Trauma, Kwanzaa, and Healing Justice
There are a few threads I need to connect today, mostly because if I don’t write this down, the signal will get lost between school drop-offs and research deadlines. But we need to look at the big picture before we look at the mirror.
Last night, I watched clips from the rally where Trump bragged about the decrease in gas prices. The crowd cheered, but the silence between the cheers was deafening. He was loud about the pump but silent on the unbearable cost of living that is actually drowning most Americans—healthcare premiums, utilities that keep rising, and the grocery bills that don’t match our paychecks.
This is the dissonance we are all living in. We are being told the economy is “working” because gas is down, meanwhile, federal cuts to social security programs hit this past July, destabilizing the most vulnerable among us.
Why does this matter to everyone, not just the “vulnerable”?
Because the American economy relies on a subsidized care infrastructure, and that infrastructure is largely built on the backs of Black women. When federal safety nets are slashed, the burden of care falls even heavier on our shoulders. But here is the shift: Black women are withdrawing our labor from the care economy. We are burnt out. We are opting out. And when we withdraw, the destabilization isn’t just felt in our homes—it ripples out to the American workplace at large. Healing justice is no longer just a niche concept for wellness circles; it is a critical labor issue for every single American.
The “Greatness” of Gen X This brings me to the “who” and the “how.” The New York Times recently published a piece examining the “greatness” of Gen X. I had to laugh. After being the invisible middle child of history, labeled as slackers and misfits, we are suddenly being hailed as the “curse-breaking generation.” The article points out that we shifted the culture by waiting to have kids (or opting out entirely) and raising daughters who are more focused on their economic power than their grandmothers ever could have been.
But as I read it, I realized I didn’t just live through these shifts—I can pinpoint the exact moment my personal habits changed because of them.
The Year We Got Emotional (Literally) The article misses one massive detail: the timeline of our emotional education. It is no coincidence that 1995 was the year everything changed. That was the year Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence and Oprah looked into the camera and asked America, “What’s Your EQ?”
I have such vivid memories of this shift. We went from a culture of “suck it up” to suddenly having a vocabulary for how we felt. Gen X women, in particular, internalized this language. We were the first ones to grab onto “EQ” and realize it was a survival tool. We took this academic concept and ran with it, deciding that while we might have survived economic and spiritual violence from our elders, we weren’t going to pass it down.
We are the generation that traded latchkeys for therapy keys. We processed our wounds with mental health professionals who were our age, and we collectively decided: It ends here.
Healing: The Black Woman’s Remix For Black women, this hit different. Healing modalities weren’t exactly built with us in mind. But we are the masters of the remix. We took the tools of emotional intelligence, applied them to our specific survival needs, and used them to navigate spaces that weren’t built for us.
And then? We taught it to our daughters. That isn’t just parenting; that is intergenerational stealth work. It is the reason you see Black women infiltrating every sector of this country, breaking glass ceilings despite the discriminatory policies trying to reinforce them.
Yesterday was a healing day for me. I had the honor of participating in an AfroPortals activation in East Oakland. And a portal it was. The Oakland portal is curated by a queer Black woman, Ashara Ekundayo, and the space is healing itself. It was a reminder that when we create space for ourselves, we create the capacity to keep going.
Healing from the Holidays
UnSelling the Holidays Since we are already in the business of breaking curses, let’s talk about the holidays. My wife and I were recently strategizing for the season—because let’s be real, in a capitalist culture, if you aren’t strategizing, you’re just spending. That conversation birthed my new poem, ‘UnSold‘ (which I’ll share more on later).
We realized that our investment in the “look” of a holiday shows our dedication to the system. Kwanzaa offers us an off-ramp. It is the ultimate Gen X holiday: it’s counter-cultural, it centers community over commerce, and it connects us to a lineage richer than anything the American marketplace ever offered us.
From the Big Picture to Your Picture We are connecting the national economic shifts to our local realities. If you want to see what this work looks like in real-time, I invite you to follow Artist as First Responder on social media to see how artists are stepping in where systems are failing.
For Black women specifically in the Bay Area, CA and the Capital District, NY, I am inviting you to sign up for my virtual Map & Meets. These are spaces to document our stories and map our healing.
Help Create the Space This work takes resources. I am asking for a light push of support to help us reach our goal.
- $20 pays for the participation of one woman in the virtual workshop. It covers her materials, my labor, and the online fees to keep the platform running. It creates space for a Black woman’s story to be told.
- $50 allows me to snail mail “swag” from the workshop to both the participant and you, the donor, as a thank you.
Great News: The project is fiscally sponsored by the East Oakland Boxing Association. This means for my microdonors looking to add to your year-end giving, your contribution is now tax-deductible.
Let’s break the curses, map the healing, and refuse to be sold.
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