Esther A. Armah is an international award-winning journalist, playwright, radio host, and writer. She is currently CEO of The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice, (The AIEJ), a global institute implementing the ‘Emotional Justice’ framework she created. The AIEJ devises, develops, designs, and delivers projects, training, and thought leadership. The Emotional Justice framework has taken Armah as a speaker to a range of prestigious venues including Netflix Inclusion Institute, Stanford, NYU, and Kenya’s African Women in Media Conference. She is based in Accra, Ghana, but the majority of her and The AIEJ’s work are in the U.S.
About Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing
In her powerful and groundbreaking new book, Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing (October 11, 2022; Berrett-Koehler Publishers) Esther A. Armah argues that the crucial missing piece to racial healing and sustainable equity is Emotional Justice—a new racial healing language to help us do our emotional work.
Emotional Justice connects the histories of oppression to what is happening now, what is going wrong, and how we can put it right. Putting the two words together is about highlighting that this is our collective work, a group focus – not an individual effort, that it is about highlighting and addressing injustice. We all—white, Black, Brown—have our emotional work that we need to do. But that work is not the same for all of us.
This emotional work includes unlearning the language of whiteness, a narrative that centers white people, particularly white men, no matter the deadly cost and consequence to all women and to global Black and Brown people. That’s why a new racial healing language is crucial.
With forewords by two prominent thinkers in the field, Brittney Cooper and Robin DiAngelo, Emotional Justice grapples with how a legacy of untreated trauma from oppressive systems has created and sustained dual deadly fictions: white superiority and Black inferiority that shape—and wound—all of us. These systems must be dismantled to build a future that serves justice to everyone, not just some of us. We are the dismantlers we have been waiting for, and Emotional Justice is the game changer for a just future that benefits all of us.
Emotional Justice will help readers do their emotional work in dismantling systemic inequity, which will help them to coexist across different perspectives.
Drawing from her expertise and key themes in Emotional Justice, Esther can discuss:
• What Emotional Justice is and how the work varies for Black, Brown, and white individuals
• The process of dismantling the language of whiteness and where to start
• How to identify the emotional work that needs to be done on an individual level
• How to unlearn and reframe the way we see ourselves based on learned narratives
• The division of emotional labor to move towards Emotional Justice
• How white people, especially women, can evaluate the role they play in sustaining white supremacy
• Dismantling inequitable systems is what’s necessary. How with Emotional Justice, we are the dismantlers we have been waiting for
• What systemic equity looks like and actionable ways to achieve it
• The 4 pillars of the language of whiteness: Racialized Emotionality, Emotional Patriarchy, Emotional Currency, and Emotional Economy
• The 4 pillars of the Emotional Justice love languages: Intimate Reckoning, Intimate Revolution, Resistance Negotiation, and Revolutionary Black Grace
• The importance of accountability and action in regards to improving DEI
• How untreated trauma shapes how we see ourselves and each other, and may influence how we engage with one another
• How Emotional Justice is the future of DEI and why our emotional work does not rely on our personal progressive politics
• What transformative change created by Emotional Justice looks like in a corporate setting
Connect
Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing is available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold.
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Esther A. Armah on:
Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing