Emotional emancipation: This organization is strengthening Black communities by healing from the trauma of racism

Image via the Community Healing Network

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Enola G. Aird remembers that autumn evening in the Adams Morgan district of Washington, D.C., when she went to a small nightclub with her husband and a friend, and met a woman named Deedee. 

The woman seemed to be a regular in the space, where everyone seemed to know her. She moved around with a jovial spirit, had a banter with the band, and got more and more drunk as the night went on. Later in the night, Aird was in the washroom with her friend when they saw Deedee, who seemed oblivious to their presence, come out of the stall, look at herself in the mirror, and say: “Here you are, Deedee – old, Black, and ugly, as usual.”

“I really can see that vividly as though it were now…and even now it pains me to say those words,” says Aird. 

The experience left her with this feeling of wondering, “How many Black people feel this way? How many Black people look at themselves in the mirror without fully appreciating their beauty, fully appreciating how unique and special they are just by virtue of existing as human beings?” 

Though she was previously a corporate lawyer, Aird also has activist roots. She worked at the Children’s Defense Fund where she led the violence prevention initiative, and was also an acting director for the Black Community Crusade for Children. 

Aird explains that the lie of white superiority and Black inferiority has been around for centuries and has “cast African people out of the circle of humanity in perpetuity.” This lie, she says, can fly under the radar, but it is very much in everybody’s mind –  it’s part of the global consciousness. The work that was left, as Aird saw it, was to create a community for Black people all over the world that scrubbed this lie clean off their minds. 
 

Starting the Community Healing Network 

With this goal in mind, Aird founded the Community Healing Network (CHN) in 2006. The idea was to focus on helping Black people globally to heal from the centuries of trauma caused by anti-Black racism. Through community-led support groups called emotional emancipation circles (EEC), participants are guided to understand how racial trauma manifests in them individually, recognize internalized racism, and move past it. 

The structure of EECs were made in collaboration with the Association of Black Psychologists and provides a space for Black people to share their stories and emotions, and to understand their personal histories more deeply. 

“When we come through the emotional emancipation process, we have a deeper understanding of what we’ve gone through. We have a deeper understanding of what our ancestors have gone through with a deeper understanding of our strength,” says Aird. 

Launched in New Haven, Connecticut, CHN has grown globally to the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, Ghana, and South Africa. The network has trained more than 1,000 people to facilitate EECs for more than 10,000 people around the world. 

CHN has also hosted four Valuing Black Lives Global Summits to bring together Black leaders from around the world to discuss solutions-based action plans to fight anti-Black racism globally. 
 

COVID and anti-Black racism’s impacts on health 

Through the pandemic, studies have shown that Black populations in Canada faced disproportionate economic, social and health impacts, which were closely related to high COVID-19 infection rates. Historic inequities like disproportionate representation in low-income jobs rooted in systemic racism shot their way up to the surface, becoming visible to everyone. 

“What many fail to see is how anti-Black racism illustrates the ways in which racism operates at personal, ideological and institutional levels,” writes Njoki N. Wane in her 2020 research study in the Royal Society of Canada on COVID-19’s impact on Black communities in Canada. “A discussion brings attention to Black-owned business closures, health inequalities, the disproportionate loss of jobs and the high death rate of Black Canadians.”

Some studies have also looked into how racism and discrimination can cause frequent stress on the body. It can trigger coping behaviours like smoking or drinking that often lead to diseases like high blood pressure. 

When it comes to mental health services, not only is therapy inaccessible and unaffordable for many people — for those who reach out for help face a general lack of cultural competence (the ability to understand the history, values, and systemic barriers of a culture) and a lack of BIPOC therapists in Canada to deal with the nuances Black clients’ needs. 

A report by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) titled ‘Dismantling Anti-Black Racism’ says that, “mental health services are often designed with biases inherent to Western models of care that are rooted in colonial histories. These inherent biases and inadequate training hinder Black and other racialized populations from seeking care.” 

While understanding systemic issues like unequal access to employment and education, alongside the role of government policies in alleviating them is a vital part of tearing down anti-Black racism, the CHN also believes that it’s important to focus on how racism has impacted people on a personal level  and to heal from that, reinforcing the emotional strength of the community. 

At the same time, Deneece Plummer, a bilingual health promoter at Black Health Alliance, a national charity focused on improving the health of Black communities, notes that healing efforts shouldn’t rest solely on the shoulders of these communities to deal with on their own. She says policymakers and government programs need to step up to understand the needs of Black populations, and implement systems change, whether that’s increasing diversity within service providers or promoting culturally sensitive training.

“At the end of the day, there still is a system that we’re living in and working within, and if there’s no changes done in the system, or we’re putting basically all of the work on ourselves, that’s really not how it should be; there should be a system that supports us effectively,” says Plummer. 

“We still are able to support ourselves, but having that extra level of support from a good system that’s culturally safe, that addresses needs in proactive ways and not just reactive ways…It is really important for the healing of our communities.” 
 

Emotional emancipation builds community

Kimberly Cato is an emotional emancipation circle facilitator at CHN and has also been working as a registered psychotherapist in Ontario since 1996. In her own practice, her treatment areas include general mental health struggles, but she also specializes in working with clients who are tackling racial trauma, and identity and belonging.

She recalls that when the pandemic first hit, many of her clients were struggling in the face of social isolation and job loss. When George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, it was another traumatizing event for her clients, and for herself. 

“I was scrambling, looking for community,” says Cato, who was seeking a space that would bring Black people together to collectively work through the traumatic events from COVID-19 to racially-motivated hate crimes around the world. Through this search, she came across CHN. 

She attended her first EEC in August 2020 and was immediately struck by how much she needed that sense of community. “It’s interesting because I dove into it thinking about looking for resources for the people that I was serving but almost instantly became aware of my personal need for this connection,” says Cato. 

Over the course of four weeks, Cato and the other participants of the EEC met through Zoom at the height of the pandemic, sharing their stories, and trying to surface some of the internalized racism they were dealing with. 

Cato says that the power of that lay “in the community and in listening to what people had experienced — and not just in terms of oppression, but in terms of understanding who we are as a people before colonization, before oppression, before white supremacy,” says Cato. 

Connecting with other people through these circles and rediscovering their roots was a major factor for Cato in rebuilding her sense of identity and connection to her heritage. 

“I was hearing people talk about African ancestry in a way that I hadn’t explored and it was in exploring who we were before enslavement that I developed a strength and a grounding and the centeredness that I was lacking,” says Cato. 

For Cato, building a strong community is centered in restoring what was destroyed by colonialism. 

“The very first thing white supremacy and colonization has always done is divide people — they separate you from what you know, from who you are, from the things that ground you, and once separated, they tear you down. So if you want to rebuild, if you want to tap into resilience, you have to reconnect. Resilience is not an independent thing,” says Cato.

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