Black People: Healing Justice Demands Borderless Struggle

In this moment of violent escalation, some Black people are choosing to look away. 

Families are being separated and people are being disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Deportations are increasing, global militarized violence is on the rise, and the state is growing more aggressive, not less.

But in the face of this, some are saying they are done putting their bodies on the front lines for struggles they do not see as theirs. Others are using the language of healing, rest, and community care to justify withdrawal. But as Black Healing Justice practitioners, we must be clear: this is not care, it is not healing, and it is not justice.

Disconnection enacts the logic of disposability softened by language that was born from movements we have not fully understood or honored. The words we now use to justify it—rest, boundaries, regulation, self-preservation—have been lifted from liberatory frameworks that came from real organizing, from care that was always collective, and from strategies that were never about abandoning one another.

We are not here by accident, and we are not suggesting that the push to disconnect, or to see some struggles as separate from our own, is a personal failure. The truth is, it is the outcome of a strategy that has been refined over generations. Divide and conquer has always been the way power protects itself, and through eugenic policies, population control, racist surveillance, and resource hoarding, the state convinces us that we are safer alone. The system convinces us that solidarity is optional and that care should only extend to those who look like us, believe like us, or live near us. But we do not have to fall for that; in fact, the principles of Black liberation call us not to. 

True Black liberation is collective

Black liberation is a collective project that has always had an analysis of imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy, and we have always moved in struggle with liberation movements globally. It has never been just about us. Dr. King marching with sanitation workers. The fight against South African apartheid. Black delegations traveling to Palestine, whether in 1964 or in 2015. Building with Asian communities during the rise of Anti-Asian violence at the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Our movements have always been grounded in solidarity; Black people are migrants, refugees, queer, trans, and so much more. We have long organized across borders and identities, standing with one another in the face of global fascism and state violence. Take what’s happening with Trump’s racist attacks on Haitian immigrants. From detention and deportation to the erosion of legal protections like Temporary Protected Status, Haitian communities have been repeatedly targeted by immigration policies rooted in anti-Blackness. While Temporary Protected Status was never a liberatory solution, it is an important pathway for many people in our communities.

And even though solidarity is not transactional, we have been met with deep solidarity in return. In 2020, when protests for Black lives swept the globe, it was people of Color, and Indigenous and immigrant communities who marched, organized, and offered protection alongside us. Palestinian freedom fighters have trained organizers in the United States on resisting militarized policing. People of Color migrant justice groups have shown up again and again for Black people facing deportation and incarceration. The list is long, and the connections are real. That is why our solidarity is dangerous, and that is why the state works so hard to break it.

We are also seeing more Black people speaking openly about the anti-Blackness they have experienced across movements. That harm is real, and it is global. Reckoning with that is not just necessary, it is essential to our collective liberation. But even as we hold that truth, we must also be honest about the whole story: we must name the growing xenophobia within some segments of the Black community, and we must be honest about how some of us have internalized American exceptionalism and adopted the belief that migrants are a threat to our safety or resources. We also have to name the long-standing othering of Black queer and trans people, and of those whose identities do not conform to the narrow western idea of who deserves to belong. 

This is a lie rooted in the same white supremacist logic that harms us all, and it is the same logic that justified the war on drugs, redlining, and discrimination. It is the logic that sees some bodies as less worthy of protection, some pain as too foreign to touch, and some people as collateral damage. When we adopt that logic, we do the state’s work for it.

Desensitization is deadly

We are collectively dysregulated, and the nonstop stream of livestreamed violence, mass death, and political collapse only adds to the pressure. Our ancestors did not have to contend with seeing global state violence on their screens every hour of the day. We are being desensitized in real time, and that desensitization is shaping our sense of what is urgent, what is possible, and what is worth fighting for.

If we truly allow ourselves to feel what is happening to migrants, we also have to feel what happened to our people; we have to feel what could happen to us. That is terrifying, and so some of us shut it down. But when we do, we are not protecting ourselves: we are participating in the logic that says some lives are expendable. That logic is foundational to fascism, and it is the logic that undergirds ICE raids, border walls, refugee bans, and prison expansion. It is the same logic that has always targeted Black communities.

This is not theoretical. Every time we say, “this is not my fight,” the state hears, “we can move forward without consequence.” Every silence is permission and every disengagement is an opening for more violence. We do not need every Black person to show up in the same way, but we do need to be clear about what we are naming as care.

Disconnection is not care.
Dissociation is not care.
Silence is not care.

Healing Justice teaches us that care is political. It is about safety, survival, and solidarity. It is not about spa days and luxury rituals while people are being detained, deported, and disappeared. It is not about affirming each other’s disengagement with slogans like rest as resistance while people are being dragged out of their homes and put in cages. Healing Justice calls us to more; it calls us into relationship, and it calls us to move from individual relief toward collective power. That is what our movements have always done at their best.

We need to return to that. Healing Justice was born from the labor of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, disabled, queer, and trans organizers who understood that healing is not a break from the work. It is the work. Healing from collective grief and trauma is what makes it possible to stay in struggle with each other. Healing is how we keep showing up, and it is not separate from resistance. It is the foundation of it.

• What ICE is doing in detention centers is the same as what jails and prisons have always done to Black people: isolation, punishment, and erasure.
• What border enforcement is doing to migrant families mirrors what the foster system has done to Black families for generations: tear them apart under the guise of safety.
• What artificial intelligence is doing to track and target migrants is what predictive policing and surveillance have done to our neighborhoods. 

These are not parallel systems, they are the same system refining its tools.

This is healing justice

Healing Justice offers a way forward, and it teaches us that healing is not about deciding who deserves care, but about refusing to let anyone be discarded. It asks us to stay engaged from a place of rootedness and clarity, not performance or guilt. It calls on us to confront isolation and fear, to remember that the state wants us to be afraid of each other. It wants us to hoard care, to hoard safety, and to believe that there is not enough for all of us. But we know better.

Healing is not something that happens on the sidelines of our movements, it is the heart of how we build power and care for each other. When we talk about Healing Justice, we are talking about the ways we stay connected, the ways we move through trauma together, and the ways we create space for grief, repair, and resilience as part of our organizing strategies. 

This work shows up in many forms, but is guided by several core principles:

1. Collective trauma is transformed collectively. There is no safety without solidarity. There is no liberation without relationship. There is no justice that leaves anyone behind.
2. There is no single model of care. We honor the complexity of people, community, and conditions. There is no singular, rigid definition of what healing looks like. 
3. Healing strategies are rooted in place and ancestral technologies. Our healing must come from the wisdom of our ancestors, where we come from, and the conditions we are living through.

Healing Justice is not something to implement from the outside. Healing Justice takes many forms, shaped by context, communities, and the realities our communities face. It moves at the pace of relationship and the pulse of collective need, and it lives in everyday people: in trans doulas resisting medical neglect; in people fighting for the bodily sovereignty of intersex children; in disabled organizers leading mutual aid networks; in cultural workers tending to grief through ritual and resistance. These are not just acts of care, they are strategies for survival. Healing justice emerges in the spaces where institutions do what they were built to do—exclude, punish, and neglect—and where our people choose to care for one another instead. 

This moment requires us to remember who we are. It is a call to reject the narratives that say we must choose between rest and resistance, and it asks us to reclaim our legacy of connection and care. 

We must get free together, because there is no other way.

Featured image by Kimmie Dearest