Introduction

In Need of Emotional Justice

We are navigating a new world whose future demands global racial healing and dismantling systemic inequity. To get to that future means working through a racial reckoning. For that we need tools. All over America, all over Europe, all over the world, in communities, places of learning and labor and leadership globally, our work and our future require this combination of racial healing and dismantling systemic inequity.

We need these tools to help us listen, engage, and stay when every part of us wants to run; to seek refuge in our good intentions, our solid arguments, our progressive politics; and to deflect and deny that this is our work to do. It is no one else’s. This new world does not have a shelf life; it is not a blip or a moment. It is the future we yearn for.

Until now, we have been navigating this racial healing lacking crucial understanding, and therefore lacking adequate emotional tools, deficient in effective language but wanting to be better, to do right, to harm less, to repair, to heal, to lead with love, to win.

What we need is Emotional Justice. This is a new love language for racial healing and social justice. It grapples with a legacy of untreated trauma from a history of horror and harm that has shaped, impacted, and affected all of us. I am a Black woman who built and shaped Emotional Justice over fifteen years in three cities across four countries on three continents—North America, Europe, and Africa. It has been engaged by communities of Black, Brown, and white leaders, managers, and workers who highlight how it applies to them, their journey, their community, their particularity. They come from the sectors of philanthropy, academia, activism, journalism, art, law, education, medicine. They are Black women and men, white women and men, and Brown women and men. They are leaders who built organizations; they are managers navigating the corporate world; they are activists and teachers; they are shaping the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This global work of racial healing is ours to do. The work is not the same in Black and white bodies. There is the specific work for white people to do with one another; there is the work Black people need to do with one another; and there is the work between Black and white people. We all have our work to do. And Emotional Justice is fresh language that we can learn to speak and share when it comes to racial healing and dismantling systemic inequity.

We are a global family, interconnected and interdependent. Nobody wins when the family feuds. But the racial feud is centuries deep, rooted and wretched, wrapped in histories and policies of power, profit, and pain that privilege some and punish others. The umbilical cord of our humanity has been cut by white supremacy and its offspring, racism. Emotional Justice offers us a new way to bind, to heal, and to win.

It is our guide. On these pages, I share Emotional Justice and the love languages by creating a roadmap for racial healing. Let’s journey together.