Womanism and Black Women’s Health

Womanism is spiritual movement. It is spiritual movement—individual, collective—toward the realization of our fundamental Innate Divinity. It is movement through healing toward wellness and well-being. It is (re)turning to Source for the resources needed for healing and movement, based on the acknowledgment of an alive Universe perpetually proffering vitality.

Movement away from Source, from vitality, from Innate Divinity, is the origin of unwellness. Movement away from Source is reflected and manifested individually as physical and mental illness and collectively as dissociation, disconnection, poverty, injustice, and violence.

Today, masses of people are in pain. They experience malaise, estrangement, depression, demoralization, and acute sickness. These conditions are endemic and exploding exponentially, globally. We are in a downward spiral—psychically, environmentally, and spiritually. In fact, we are in a race against the clock toward our own destruction. Healing, then, must be radical, revolutionary, and resuscitating. The most radical act we could take toward our own literal revival would be acknowledgment of our Innate Divinity. The most revolutionary act we could make in the direction of our own rehabilitation would be to rebuild our individual and collective lives in line with the demands of cultivating, sustaining, and realizing our Innate Divinity. Our greatest resuscitation would come from immersing ourselves in a context suffused with recognition of Innate Divinity and, indeed, the luminous nature of all Creation.

Our most fundamental power is to choose—this road or that? Toward vitality, or toward enervation? Toward life or toward death? Toward actualization or toward domestication? Every moment of every day, each of us is choosing—with choices often overdetermined by a social context created to be hostile to our well-being. These are torturous, bewildering times in which to be attempting to make beneficial, life-sustaining choices. Even to discern what is good and life-affirming has become difficult, even exhausting at times. We are tired. Our senses are dulled. Our orienting mechanisms are scrambled. Yet our Innate Divinity can never be abolished and it stands ready at all times to re-center us. So the beginning of healing is the act of re-centering, the act of acknowledging and locating our Innate Divinity.

Black women are good guides on this journey, and Black women have proven historically and transculturally to be peerless healers across an unbroken thread of time and space. Yet Black women today must first turn our healing gifts upon ourselves. We must armor ourselves with self-healing before venturing forth into the work of healing others. Our self-healing begins with self-knowledge—knowledge of what invites and supports our centeredness, the keeping of the flame of our own Innate Divinity, the keening of our faculties of awareness, and the cultivation of a surplus of vitality. Because to heal is to give vitality, to animate, to return life to lifelessness. These times drain us of our surpluses almost faster than we can create them. We must dig deep into our magic to fight this life-force-stealing pace, but due to our cultural well, the well of deep Africanity and other deep indigenous systems of knowledge that understand the aliveness of the Universe and the many invisible forces and beings at our disposal, we know how—we can access means. This is the real #BlackGirlMagic!

We are adept at healing, yet, beyond this, we bring a second gift to the promotion of vitality among the kindred of earth: our truth-telling ability. Truth is like a knife that cuts away the necrotic energy of lies, deception, and falsehood. It is a form of emergency surgery on a diseased reality. It restores integrity to the body of consciousness. It is necessary for survival. Our truth-telling is fast and strong—not mild or veiled; it is not a balm, but it is a cure. Our truth-telling may sting, but we must not stop being truth-tellers—that is, witnesses to reality. Some call it sass; the elders called it “being womanish.” By any name, it is a necessary medicine in these times. Yet it must ride on the substrate of absolute love for humanity [End Page 330...