Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing

The Black Rest Project presents EMOTIONAL JUSTICE: A Roadmap for Racial Healing – a book talk with author and CEO of the Armah Institute for Emotional Justice, Esther Armah + Dramatized reading

Amid a global racial reckoning, Esther Armah’s book, Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing, offers a much-needed language for racial healing and repair. Armah is the creator of Emotional Justice, a framework for racial healing shaped by her time as a journalist in South Africa, Ghana, London and New York. In her new book, Armah explains our historical racial healing model centers whiteness and therefore cannot serve our humanity. Armah introduces a new model that identifies our emotional work and requires we unlearn and dismantle the language of whiteness. 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.

This event is part of CBVC’s three-year initiative, The Black Rest Project (BRP). For the next three years, CBVC commits to making Black rest visible by asking, what does Black rest look like? And what will it take to get there?

Cosponsored by the Department of Photography & Imaging, NYU Tisch School of the Arts; NYU Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation; and the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Esther A. Armah is CEO, The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice (The AIEJ), a global institute working across Accra, New York, and London. Emotional Justice is a visionary roadmap for racial healing. The AIEJ devises, develops, designs and delivers Projects, Training and Thought Leadership, and engages storytelling as a strategy for structural change. Esther is an international award-winning journalist, a playwright, an international speaker, and an author. As a journalist she has worked in London, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. She was the Spring 2022 Distinguished Activist in Residence at NYU’s CBVC. Her Emotional Justice essays are featured in the New York Times best-selling book Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America; the award-winning Love with Accountability and Charlston Syllabus. She has written five Emotional Justice plays that have been produced and performed in New York, Chicago and Ghana.

For her Emotional Justice work, she won the ‘Community Healer Award’ at the 2016 Valuing Black Lives Global Emotional Emancipation Summit in Washington DC. Esther was named ‘Most Valuable NY Radio Host’ in The Nation’s 2012 Progressive Honors List for her work on Wake-Up Call on Pacifica’s, WBAI.And she was named one of ‘Africa’s Women Leaders’ in the 2019 World Women Leadership Congress Awards by CMO Asia and the Africa Leadership Academy.