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.

Amidst a global racial reckoning, this book offers a much-needed language for racial healing and repair, written by an international award-winning journalist, playwright, radio host, and writer.

The new world that we are currently navigating post 2020 demands global racial healing. Such work involves tough conversations around race, white supremacy, and anger. Emotional Justice offers a new language for racial healing and social justice.

As Armah explains, dismantling the language of whiteness requires different work from different people. The book looks at key terms - Intimate Reckoning, Intimate Revolution, Resistance Negotiation, and Revolutionary Black Grace-, that enable people to challenge white supremacy. Intimate Reckoning shows white women how they can examine their role in sustaining white supremacy, while Intimate Revolution teaches Black women to unlearn the language of whiteness that teaches them their sole value is labor. The book includes exchanges with prominent thinkers in this field, including Dr Robin DiAngelo and Courtney Martin.

This book will help readers practice anti-racism and racial repair, do the work of dismantling systemic inequity, and figure out how to co-exist across different perspectives.