Emotional Justice: A Language for Racial Healing and Global Black Solidarity 

Diaspora, Return & Memory Tide
Written By Tracie Rogers

Further Readings/Resources

  • Armah, E. A. (2022). Emotional justice: A roadmap for racial healing. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

    Additional Resources:

    • The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-armah-institute-of-emotional-justice

    • Instagram (Emotional Justice): https://www.instagram.com/emotionaljustice/

    Podcast:

    • THE SPIN - Weekly all-women-of-color podcast (available on multiple platforms and radio stations across the US, Ghana, and Nigeria)

In this episode of Saltwater Reasonings, I am in conversation with Esther Armah, creator of Emotional Justice and one of the most incisive voices shaping global Black healing and solidarity work. Together, we enter the emotional legacies of colonialism, patriarchy, and anti-Blackness, and the visionary language Esther offers for reckoning with them.

Our conversation explores Emotional Justice as both framework and felt practice: a response to rupture, a methodology for repair, and a call to rehumanise ourselves and one another. We consider the emotional body as political, and the consequences of emotional neglect within our movements, our relationships, and our institutions. Esther reflects on the cultural labour Black women carry, the violences of invisibility and extraction, and the urgent need to rewrite the relational scripts that shape our lives across the Black world.

We move through the Four Languages of Emotional Justice, the role of unlearning and relearning, and the generational reckoning required for us to build communities capable of love, accountability, and transformation. The conversation closes with a future-facing invitation: what becomes possible when our feelings are no longer disavowed, but centred? What might repair look like across the Black Atlantic? And what new worlds come into view when we practise Emotional Justice as collective survival?

What This Episode Offers

  • A clear and grounded introduction to Emotional Justice

  • Insights into the emotional and political labour of Black women

  • A discussion of the Four Languages of Emotional Justice

  • Reflections on grief, repair, and generational healing

  • A diasporic, transnational approach to racial justice

  • Strategies for rehumanising institutions, movements, and relationships

  • A vision for global Black solidarity rooted in feeling, accountability, and care

Tracie Rogers
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Mas and Memory: Performing Self and Diasporic Art-making