“Black Is Beautiful” is a reclamation of the inherent worth and dignity of Black people and a rejection of white colonial beauty standards. Photo by Capers Rumph.
Healing Ourselves
“I need to go dig a hole,” I declared to my family as I hastily changed from city clothes back to my more natural farm-y attire. I was just home from a day of facilitating an “anti-racism training” for a mostly white organization and was reeling from an onslaught of well-meaning but still white supremacist comments and microaggressions. Rather than wipe my distress all over my family, I decided to immediately go to the forest and give my pain to the Earth. I grabbed a shovel and vigorously hacked a small hole in the fragrant ground, just big enough for my head. As expected, the Land was able to absorb my tears, screams, and curses and compost them into calm. Once my sorrow was released, I filled up the hole, thanked her, and returned to my family feeling centered.
We have all the tools we need within ourselves and our communities to heal from racial trauma and reclaim our wholeness. In this section, we identify specific strategies for releasing pain and attaining personal liberation.
Making regular prayers and offerings strengthens your relationship with your ancestors.
UPLIFT
Haitian Stone Art
Komye, Leogane, is the stone carving and stone balancing capital of the beautiful island nation of Haiti. Elder stoneworkers mentor younger artists in this delicate form, gathering soft stone from the riverbed and liberating the form within. Reginald, a highly regarded stone balancer, explains, “Stone balancing is a training for the mind. You have to become very calm and patient until you can hear the stone. You must feel its exact center and then it will balance for you. For one hour or two hours you may have to listen to a single stone without faltering.” In a similar way, carving the stone requires “seeing what the stone wants to become,” according to Reginald. This dynamic meditation practice represents both a livelihood for residents of Komye as well as a healing practice. The artists believe that working with stone helps them to “let go of the stress and troubles” that they carry.50
Youth use Haitian stone balancing as a mindfulness tool. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.
Ancestor Work
Each one of us has innumerable ancestors who have endured suffering and emerged intact. Our ancestors are rooting for us, loving us, and attempting to share their wisdom with us. Our job is simply to listen. Opening ourselves to a connection with our ancestors can be as simple as holding a photograph or artifact of a beloved forebear and saying out loud, “I love you and I am listening to you. Please be with me.” Others may desire to deepen their ancestor practice by establishing an ancestor altar. On a shelf or small table, place a bowl of water and artifacts that remind you of your ancestors, such as a list of names, photographs, family heirlooms, or stones from their burial site. Whenever you eat a meal, place a portion of food on the altar. Making regular offerings increases the power of the connection between you and your ancestors. You can pray to your ancestors at this altar, inviting them to fortify you with their love. You may experience this support in powerful dreams, magical synchronicities, or the strengthening of your intuition.51
Members of this healing circle take turns listening to one another’s stories and offering support. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.
Healing Partners and Circles
One of our foundational human needs is to be listened to with unconditional positive regard. We can make an agreement with a friend or group of people to take turns actively listening to each other and reminding each other that we are not alone. Reevaluation counseling offers tools and training for peer-to-peer counseling, including a body of work specifically on healing trauma as African heritage people. However, you do not need any formal training to get started with your healing partner, just an open heart and a timer. Remember that the release of emotional pain through tears, laughing, yawning, and trembling is part of the healing process and not a sign that something is “wrong.” Here are some prompts to consider for your first few sessions together. In responding to these prompts, prioritize paying attention to the feelings rather than trying to answer each question comprehensively.
What is your life story as a Black person? What memories do you have related to Blackness? Start with the earliest and move through time.
What do you love about being Black? What are you most proud of about Black people?
What is challenging about being Black? In what ways do you believe racist messages about yourself and your ancestors? What hurts have you experienced because of your identity? In what ways are you holding yourself back because of your Black identity?
What do you long for as a Black person? Do you have a yearning for more information, connection, authenticity related to your Blackness? Where is the emptiness for you?
What is your relationship to land and nature in general? How does your Blackness inform this relationship?
Dynamic Meditation
Jun San, an elder Japanese Buddhist monk and our beloved neighbor, has dedicated her life to peace and justice activism, primarily in solidarity with Indigenous people. I once asked her, “Jun San, can you give me any tips for sitting meditation? I get antsy and can’t focus?” She laughed and tossed back the cloth of her orange robe. “I no meditate! Too boring! I beat drum, chop wood, carry water,” she responded. While sitting meditation is a unique and powerful tool, our indigenous African traditions often engage dynamic meditation, including drumming, long-distance running, chanting, singing, candle gazing, and stone carving or balancing. What differentiates meditation from just doing activities is the focused attention on a singular point in the present moment. While drumming, our entire focus may be on the sensation between the palm and the goat skin. While carving the stone, our entire focus may be on the cadence of our breath. While chanting, our entire focus may be on the echo of our song back to us from the mountains. When the mind wanders, we gently bring it back to the singular focus. Studies show that dynamic meditation can reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and substance addiction.
Caucus Spaces
While we embrace the texture and vibrancy of integrated spaces, at times it is important for us to caucus with others from similar backgrounds. Entering into spaces that are exclusively for Black people, people of color, or any other identity group central to our understanding of self can engender a feeling of safety and freedom of authentic expression. We need spaces where Black people can laugh and cry together, show our messy rage and uncertainty, and engage in our rituals unapologetically. You may convene your own caucus space, or reach out to one of these existing groups.
Women of Color in Solidarity Conference, Bluestockings, New York, New York
Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, Atlanta, Georgia
Joy and Justice Workshops, Whole/Self Liberation, New York and online
Harriet’s Apothecary Healing Village, Brooklyn, New York and national
Movement for Black Lives Healing Justice Spaces, national
Generative Somatics workshops by Lisa Thomas-Adeyemo or Adaku Utah
Across the Diaspora, community dance rituals are central therapeutic practices. Photo by Jonah Vitale-Wolff.
Community Dance
The African conception of healing incorporates community, mind, and body into holistic rituals of transformation. Illness is viewed as a disruption in the natural order of humans’ interactions with the spirit world, something that is external to the individual and does not define who they are. As such, healing must take place in the context of a witnessing community and in connection with the spirit world. Across the Diaspora, community dance rituals are central therapeutic practices. For example, Ndeup is a Senegalese dance ritual used to heal a person by connecting to the spirits who established a contract with the community’s original ancestors. Ndeup is a multiday ritual involving sabar drumming, nonchoreographed dance and free movement, offerings to the ancestors, and spirit possession. Similarly,
Zar is a spirit possession deity system that originated in Ethiopia and is now found throughout parts of northeast Africa and the Middle East. Women lead this dance ceremony, which provides a container for participants to witness the patient’s distress. Krump dance (Kingdom Radically Uplifted Mighty Praise)evolved from clown dance in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. This free, energetic, fast-paced, improvisational, aggressive dance form is used by African Americans as a way to release anger and frustration nonviolently.52 Dance is a healing art that each of us can access. Whether in a West African dance class or house dance party, use the transformative movements to release the emotions that do not serve you.
Plant Medicine
Plant spirit medicine is available to us for trauma healing. A comprehensive discussion of herbs is offered in chapter 10. Two African plants are especially powerful in relieving anxiety and depression connected to trauma. Solenostemon monostachyus is used across West Africa as a tea to soothe the nervous system and end panic attacks. Megbezorli, Dysphania ambrosioides, is an epazote of West Africa used to treat anxiety, nightmares, and shortness of breath. Macerate the fresh leaves into a paste, mix with water, and take three times daily.53 Vodou practitioners anoint their foreheads with an infusion of rosemary, vinegar, red wine, and honey before bed in order to ward off nightmares and welcome healing, prophetic dreams.54 In all cases it is essential to make a small offering to the plant spirit and ask permission to use it for your healing work.
________
The times when it is most important that I engage one of the aforementioned healing practices are often the most difficult times to remember to do so. At the height of a triggering situation or in the midst of a panic attack, I often do not remember that I have tools for self-healing. For this reason, I prominently display a list of healing practices categorized by how long they take. My list includes 10 people I can call at any time, affirmations to say out loud, quick actions I can take to shift my energy, and more involved healing practices. I ask those in my family to help hold me accountable to using my list and claiming power in my healing process.
Of course, when we are living with a boot on our neck, there is only so much we can do internally to find equanimity. We also need to organize, resist, and embody our power as change agents. By first focusing on internal fortification, we arrive to movement work with the necessary sturdiness to face opposition without depleting ourselves. In the next chapter we explore organizing strategies to uproot racism in the food system and beyond.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Movement Building
With all due respect, King T’Challa, what can a nation of farmers have to offer the rest of the world?
—from the film Black Panther
We are part of an inexorable web of connection that binds our lives to those in our community, nation, and world. Even as we engage in the sacred work of tucking seeds into soil, we must also leverage our resources to change the structural conditions that keep our people in bondage. As my elders in Kroboland, Ghana, taught me, “Late ete no no daa,” which means there need always be three stones in place for the cooking pot to stand firm. I believe that movement work is most successful when we engage three equally crucial strategies: (1) protest and direct action to resist oppression; (2) working within the system to evolve policies and practices toward justice; and (3) building alternative institutions and creating models of the world we want to see. When these strategies are in balance, our movement work is effective and transformative.
One of our models for integrated strategy is the work of southern Black farmers during the civil rights movement era. As noted in the introduction, our mentor, civil rights veteran Baba Curtis Hayes Muhammad, explained to us that “without Black farmers, there would have been no Freedom Summer—in fact, no civil rights movement.” Muhammad leaned forward on his hand-carved wooden cane, eyes creased in a gentle but determined smile. He paused to make sure we were listening attentively, heeding the wisdom of the activists who preceded us.
Baba Muhammad explained the central role that Black farmers had played during the civil rights movement, coordinating campaigns for desegregation and voting rights as well as providing food, housing, bail money, and safe haven for activists and displaced tenant farmers. Independent Black farmers were their “own bosses,” unlike sharecroppers or domestic workers, and as such could not be fired by retaliatory white bosses for having the audacity to attend a meeting or register to vote. This modicum of independence catapulted Black farmers into a leadership role in the civil rights movement. The percentage of landowners involved in the movement surpassed tenant participation by very large margins.1 These farmers employed the “three cooking stone” approach; they maintained institutions (farms) to offer material support to their communities, engaged in system reform (voting and petitions), and led civil disobedience (marches and sit-ins).
At Soul Fire Farm we ask ourselves how we can emulate our elders and ancestors who selflessly gave their land, leadership, and resources to the broader movements for justice and dignity. So in addition to being “just” a farm, we also offer our space for meetings, trainings, retreats, meals, and safe haven to dozens of activist groups each year, from the New York State Prisoner Justice Network to Miracle on Craig Street community center.
The Northeast Regional Farmers of Color network is an informal alliance of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian farmers making our lives on land in New England and upstate New York. Photo courtesy of NEFOC.
We also organize ourselves on a regional and international level. Our primary coalition is the Freedom Food Alliance, which Black farmer and prison abolitionist Jalal Sabur helped to start in 2009. We are a collective of farmers, political prisoners, and organizers in upstate New York who are committed to incorporating food justice to address racism in the criminal punishment system.
One of the Freedom Food Alliance’s central efforts is the Victory Bus Project, a program that reunites incarcerated people with their loved ones while increasing access to farm-fresh food. Together with other local farmers, Soul Fire Farm contributes produce toward food packages, which families of prisoners can purchase using SNAP. Once they purchase the food, families get a free round trip to visit their loved ones at correctional facilities in upstate New York. Families may choose to give the food to prisoners as a care package, take it home, or both. While on the bus, Jalal facilitates conversations about the prison-industrial complex and food justice, using texts such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Our other regional coalition is the Northeast Farmers of Color Network. We provide mutual aid and love for one another as rural Black and Brown farmers, and coordinate the “Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous Farmers,” which matches people with resources to farmers seeking land and wealth. We also run Uprooting Racism trainings for hundreds of food justice groups interested in adopting a racial equity lens and engaging in reparations work.
Farmers in the Dessalines Brigade work together on seed saving, composting, and reforestation projects. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.
Nationally we organize with the US Food Sovereignty Alliance, National Black Food & Justice Alliance, Black Urban Growers, Agricultural Justice Project, HEAL Food Alliance, and other formations to advance a collective policy agenda.
Committed to a food system that is globally just, not simply fair for people within our borders, we have worked in solidarity with other campesinos and peasant farmers in Haiti, Puerto Rico, Ghana, Mexico, and Brazil. As of this writing, we just completed a seven-year solidarity cycle with the farmers in Komye, Haiti, who are part of the Dessalines Brigade, an alliance of peasant farmers committed to food sovereignty. Together we planted thousands of mango trees, installed irrigation, repaired homes after the 2010 earthquake and 2015 hurricane, and established composting on every farm in the community. In 2013 the Global Food Sovereignty Prize was awarded to the Dessalines Brigade in Haiti for their cooperation to save Creole seeds and support peasant agriculture.2 The grou
p earned international attention when they set fire to hybrid seeds Monsanto donated after the 2010 earthquake. These seeds were dumped on the Haitian market at the time of the rice harvest, threatening to outcompete and undermine the local smallholder agricultural economy. Flavio Barbosa of Brazil, representing the Group of Four / Dessalines Brigade, explained, “Haiti is a country that everyone talks about helping because it has a lot of needs, but in the 21st century, Haiti has been recolonized.” These modern-day colonizers include the Haitian government, NGOs, and biotech companies like Monsanto, whose “help” for the Haitian people has resulted in monocropping, deforestation, the destruction of Haitian markets, hunger, and poverty.
The challenges before us are monumental. We are not obligated to complete the task of repair, but we are required to act at the intersection of our capability and what the world needs. To maintain silence is to cast our vote for the status quo, to passively endorse a racist and exploitative food system, and to deny ourselves agency over the destiny of our community. This chapter offers strategies to challenge the Empire’s undermining of Black land sovereignty. Building on the legacy of our ancestors and elders who successfully sued the federal government, founded universities, drove their tractors to DC in protest, escaped slavery to form maroon communities, and organized massive boycotts of corporations, we explore diverse resistance tactics that will result in the reclamation of our rightful place on land. Each section will highlight a distinct resistance strategy, including current efforts that you can join or emulate.
Litigation
While the criminal injustice system is rightfully notorious for conspiring harm against our people, it is sometimes possible to leverage legal processes to defend and uphold our rights. Most legal action occurs outside of the courtroom. The Black Belt Justice Center is one example of a legal nonprofit that supports African American farmers to retain and increase landownership, organize into cooperatives and entrepreneurial businesses, and navigate heir property law.3 Law schools also have community law clinics that offer free and low-cost legal services to individuals and organizations. The law is not simple to navigate on your own, so having legal assistance can support you in exercising your rights. Here are some questions that lawyers can help you address:
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