“The struggle gotta come from our heart” (Part 1): Healing justice & resistance in the ends
Inspired by Ez Chigbo’s series ‘The Role of Love in Social Justice Work’ on the Surviving Society podcast, I’ve written a two-part blog about social justice in the context of my experience.
Social (in)justice is the work of my life, my family and community. So for part 1 (done in the style of an interview), I wanted to explore who I am and who my community are in relation to these things, and who we’re presumed to be. As love is about relationship, it also felt necessary to give people who might be unfamiliar with the context of being ‘from ends’ (which is a racialised, classed and gendered experience) the opportunity to better see us, understand us more & hear more of our stories. Part 2 will more directly respond to the podcast series’s central question of ‘what is the role of love in social justice work?’.
Q. Tell me about you and your story.
A. We grew up around council estates, on concrete parks and tarmacked playgrounds, behind steel school gates. Amongst vibrant high streets with chicken and betting shops. For decades, our homes have been characterised by media narratives of gun-brandishing young men going to battle, tormented long-suffering mothers, of embarrassment, shame and vengeful ambition that comes with being poverty-stricken. By worries about police harassment, inadequate schooling, gentrification and social exclusion. By a certain culture and rhythm, a loyalty and rebelliousness. By clichés that growing up in harsh conditions makes you tougher somehow. By fraught emotions, exclusion, carcerality, violence, family breakdown.
It wasn’t all difficult, there were plenty of times we caught jokes, there were times, knocking for my bruddas to play out in the estate, that the ends felt so close knit and full of love. There were times we enjoyed some of the (imperfect) fruits of the adaptive, creative, fertile ground that is our culture. But for too long, the ends have been suffering.
It has been a gradual learning process to understand this pain. I grew up in this environment suppressing emotions, insecure (and overcompensating), dissociating, hyper vigilant, anxious and closed off. When I was a teenager I experienced what felt like insurmountable flatness/sadness. It started with pressures mounting — family members getting sick, slow growing resentment when noticing how starkly different my life circumstances were to most of the middle class white kids at my college, and attempts to find temporary distraction from upheaval and pressure in my home and school life.
I experienced the effects of a ‘cruel optimism’ resulting from my investment and trust in neglectful systems and struggle to actualise aspirational selfhood (Yusef Bakkali), and ended up growing steadily more isolated, losing perspective on many of the good things in my life. At one point during this time I was contemplating whether I wanted to continue to live. The anger from these experiences continues to influence my politics.
Q. This story is bigger than just you. What’s the group experience of this?
A. Yusef Bakkali’s sociological research on ‘the munpain’ (coined as shorthand for ‘pain of the mundane’) tells us that there is a symbolic struggle at the centre of life on road: a struggle for personhood, value and to escape the violences of class warfare whilst navigating the various violent ways we’re policed and socially stigmatised, the tensions of the social and cultural environment, and the exigencies of financial insecurity.
‘The munpain’ is an articulation of how road life feels — an everyday experience of a malaise, a pain that’s always there and difficult to locate due to being often too immersed in daily realities of our conditions. His work teaches us that in the ends we need to resist and find new ways to assert who we are in this currently antagonistic relationship to capital and neoliberal ideas of success.
The ends is the only place I’ve ever felt any sense of belonging. There are contexts in which beautiful and important creativity, love, care & healing work is being done, such as food banks, community centres or the mandem working with kids, incarcerated people, people facing legal injustice and more. People working hard to help each other in the thick of struggle, epitomising interdependence. We are beautiful, as Nabil Al-Kinani says in Privatise The Mandem. There is usefulness, truth and value in our ‘endsness’. But as we know, and as Nabil also articulates, we struggle to find scaffolds in our environment for self determination; for us all to ‘win’.
Q. So you’re saying these experiences of distress are both political and personal. Who are the authorities on this? If you had to convince someone who was skeptical or confused, are there facts to back this up?
A. If you’re from ends, you know this instinctively. When walking past some police patrolling, forgetting my wallet in a hostile/upscale place of business, being on the bus and getting the wrong kind of energy or look from someone. There’s a trauma response in my body when I experience these things (freezing or dissociating in the moment) from all of the times in the past that these experiences have meant immediate danger for me. Or if I’m in situations where there is a risk of punitive authority, I often spend extra mental and physical energy worrying about speech, actions or body language that could be perceived as threatening or defiant. These are embodied responses to the social and structural conditions.
A great exploration of the responses of working class racialised communities to trauma/distress comes from campaigner and founder of the 4Front Project, Temi Mwale, speaking about young people she works with who have experienced significant harm. She said, “experiences of violence often… disconnect you from who you are. Often the sanctity of your physical has been violated, so it’s really hard to then reconnect with that — especially when that’s something that’s still fresh.” She goes on to assert that we need to reconnect with that as a way to avoid ‘dehumanising ourselves’.
Many like Nkem Ndefo, Farzana Khan, Ez Chigbo, Ron Dodzro & groups like NSUN (National Survivor User Network) have also spoken publicly on the issues of compounding injury due to repeated exposure to harm in these contexts.
A few years ago, I held an online discussion with working class Black Psychotherapist Vivienne Isebor which highlighted so-called ends ‘cultural factors’ that exacerbate trauma (what Resmaa Menakem describes as ‘trauma decontextualised over time’) — including a culture of “not wanting to be seen as weak, because then you can be taken advantage of or people can mug you off”.
Q. Okay, yes — if people are harmed by oppressive systems of power, they need to heal from this (as well as work towards ending oppression) — so how do you do this?
A. Reconnecting and recovering allows us to put energy towards community work and care. The term ‘healing justice’ arose in the early 2000s from radical Black groups in the US. They use this term to describe a ‘politicised’ type of healing — the idea that a justice-oriented approach is required alongside any attempts to address deep and widespread community trauma.
In UK history, this has looked like working class racialised resistance being spoken of in terms of sustainability, survival and the ‘collective health of our communities’. Looking at the work of OWAAD (Organisation for Women of Asian and African Descent), Pattigift Therapy, UKABPsi (UK Association of Black Psychologists), Imkaan, as well as wellness practitioners, doulas, researchers, campaigners and more, for example. I’m currently working at Healing Justice Ldn, where some of this work and learning is taking place.
In her book Divided, Annabel Sowemimo tells us of Britain’s history of Black and global majority healing traditions: some considered a ‘threat to colonial powers’, some that were the basis of knowledge for a number of ‘breakthrough’ ideas in Western medicine.
In the context of historical oppressions, some of our traditions have practical functions that address our physical and mental needs — those that indicate how we should live together, care for one another, grieve, heal, organise and support ourselves. As we’ve been systematically eroded, there have been creative politicised healing responses which have led to our collective survival.
Q. Is that really going to work? It takes a lot to believe you can be healed when you haven’t experienced healing. Why would you trust that it can happen?
A. Prior to my exposure to ‘healing justice’, I saw most discussions of healing as unrelatable, eurocentric or weird. In the ends, our personhood is often reduced to one dimensional portrayals — depicted as animalistic with no self-control or agency. Society portrays us as needing to be controlled, policed and nullified, and this dynamic often translates into us fearing losing control of our selfhood. This is why any healing practices, which will inherently expose some of these issues, need to be primarily coming from a place of trust and self direction.
Patriarchal dominant culture impairs this, convincing us that healing practices are frivolous, unimportant and only for middle class white women to be concerned with, rather than allowing us to see them as useful radical tools. Capitalism encourages us to seek comfort through consumption, and whitewashes the non eurocentric lineage of meditation, mindfulness or other healing tools.
It can seem doubtful that in this environment we’d be able to slow down or feel safe enough to turn our attention towards unhealed wounds, but many practitioners teach that we can always find ways to address our needs (even if only in a small way). If, with cases of extreme trauma, the only feasible option is to block things out for now — Nkem Ndefo explains that it can be helpful to have an awareness that this is what you’re doing, and reassure yourself that it’s serving a beneficial purpose. Then you might become open to other healing tools when your circumstances eventually change or alleviate.
Q. What does ‘healing justice’ lead us to? I think all this stuff can just make people angry or sensitive. Heal, and then what?
A. We often end up utilising our political pain to engage in forms of art, culture change and resistance. D Hunter tells us that economically marginalised people are ‘carers and warriors’ who ‘in many ways are the ideal revolutionary’ but often have our forms of resistance and care labelled as violent or righteous, but misguided. This is part of the uncritical societal impulse to label most of what we do as vulgar, in bad taste, or morally wrong.
I think this clip of Tupac Shakur at the Indiana Black Expo in Indianapolis, 1993 (tough-)lovingly reminding us ‘the struggle gotta come from our heart’ is really powerful because it demonstrates that a love and care towards ourselves and each other is not about making it easier to sit passively in painful circumstances, but connected to how we get free.
Me and everyone I know is grappling with this — with connecting to each other, love and the struggle for justice. With re-adjusting, looking inward, and asking ‘how much can I really change?’ How much can I work in community? How much can I protest or organise? How much can I find the roots for love in this — to be in it, to embody it, to live it?
As much as it feels disempowering when we’re treated ruthlessly, stereotyped and dehumanised. When we’re dismissed despite the hard work, desirability and achievement we’re taught is supposed to free us in this society. As hard as it might be to be in solidarity with people or push through disagreements and conflict — we do have power within our communities. A power in exceeding our limitations, in ‘letting our light shine’. And the ability to build power where we lack it.
Though our contexts are not always similar, I can learn from Black working class uprisings, The Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, elders, bredrins, family and traditions. They tell us we should aim to strengthen our communities, build power and find new ways to reclaim and fortify the fight for justice.
Through knowing ourselves and our needs, we make sure that we have a ‘fuller cup’ to pour into others. We make sure we’re curious and creative when responding to these questions of how we transform society. We build the minerals for standing up to power, putting our comfort, finances, security, bodies or freedom on the line. We make sure we have internal resources to support ourselves when working to dismantle the inequalities and forms of violence that affect our lives.
