It’s important to name that this task of healing sits against a political backdrop, and that backdrop does not allow us to simply individualize healing or imagine that it could ever be an apolitical endeavor. For Black people, many of the tools and technologies used by our ancestors to heal have been taken or suppressed. And the extent of the traumas we have experienced has been constant and collective, overwhelming our efforts and our resources to address. In many ways, the moment in which we find ourselves is calling for each and all of us to acknowledge and address the existence of Black pain and trauma, finally and with consequence. Each death and each riot activates another memory of another life lost without justice or reason; this is how trauma unhealed haunts and accumulates, reemerging and reanimating the body. It does not disappear. The study of trauma has been itself a way to name human pain that lingers and lives on after rupture, especially in the individual, but increasingly also in the collective. We understand more now about how trauma winds and warps, inhabiting bodies, permeating relationships, and shaping lineages.

— You Are Your Best Thing by Tarana Burke, Brené Brown (Page 47)