Emotional Justice

It is time for an emotional reckoning on our path to racial healing, sustainable equity, and the future of DEI. Here’s the tool to help us navigate it.

In this groundbreaking book, Esther Armah argues that the crucial missing piece to racial healing and sustainable equity is emotional justice—a new racial healing language to help us do our emotional work. This work is part of the emotional reckoning we must navigate if racial healing is to be more than a dream. We all—white, Black, Brown—have our emotional work that we need to do. But that work is not the same for all of us.

This emotional work means unlearning the language of whiteness, a narrative that centers white people, particularly white men, no matter the deadly cost and consequence to all women and to global Black and Brown people. That’s why a new racial healing language is crucial.

Emotional Justice grapples with how a legacy of untreated trauma from oppressive systems has created and sustained dual deadly fictions: white superiority and Black inferiority that shape—and wound—all of us. These systems must be dismantled to build a future that serves justice to everyone, not just some of us. We are the dismantlers we have been waiting for, and emotional justice is the game changer for a just future that benefits all of us.Contents


Introduction: In Need of Emotional Justice
1. What Is Emotional Justice?
2. The Unfinished Journey of Racial Healing
3. Intimate Reckoning
4. Intimate Revolution
5. Resistance Negotiation
6. Revolutionary Black Grace
Conclusion: Become the Change We Claim“The wonder and terror of this book is that Armah makes it clear that the emotional rot that harms the globe must be individually and systemically reckoned with or we have no chance.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

“A brilliant, pathbreaking, and wholly original intervention into the conversation on race and justice. In addition to providing a critical analysis of the world as it is, Armah gifts us with the intellectual, cultural, and emotional resources necessary to produce more beautiful and just futures.”
—Marc Lamont Hill, Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions, Temple University

“This sharp, hard-hitting, and thought-provoking book unveils the power of language and reframes our understanding of emotion as a structural force that must be addressed through concrete actions.”
—Keisha N. Blain, co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Four Hundred SoulsEsther Armah is an international award-winning journalist, playwright, radio host, and writer. She is currently executive director and founder of the Armah Institute of Emotional Justice, a global institute implementing the emotional justice framework she created; the institute works on projects, training, and thought leadership.Forewords by New York Times bestselling authors Brittney Cooper and Robin DiAngelo