Valuing Black Lives: Community Healing Network

Valuing Black Lives

Happy Tuesday!

Breathe, Baby, Breathe.

With the arrests of two Black men for “being” in a Philadelphia Starbucks coffee shop and a little Black boy shot at in Rochester, New York, for “asking” for directions, this country has added, yet again, to the list of ordinary everyday things that are safe for White people, but dangerous, and even life-threatening, for Black people.

Breathe, Baby, Breathe.

This is sobering news for sure. But it has an upside. These tragic events force us to ask why—and, in the asking, we are getting closer and closer to the root causes of the challenges we face as Black people. And the closer we get to root causes, the closer we get to dealing with them once and for all and charting a course to our complete liberation as a people.

This month marks the 172nd anniversary of the filing of Dred Scott’s lawsuit in St. Louis County Circuit Court. Scott was an enslaved Black man who claimed he should be freed because his owners had taken him from Missouri, a “slave” state, to the “free” states of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory. The case ended up in the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that Black people could not sue because they were not citizens.

The Court declared that Black people “are beings of an inferior order... so far inferior that they have no rights which the White man is bound to respect.”

The persistent attacks on the dignity and lives of Black people today raise the same question Dred Scott tried to get the Supreme Court to address more than a century and a half ago.

Are Black people in America clothed with any rights the White man is bound to respect?

Breathe, Baby, Breathe.

We, Black people, may declare that Black lives matter. But it is increasingly and painfully clear that, for far too many people, Black lives simply do not matter as much as White lives. Why not? Because of the lie of Black inferiority upheld in the Dred Scott decision, and, its equally evil twin, the lie of White superiority.

For nearly 600 years, these lies have created a hierarchy of humanity, with White people on the top and Black people at the bottom, and, often, even outside of the circle of humanity. These lies objectified, commodified, and dehumanized Black people, and they are still haunting us today.

These lies created stereotypes that cause us to think badly of ourselves, and others to think badly of us. These lies are at the root of the many racial disparities between Black and White people. They are at the heart of the mistreatment and the killings of Black men, women, and children.

Unless we rid ourselves of these lies, we and our children will continue to suffer.

Declaring that Black lives matter is a crucial step along the road to ending the dehumanization of Black people. But we need more. We need a systematic and comprehensive movement for emotional emancipation to value Black lives by helping Black people heal from the centuries of trauma caused by the lies and by extinguishing the lies once and for all.

Stay tuned for more on the next phase in the movement for emotional emancipation.

For now, we want to invite you to take the first and most important step in valuing Black lives by focusing on—and calling attention to--the underlying causes of the disease of anti-Black racism.

A Rwandan proverb advises that “it is not where you are. It’s what you do there that matters.”

The great need of this hour is to focus on the root causes of our challenges as people of African ancestry—here in the United States and around the world.

And so, I ask you to consider, wherever you are, what are you doing there to focus attention on root causes? How might you be more intentional, more collaborative, more powerful in the vital work of freeing our beloved community from the lies?

It is well past time for us to address the underlying causes of our collective dehumanization--and focus with clarity and courage on the restoration of our full humanity.

What do you think? Click the button below to share your thoughts.

The Struggle is Ending. Victory is Certain.

--Enola G. Aird, CHN Founder and President

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