die.

The TRC’s process required the full truth to be told. Those who took the stand regarding Steve Biko’s death didn’t do that. They prettied up brutality, justified terror, minimalized violence, and expected forgiveness.

Ntsiki Biko said, “There is a lot of talk about reconciliation. What I want is for the proper course of justice to be done.” Mrs. Biko and other families sued the government, rejecting the TRC’s process and demanding justice for their loved ones.

It is listening to Mrs. Biko, her call for a justice even when connected to a process that was deeply emotional, that I begin to think in a more structural way about the emotional and Blackness as integral parts of a justice project.

Lessons from Ntsiki Biko, Desmond Tutu, and the TRC

I begin to parse and rearrange the pieces of this narrative about pain, power, race, whiteness, emotional labor, and racial healing. I am struck by the focus on how white people feel, by the care and thought given to those feelings, and by how those feelings are the center of a process that addressed forgive-ness—by how the pain and loss were racialized and politicized. The process was not individual—it was structural and one connected to the political, but it was unjust and inhumane.

I begin connecting the emotional to the notion of justice when it comes to race through listening to Ntsiki Biko, to Winnie, and to the women of South Africa, and through my interviews with Desmond Tutu and other ANC leaders. I don’t judge their focus; I simply recognize that this is unfinished work. Effective racial healing—through which Black and white people come to fuller humanity—cannot be achieved by centering the needs, the fears, and the feelings of those who have caused the harm. Because when we do that, we are using the emotional as an instrument to entrench what is unjust. That teaches the perpetrator entitlement, and it teaches those harmed to sideline themselves.

I see how this model manifests all the way up to the world of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). It is a model that centers those who hold power and have abused it. It centers their feelings and discomfort. It calls for minimal labor by those who perpetuate harm, and applauds, affirms, and appreciates them for doing the bare minimum—and then calls that change.

I see how this model manifests during the trial of Dylan Roof, the white American supremacist mass murderer who killed nine African Americans in church. He stood in the dock as the loved ones of those killed offered an outpouring of forgiveness, emotion, tears, and trauma toward this white supremacist murderer.

Let me be clear. I do not condemn individual acts of forgiveness by those who believe in that. This is about a global racial healing model, the lessons passed down by that model, and how those lessons shape what we do today—but, more important, what we do not do. This is about understanding that there has been no equal division of emotional labor; there has barely been a requirement that white people do any emotional labor on behalf of dismantling inequity. And it is for this reason that we need Emotional Justice and its roadmap for racial healing.

Emotional Justice Is Born

It is because of my journey with these assignments—engaging with leaders, listening to Black South African women challenging authority, and watching an adoring global media lap up the South African model—that the term Emotional Justice is fully born. It is because of my journey that I explore how systems are upheld and that I more fully understand that systems work through people, are maintained by people, and therefore must be dismantled by people. The individual connects to the institutional. Context, nuance, and detail matter. The emotional work is the crucial—but neglected—part of the political, intellectual, and organizing work to dismantle white supremacy.

This historical but now outdated racial healing model lauded in South Africa—one of white harm and Black forgiveness, Black outpouring of pain and trauma, white supremacy and Black emotional labor—promoted injustice. There was no reckoning, wrestling, or negotiating for whiteness—and therefore no dismantling of systemic inequity, no racial healing practice that addressed a full humanity. The emotional required justice too.

Emotional Justice is ignited by my mother’s broken silence, expanded by Winnie Mandela’s words of guidance, cemented by Ntsiki Biko’s act of resistance. It is also shaped by the men of the movement: my dad, Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Tutu, who taught me that the political was upheld and entrenched by the emotional. Their work was crucial in shaping the course of independence for African nations and must always be celebrated and honored. There is simultaneously undone, unrecognized, unnamed work—that work needs a new model. Reconciliation is not, and cannot be, the path for racial healing for our future and our humanity. Emotional Justice is.

Emotional Justice is about all of us having emotional work to do, but as I stated earlier in this book, that work is not the same, the harm is not the same, the toll is not the same. South Africa’s lesson for me—and Kenya’s before it—was that the old model of racial healing began by centering whiteness. Such a beginning could bring no healing to a humanity harmed by this whiteness—not for white or Black people. Understanding mattered, and so the roadmap for racial healing was named.

The Engagement

New York, 2009–2014

I live and work in New York for seven years. I absorb the lessons from South Africa and Kenya about the damage of centering whiteness. I build on those lessons and explore how they connect in the US and with US history. Here, I expand what I experienced in London, learned in Ghana, developed in Philadelphia, and manifested in South Africa.

In New York, I specifically center Blackness. I lead annual public intimate discussion and conversation series across multiple platforms. One example is the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. It is the first home to and sacred space for #EJconvos, a five-year annual series of discussions with activists, scholars, artists, journalists, and public intellectuals, engaging with community who come to listen, share, and challenge. Our first seasons grapple with trauma, the power of emotions and the emotional to shape, stifle, and stall movements no matter how sound and strong their politics. I explore the critical—but misunderstood and ignored—role of the emotional in what is too often defined as purely ideological, philosophical, or intellectual.

Scholar Mark Anthony Neal; award-winning filmmaker Byron Hurt; scholar, writer, and television commentator Marc Lamont Hill; and scholar and writer Dumi L’Heureux Lewis make up the very first New York #EJconvos panel. We explore Black male privilege within our own communities, whom and how it hurts, and how we might heal.

#EJconvos navigates the personal, familial, and political trauma; Blackness; movements; power and change. In other words, it explores and identifies our emotional work as Black people when it comes to racial healing. This annual series of discussions includes award-winning writer Akiba Solomon; critically acclaimed writer and scholar Dr. Joan Morgan; scholar and New York Times best-selling author Dr. Brittney Cooper; award-winning poet, writer, and activist Staceyann Chin; educator and child-rights activist Dr. Stacey Patton; national radio host Karen Hunter; writer and activist Darnell Moore; scholar Rich Blint; and organizer and leader Wade Davis II, among many others.

I explore how Emotional Justice can change, challenge, and shape the way that white women progressives do their work; and in conversation with activist, writer, and educator Jennifer JLove Calderon; New York Times best-selling author and journalist Laura Flanders; journalist and educator Jennifer Pozner; and racial justice educator Marjery Freeman, we explore what that work is and why it is so crucial. Jennifer JLove Calderon goes on to engage Emotional Justice in her work regarding liberation and challenging white people. She would say of Emotional Justice, “As a white woman focused and committed to working with white people to tackle our biases and focus on an antiracism practice, Emotional Justice is a powerful, purpose-filled framework that I engage with—and can call on my community to engage. I worked with Esther and her framework for all of my work.”

What starts and is explored and developed in South Africa, Kenya, and London expands to the US. This expansion identifies Emotional Justice as a global model and roadmap for racial healing.

On the Stage

From holding annual in-person series, I move to a more creative space to enable me to more deeply think through themes of Blackness, identity, emotionality, and power. The theater becomes the space to deepen the roadmap, expand its meaning, and further engage the community through new audiences. There are performances and panels in New York and Chicago, where I write four plays and have them produced and performed.

On the Mic

The airwaves are a home for me to explore racial healing that centers and explores Blackness. I am a radio host of Wakeup Call, the morning show of WBAI, the New York radio station of independent national broadcaster Pacifica. I conduct a series of one-on-one exchanges on the mic. With my guests, I explore how the emotional shows up to stifle and shape individual lives, and connect individual experience to institutional work—that of movements, organizations, and sectors. These interviews include the notable scholar and writer Cornel West; scholar and writer Michael Eric-Dyson; and writer and feminist Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker.

I then create The Spin, a podcast with online and on-air audiences; it airs on community radio stations across the US—in Arizona, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, Connecticut, and South Carolina. The podcast has a specifically gendered and racial focus. Learning lessons from South Africa, remembering how affected I am by my mother’s broken silence—I use this podcast and space to explore the world through the lens of Black women from academia, activism, journalism, and entrepreneurship, bringing together women in the US with those in Africa.

Expanding Emotional Justice, Creating Global Connections

I connect the legacy of racist US laws undone by resistance and social justice movements to those of South Africa and Kenya. I see how nurtured intellect, ideology, and profession are no substitute for doing the emotional work. I name racial healing that centers global Black people, navigating a legacy of untreated trauma due to the language of whiteness, language that has shaped a relationship to Blackness. I recognize how deeply ingrained the language of whiteness is in us all, even though it manifests in different ways. In South Africa and Kenya, I noted a deference to whiteness that shaped power, and an internalizing of historical trauma by the Black majority that would show up within community, how we treated and saw one another as global Black people.

The racial trauma from systems of oppression is not healed by legislation, ideology, or movements alone, although they hold a crucial place in transforming landscapes—and indeed landscapes are transformed by each of them. The emotional transforms us and how we see ourselves, and that needs healing in order for us to divest from a cycle of progress and regress.

2014–2019

I leave New York and travel to Ghana. Here I expand Emotional Justice further, and begin work on specific issues of masculinity, gender, violence, and healing a global Blackness shaped by the legacy of colonialism. I return to the keyboard and publications, exploring Emotional Justice in the context of Africa through a weekly column in Ghana’s prestigious newspaper Business & Financial Times, and a writing series in WARSCAPES, an online space that explores conflict and is led by professor and writer Dr. Bhakti Shringarpure. I contribute Emotional Justice essays to the works of the critically acclaimed and award-winning writers Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Dr. Keisha Blain.

2019–Present

I build a global institute, The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice. With a global team across Ghana, Chicago in the US, and London and Oxfordshire in the UK, we work to implement Emotional Justice as a tool to transform and heal within organizations and communities. It is for the global community of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white humanity. We use storytelling as a strategy for structural change and develop our resources in three areas: projects, training, and thought leadership. Our work is to strategize, structuralize, and operationalize changing hearts and minds by developing resources and tools using the Emotional Justice roadmap.

So, from Ghana to London to Philadelphia to South Africa to New York, I make connections to the emotional work required to unlearn the language of whiteness as a crucial element for dismantling systemic inequity.

I Built This . . . in Global Community

This, then, is my journey of building the Emotional Justice roadmap for racial healing with family and global community in cities and countries and continents, through research and exchange; engaging storytelling, deep listening, journalism, theater, and history. Emotional Justice emerges from the ideas, the experiences, the history of horror and harm, of resistance and community, and lessons learned. It is the combination of all of these that forms the roadmap.

Emotional Justice ignites a global clarion call for finishing our journey with a roadmap for racial healing that takes heed of the models of South Africa and Kenya, recognizes the unacknowledged power of the emotional and the urgent need to connect it to justice, and expands to root it in a long line of justice movements to progress our world and dismantle what is inequitable. It is the roadmap to help finish this journey of racial healing for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white people.

Chapters 1 and 2 explained how I built Emotional Justice through research and engagement. Now that I have shared how I built it, we’re off to engage with it.

In the next four chapters, I introduce, define, and contextualize each of the four Emotional Justice love languages, the demographic they apply to, and what unlearning the language of whiteness looks like, and I end with the Emotional Justice template to guide the action to be taken. Consider these next four chapters as your working tools, designed to be returned to again and again, to be engaged, explored, exchanged, and utilized in your worlds of labor and learning.

Each chapter includes the following elements:

• Definition and Action to Be Taken. This explains the love language and whom it applies to.

• Breakdown. This offers context for the love language and describes what unlearning the language of whiteness looks like in this context.

• An Exchange. This is a conversation with leaders and thinkers exploring what this work means to and for them and their sector.

At the end of each chapter, there is the three-step Emotional Justice template to help you work through the themes. As a reminder, they are

1. Work through your feelings

2. Reimagine your focus

3. Build the future

Let’s now continue our journey together delving into each of the love languages of Emotional Justice. Let’s keep going.