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Racial Healing
by Satara Charlson, PhD, MSW
Dear colleagues,
The National Day of Racial Healing is January 17, 2023. I don’t know if many of my peers know about this day and what it represents, so I wanted to take a minute and share about it, and to share a few thoughts related to it.
The Kellogg Foundation launched the National Day of Racial Healing campaign in 2017 as part of its Truth and Racial Healing Transformation (TRHT) efforts. The overarching purpose of the day is for individuals, groups, and communities to come together and acknowledge how systemic racism is woven into the fabric of our nation, and to work to dismantle it. It’s a tall order, to address systemic racism and foster healing, but it’s one that we as social workers are intimately familiar with.
In fact, the more I learned about the TRHT framework (from which the National Day of Racial Healing was born), the more I was reminded of learning about the process of truth and reconciliation as an MSW student at the University of Kansas in the 1990s and how in awe I was to learn about this healing process and how it was used by different countries, communities, and organizations. The difficult, yet beautiful, process of truth and reconciliation fit so perfectly into my macro social work classes. I vividly remember being not only in awe of this new knowledge, but wanting to immediately go put this process into practice in my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Truth, Reconciliation, and Healing
In case you aren’t familiar with the process, I’ll share my lay person synopsis. For me, the process of truth and reconciliation is aimed at healing divided communities through working to transform pain and oppression into collaboration and healing. How do you move forward after horrible things have happened (like colonization, genocide, slavery, massacres) and the status quo is unjust?
The process of truth and reconciliation helps divided groups and communities move forward in a meaningful way. It focuses on healing, as opposed to punishment, and is the only process I know of that can really build sustainable bridges for both the privileged and the oppressed, in a place where a long legacy of colonization, violence, genocide, and oppression are ubiquitous to a country or community’s past or present.
Although there are various approaches to the process, the process generally involves:
- truth sharing
- acknowledging truth (and the legacies of injustice)
- collaboration
- restoration
Through truth sharing and acknowledging not only truth, but the legacies of injustice stemming from what happened, the process builds a starting point for healing. I remember a professor once saying, “You must see and feel a wound to heal it.” Shining a light on truth, not to punish, but to heal, is key to the process. Truth is central to trust building, which is also key.
Next, the process involves collaboration and restoring relationships. Building bridges where they did not exist and building on strengths, common goals, values, and our shared humanity can help divided groups unite and collaborate.
Finally, restoration and healing can occur. Healing can come in a myriad of ways and can look different to everyone and every community, but for me, the key is action. What actions foster restoration and healing? Each community may be different, but the outcome is aimed at transformation. The healing power of art, music, storytelling, and collaborative projects done in solidarity is encouraged throughout the process.
A Social Work Call to Action
As a professional social worker, reflecting on the National Day of Racial Healing underscores for me the desperate need for more truth and reconciliation efforts in our country and the need for social workers to lead the way. As social workers, we are in both a unique and exciting position to help usher in social change for social justice this year. We are specifically educated and skilled not only to understand social injustices, like systemic racism and historical trauma, but to help others see and face it, and work to foster healing—across micro, mezzo, and macro levels. We know the devastating impact oppressive systems have on individuals, families, groups, and communities, and we know how to work toward healing. It’s what we do on some level every day in practice.
Plus, one of the many unique and wonderful things about our profession is that we are ethically bound to work for social change and to help dismantle oppressive systems. We’re trained for this and ethically required to do it, so let’s help each other do it. The world needs us! Now more than ever, the world needs us to lead the way and to use our skills (not just the micro ones) to organize, agitate, and build bridges to truth and reconciliation and ultimately transformation and healing in our nation.
It seems to me that our nation grows more and more divided as white supremacy rears its repulsive head through organized movements against democracy, Critical Race Theory (CRT), in antisemitic attacks, in attacks against transgender youth (and the entire LGBTQ+ community), and so forth. These injustices grow and fester like wounds in desperate need of medical intervention, yet becoming more infected and lethal each day they’re left untreated. Families, friends, and communities are divided, and the importance of human relationships (a key value of social work) is sometimes replaced by the importance of political ideology.
This year, I encourage us as a community of social workers to unite, organize, and build on our strengths as professional social workers in our respective communities and in our states. Let’s also build on our national strengths, like our work ethic, individualism, creativity, innovation, and our humanity to empower real change.
It’s been done before by our predecessors who courageously united and fought for many of the rights and privileges many of us take for granted today. We honor them in coming together, building on strengths, and using our professional education and skills to create social change this year. We can learn from our colleagues in restorative justice and from countries that have used formal truth and reconciliation commissions (like South Africa and Canada) and various communities that have used the process to foster healing.
Satara Charlson
Satara Charlson, PhD, MSW
Dr. Satara Charlson serves as a professor of social work at UMASS Global.