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What Is Emotional Justice?

Emotional Justice is a roadmap for racial healing, focusing on the emotional work that white, Black, and Brown people need to do to end systemic inequity. That emotional work entails exploring, identifying, and severing the connections in our relationship to power and race that uphold systemic inequity, by unlearning the language of whiteness. This relationship shapes how we lead, learn, work, see ourselves and one another as Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white people. That’s because the connections are about identity, essence, emotions, intimacy, trauma, heart, and soul—not intellect, ideology, or philosophy. Emotional Justice engages and explores how a legacy of untreated trauma from global histories of injustice shapes us. It transforms how we lead, learn, work, and see ourselves and others. It is about loving one another more justly, in order to make our world more justice centered.

We have justice movements to change our world for the better—social justice, environmental justice, gender justice, labor justice. Each speaks to a particular part of the fight for our global humanity, and engages issues of injustice, inequity, or violence that threaten that humanity. Emotional Justice is part of this family. I don’t treat the emotional in the purely individual sense. I treat the emotional as structural. Emotional Justice is specifically about the role emotions play when it comes to race, whiteness, power, and sustaining inequity. History and politics help us see the need for social, environmental, gender, or climate justice. Similarly, Emotional Justice explores the impact of history’s systems of oppression when it comes to the emotional. Like the other justice movements, Emotional Justice connects the histories of oppression to what is happening now, what is going wrong, and how we can put it right. It connects us to the role of the emotional within systems that cause harm. Putting the two words together—emotional and justice—is about highlighting that this is our collective work, a group focus connected to institutional change. Emotional Justice joins the family of justice movements fighting to bring people together to heal a harm that impacts all of us, and to make change that benefits all of us. It is not a replacement for social or racial justice. It is a crucial untold but pivotal addition.

This roadmap for racial healing gives us fresh language we can learn to speak and share when it comes to race, racial repair, and racial healing. A roadmap has signs with information that keeps you on your path toward a specific destination. It helps ensure you’re going in the right direction; it identifies location, helps you stay on track, and ensures you arrive at your chosen destination. That’s what Emotional Justice does: locates where we are when it comes to the emotional regarding race, trauma, whiteness, and history. It explains how we got here, identifies the next place to go, and ensures and affirms that you are on the right path and equipped to get to the next sign. A roadmap does this with signs; Emotional Justice does it with a love language of phrases—those we must unlearn, and those we will replace them with.

The Roadmap

Emotional Justice is about unlearning the language of whiteness and replacing it with an Emotional Justice love language. The language of whiteness is the thread stitched into the fabric of systems of oppression that build connection and sustain our relationship to power, centering whiteness. It is a narrative about who we are as white, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and about our role in the world, with a central focus on white men. It is a false narrative that says whiteness is the world, has built the world, and saves the world.

The language of whiteness lays the foundation and is the heartbeat of sustained injustice. At its soul, that language centers a notion of supremacy and issues of dominion, subjugation, exploitation. Supremacy means being better than somebody. In order for that to be real, this language created this narrative about itself as a global savior and civilizer, with Black, Brown, and Indigenous people as savages needing saving and civilizing. No one is immune from the weight and toll of this narrative of whiteness that permeates every sector, industry, and aspect of our lives as people across all parts of the world.

We must unlearn this language. This unlearning is required of all peoples—white, Black, Brown, and Indigenous. If we do not unlearn the language of whiteness, we cannot fully dismantle systems of inequity. And if we do not dismantle them, we maintain cycles of progress and regress that exhaust, devastate, and debilitate.

The systems of oppression that built the world were about labor, race, and power. The labor was always unequal. Racial healing with Emotional Justice means that all of us are doing emotional work. There can be no Emotional Justice without the equal division of emotional labor. Dividing up that emotional labor to do the work of dismantling means naming the connections; contextualizing the relationship to the emotional, to power and whiteness; and identifying who should do what, because although we all—white, Black, Brown, Indigenous—have work to do, our work is not all the same. It is crucial that we understand this and identify who has what work to do and why it is they, and they alone, who must do that work. How do we do that? We start by identifying the four pillars of the language of whiteness. Each has a name and a definition.

The Language of Whiteness

Here are the four pillars of the language of whiteness:

• Racialized emotionality

• Emotional patriarchy

• Emotional currency

• Emotional economy

Racialized emotionality: a world where we add gender, color, context, and consequence to universal human emotions. The universal becomes racialized. The racialized is then dehumanized. The dehumanized becomes the ongoing target of violence.

Emotional patriarchy: a society that centers, privileges, and prioritizes the feelings of men, centrally white men, no matter the cost or consequence to all women and to Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples.

Emotional currency: a society that treats women—particularly Black women—as currency that appreciates or depreciates according to its service to whiteness, men, and, centrally, white men.

Emotional economy: a world that makes decisions and creates policies that revolve around the feelings of white men, and is relentlessly driven by those feelings regardless of the harm to the health of a nation. The emotional economy functions to sow division, to plant seeds that segregate, and to spin narratives that separate.

This is what we are unlearning. We must then replace each with an Emotional Justice love language. What does that look like?

The Emotional Justice Love Languages

There are four Emotional Justice love languages. Each has a name and a definition.

• Intimate reckoning

• Intimate revolution

• Resistance negotiation

• Revolutionary black grace

Intimate reckoning: for white women and men to do the emotional labor of severing their connection to power and race that upholds a white masculinity centering the subjugation and exploitation of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, and white women. That means to stop defending, supporting, uplifting, and cheering a white masculinity that sustains the language of whiteness and shapes white men’s emotional connection to and relationship with power and race.

Intimate revolution: for Black women to sever the connection between labor, value, and worth by centering rest and replenishment. This connection stretches back into a history where labor was life and death, conditioning Black women to see their sole worth as connected to, and measured by, labor, struggle, and servitude to people outside themselves. This connection comes with a parallel narrative of laziness, gender, and race, making it complex. It is how the language of whiteness is spoken by global BIPOC women. That complexity means reimagining the relationship to labor that associates rest with guilt; it means normalizing rest and severing a connection to labor rooted in history’s systems of oppression.

For Black men to heal from a masculinity that is traumatized and hypersexualized by the language of whiteness and that too often leads to pouring their untreated trauma over the bodies and beings of Black women. Intimate revolution means unlearning that Black women are Black men’s emotional currency—having their value treated as a commodity—and replacing it with a path, process, and practice of making peace within their Black male bodies, and the complexity within themselves.

Resistance negotiation: for white women and men to do the emotional labor of staying to work through the discomfort—your insides that squirm, protest, deny, and defend as you are challenged, confronted, and called out about issues of race and racism. Resistance negotiation requires you to navigate through feeling personally maligned; it is how you stay, fight, and work through “white fragility,” the term coined by Robin DiAngelo.

Revolutionary Black grace: for Black people globally to un-learn the narrative that makes American blackness criminal and African blackness wretched. It’s unlearning a single-story narrative exported by the language of whiteness rooted in systems of oppression that sustain segregated Blackness and feed emotional labor that upholds unhealed, untreated trauma among global Black people. It is learning to love one another more justly as global Black people, and to engage one another with more compassion, tenderness, discernment, and empathy.

This is our work: to unlearn the language of whiteness and replace each of its pillars with an Emotional Justice love language. That means we must

• Unlearn emotional patriarchy and replace it with intimate reckoning.

• Unlearn racialized emotionality and replace it with resistance negotiation.

• Unlearn emotional currency and replace it with intimate revolution.

• Unlearn emotional economy and replace it with revolutionary Black grace.

Unlearning each pillar and replacing it with an Emotional Justice love language is our process, path, and practice for racial healing, dismantling systemic inequity, and building a truly brave new world that centers our full humanity, one that works for all peoples—Black, Brown, and Indigenous women and men, and white women and men.

The Emotional Justice Template

For each of us to do this emotional labor, there is the Emotional Justice template. While our work as Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white people is not the same, there are three steps we each must take to do that work:

• Work through our feelings

• Reimagine our focus

• Build the future

Work through our feelings. The feelings of flee, deny, disregard, blame, shame, punish, defend, grief, sadness, hurt, and leaning on historical behaviors will all come up. Leaning on historical behaviors means engaging in old racial disparity dynamics of Black emotional labor in service of whiteness. Become aware of these feelings; feel them—all of them. That’s how we begin unlearning the language of whiteness. That awareness is a beginning. It is the act of becoming embodied.

For white women, that means no more “white tears”—the weaponizing of emotions to avoid doing your emotional labor when it comes to issues of race and racism.

For Black, Brown, and Indigenous women, that means not taking on the emotional labor of soothing, comforting, and reassuring whiteness. These feelings are part of an emotionally racial DNA—that is how a history of oppressive systems shapes the emotional responses and engagement of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people—and particularly women.

Reimagine our focus. Answer this question: How do I speak the language of whiteness? Answer it for yourself first and then within your community, your places of work and learning.

Build the future. For white people, this step entails decentering—focusing outside yourself and instead centering the experience of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Building this future means severing your emotional connection to whiteness that puts white people at the center. This severing is a continuous action, not a one and done. It is in this focus that you choose a different path, and start actively speaking an Emotional Justice love language. This focus is transformative; it is the future.

For Black, Brown, and Indigenous people—and particularly women—building the future means actively centering yourself and ending the historical practice of soothing, comforting, and reassuring whiteness. By actively centering yourself, you start speaking an Emotional Justice love language. This is building your future doing your particular emotional labor.

This decentering for white people and centering for Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples—and particularly women—is how we build a future with a racial healing practice. It is how we gain and practice Emotional Justice.

This Emotional Justice template requires that you stay, emotionally. What I mean by that is that you stay and feel all the feelings that emerge—resentment, denial, guilt, frustration, desire to flee, shame, sadness, grief, anger, hurt. It means you do not run from the feelings or project them onto someone else or punish someone because of how this emotional labor makes you feel. This is what it means to do your own emotional labor. It is what is necessary to then focus on answering the question, How do I speak the language of whiteness? And that focus leads you to create a future of developing and sustaining a racial healing practice, and speaking an Emotional Justice love language.

Examples of Change

We at The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice have seen how Emotional Justice training transforms worlds through these three steps. In the wake of the George Floyd murder and a national reckoning that ignited a focus on diversity, change, race, and healing, we led an Emotional Justice training at a department in an Ivy League university. The training is called Emotional Justice Truth and Accountability Sessions. This is a three-day workshop followed by a six-month facilitation to work with department heads to effect sustainable change.

We separated students and their department faculty, managers, and leadership. We held a full interactive and creative session where we asked Black and Brown students to describe the department’s organizational culture. We were engaging a thirty-year span of past and present students. Whether they were alumni or current students, their narratives were disturbingly similar. Their answers revealed a narrative of elitism, an unwillingness to wrestle with or resolve issues of race when they arose, a disregard for their well-being, exclusionary and discriminatory practice, a world that was lily white.

The group included a Black student excited to participate in a department production, going for a wardrobe fitting that required a white coat. The costume department hadn’t found anything for him, and told him he could wear a coat from a previous production. He put it on, and discovered it had KKK on it. KKK for Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist group that terrorized Black people, burned crosses on lawns, and is part of a dark, dark period of American history. He was shocked by the costume department’s nonchalant attitude toward him wearing that for rehearsal after rehearsal and then performance after performance without any care or thought of what that might mean for him. Wardrobe is a crucial part of a character in theater. The department’s disregard for what that student needed, lack of care about his well-being and his performance, and lack of action when he raised how problematic this wardrobe was—all were symptomatic of his student experience in the department.

Other students shared that they had stopped going to auditions because of an ongoing inability to land roles that enabled them to practice their craft, and the department’s use of a canon of material that was almost exclusively white. Another called out the way department productions were considered mainstage and desirable, but the single diverse theater body was in a basement and treated as if there was, in their words, “theatrical apartheid.”

We asked the predominantly white faculty, managers, and department heads the same question about their experience of the organizational culture. They used words such as inclusive, affirming, diverse, belonging, and engaging.

We then presented our findings from our engagement with the students and alumni to the white faculty, managers, and department heads, using art and theater. With Emotional Justice training, we privilege narrative and use art and theater. Our training team includes artists. That’s because while numbers offer information, narrative provides connection. Emotional Justice is about making connections you have not made before, both within you and to experiences outside yourself.

After presenting a dramatized written monologue encapsulating the students’ findings, we asked for their feedback about what they heard. They shared their shock, and they spoke about the harm the department is doing to Black and Brown students, and their realization that they had not been centering Black and Brown students. After they shared their feedback, we invited them to describe that organizational culture, now centering their Black and Brown students. They no longer used words like belonging and inclusive; words such as harming, discriminatory, and exclusionary now appeared.

It does matter that we say the university policy celebrates diversity, affirms inclusivity, and firmly rejects discrimination. But we must remember that policy alone doesn’t help us measure organizational culture. That’s because policy is about your intention, whereas culture reveals your practice and your values. Culture is about outcome. And it is in culture that the hidden values of worth and who is centered reveal themselves. Whiteness always centers itself and measures success from its experience.

For white people, focusing on an experience outside yourself is an Emotional Justice practice of decentering. For this department, making that connection set a path to change the department’s future, as well as that of both the students and those who teach and lead their department.

The department faculty and leadership described what the Emotional Justice training did for the department. One said, “Emotional Justice is decentering ourselves in order to move on from the painful structures that exist due to white supremacy.” One department leader said, “Emotional Justice is coming to terms with what we are, not what we think we are, and it creates a path to inclusion.” Another said, “Emotional Justice is repairing the damage of anti-Blackness and white supremacy.”

Another example of Emotional Justice training takes place with Black, Brown, and Indigenous women leaders and managers to reimagine a relationship to labor and to center rest and replenishment. It is a three-part interactive, creative webinar training session called The Love Languages of Emotional Justice.

This means inviting women to explore their relationship to labor and rest rooted in family, history, and systems of oppression. The idea of institutionalizing their wellness and their rest, and centering it within a labor landscape, is difficult for many to grasp, so there is resistance.

In this training, we explore how the language of whiteness shapes Black, Brown, and Indigenous women’s relationship to labor, how history made that relationship a life-and-death scenario, and how the legacy of the untreated trauma of that history has contemporary consequences. What we call grind is the modern manifestation of the historical relationships among labor, value, race, and gender.

During one training, we asked this group of women, “Where did you learn about grind? How does it show up in your world?” There was an outpouring, upset, sadness, and tears as women leaders spoke about lessons from mothers and grandfathers, about immigrant communities ingraining grind as the single route to success, how they as women leaders and managers perpetuated those lessons taught by their families, and how exhausted and debilitated the women felt. In this training, we treat trauma as an equity issue, and introduce what we call the Emotional Justice Equity Package, where wellness, rest, and replenishment are identified, budgeted, and monetized for the life cycle of a project as an act of unlearning whiteness, centering themselves, and catering to an institutionalizing of wellness.

One participant summed up what Emotional Justice did and what it meant for her, her organization, and community. She said, “I believe Emotional Justice is a way to begin to repair all the damage that oppressive systems have caused in our communities. It is a way of recognizing our humanity beyond what we produce.”

As we see, our work is not the same. But we all have our emotional work to do. This is our practice, our path, and our process—engage it every time, and we strengthen our Emotional Justice muscles. We develop a practice of racial healing. It guides us to be better, to move in justice with one another in unprecedented ways.

We have to know what we are changing, and we have to know what we are changing it into. Emotional Justice means calculating the cost, recognizing the toll, and unlearning the story of the language of whiteness by challenging and changing when, how, and for whom we use our voice, our emotional labor, and our power. By doing our particular emotional work, we can love one another more justly because of a sustainable practice of Emotional Justice.

What Is an Emotional Justice Love Language?

Love. That four-letter word that centers on feeling good, affirmed, uplifted, desired. Our understanding of a love language is based on Dr. Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages, a global best seller that taught people five ways we speak the language of love in our intimate relationships, and how learning those languages nurtures and sustains our intimate relationships. Understanding love languages make our relationships better. An Emotional Justice love language for racial healing makes our racial healing journey possible—and transforms it into an ultimately sustainable practice.

When it comes to race, we have too often wanted a weird, unrealistic, and unattainable “Let’s all just love each other” love—one that is all-encompassing, one that blurs color, disappears conflict, and centers on how much good we all want to do and how at heart we are all the same, just good people. I get that. But an Emotional Justice love language is not that.

To be clear, you will feel absolutely wonderful, empowered, engaged, and affirmed—but perhaps not at first. The Emotional Justice love languages are about a journey into places that are rife with discomfort, where you feel challenged and where you might not want to be. It is in that precise place that the love begins. And it is in this place that you are called to stay.

An Emotional Justice love language will—and should—stretch our emotional muscles in directions that are unfamiliar. In other words, there are unrecognized places we all must go that, as part of this Emotional Justice love language, change our bodies in ways that surprise, delight, threaten, and infuriate.

It is what you then do with those feelings that makes this an Emotional Justice love language. Deep listening is part of an Emotional Justice language of comprehension, of understanding and being understood. Right now, when it comes to race, too many of us listen as a defense mechanism against a “You’re being racist” accusation. We double down, fling out phrases about no regrets, reliance on good intentions, accountability-free accountability, and unrelenting deflection from actually holding, having, and staying in hard conversations on racism, white supremacy, and racial healing.

With an Emotional Justice love language, accountability no longer feels like oppression, consequence is the inevitable cost of racial harm, intention is not a defense that excuses consequence for racial harm, and advocacy is as integral a part of an organization’s equity and antiracist practice as silence had been before our worlds changed unimaginably in 2020.

An Emotional Justice love language means speaking out and speaking up without requiring applause or affirmation, and wrestling with your own fear of repercussions or punishment. Speaking out and speaking up are crucial steps in doing dismantling work, which leads to developing a racial healing practice. To walk this road less traveled, we need compassion, equity, and empathy. All of those things are hard within a climate torn apart by an unrelenting violence, bolstered by a deeply divisive politics, and protected by the kind of policy that rewards behavior that traumatizes and devastates millions.

Here’s the thing—someone else can’t speak an Emotional Justice love language for you. Right now, some of us claim victims’ rights at the merest hint of racial impropriety, slinging emotional arrows left and right in our valiant bid to evade doing this work. Some speak the language of avoidance fluently. In other words, the let’s-just-talk-about-something-else-anything-else-ology. Or we think this work should be done according to that clock called only-so-much-discomfort-then-I’m-out. We may speak the language of “cancel culture,” that ferocious means of communicating where we play prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, elevating fear and desecrating the will for courageous conversations in troubled racial territory—such a necessity in racial healing work—but are reduced to sparring, to jabs in a social media ring where gloves are off and the goal is to draw blood.

For too long, too many of us have believed that this work can and should be done by one side, by one people, by changing behaviors, by reimagining transformation as tweaking, then standing back with a self-congratulatory Ta-da! at our barely there efforts. Tweaking. That shit doesn’t work. It never has. It is a ruse; it is reckoning-avoidance. And for too long, too many have expected to be incentivized to do this emotional work. An Emotional Justice love language is one you learn rooted in your belief in and your commitment to a fairer world, a more humane one.

Here’s the beauty: a new language is a gift enabling us to communicate beyond our worlds and move into terrain that may be terrifying, but now with tools and resources. Here’s the challenge: How willing are we to learn a language that helps us do the emotional work to create the world we believe in philosophically or ideologically, one where Black lives matter? How willing are we to make that language real in our worlds—of work, of education, of policy, of justice? Here’s the breakthrough: we can all learn a new language.

A Legacy of Untreated Trauma

Untreated trauma is a thread that runs through this emotional connection to and relationship with whiteness, race, and power from a legacy of oppressive systems. Let’s define trauma. It is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. It is damage, a wound, hurt that has lasting consequences beyond one body but also intergenerationally, handed down, manifesting again and again.

For millions of people, George Floyd’s killing was their closest engagement with racial trauma—being witness through the power of social media and the courage of a Black teenage girl who captured every heartbreaking second. For millions, this killing was a single act that led to an awakening about racial terror and law enforcement in America. For millions of Black people globally, it was not a single act but the cumulative effect of a policing system unpunished and unaccountable, whose violence robs families of loved ones with deadly regularity.

For millions of white people, George Floyd’s murder was transformative, it was a discovery; for millions of Black people, it was traumatizing and triggering—igniting both ancestral memory of white authority murdering Black people and feelings of helplessness, rage, and grief. It was untreated trauma.

For Black people globally, Floyd’s murder was a deep wound that reaches beyond America’s shores and into the UK, South Africa, across Europe—where families have fought the state and its police systems that have killed outside of video, minus criminal justice consequence, but have been no less devastating.

In setting off on your journey to learn an Emotional Justice love language, you will encounter this untreated trauma that manifests in ways that may confuse, frustrate, or transform you. The way to speak the love language and use it as a tool is to recognize that such encounters are part of what occurs when you are doing Emotional Justice labor. You may feel confused, but it is here where you should feel encouraged. This is part of racial healing with the Emotional Justice roadmap.

How I Built the Emotional Justice Roadmap

I developed this roadmap over fifteen years within a global community of activists, activist leaders, scholars, artists, and journalists in four cities in four countries across three continents. I built it with two components:

• Research

• Engagement

The research was through assignments in the US, the UK, and Africa that opened my eyes to the unnamed and unacknowledged power of the emotional when it came to race, power, politics, and whiteness. The engagement came with living and working in the US for nearly eight years and expanding that research through curated conversations exploring a legacy of untreated trauma that shapes how we see ourselves and each other as Black and white people.

Unlearning the language of whiteness requires internal and external work for us all. In other words, there is the personal reckoning that requires our own behavior and actions to be challenged and changed, and there is work to be done structurally, within and by all the sectors and systems we are all part of. That work needs to expand and continue in order for those systems to change. Let’s be clear: it is the interconnection of the internal and the external that is crucial, that is a foundational part of an Emotional Justice love language. Personal change alone ain’t it. That change must expand to be applied within the systems and sectors of labor, learning, leisure, beauty, entertainment, governance—all of them. We have all been shaped by the dual history of dangerous and deadly delusions: white superiority and Black inferiority. We pay a price for both.

I went on my own journey to devise, develop, and design the Emotional Justice roadmap. I’ll share what that looked like. Let’s hit the road.