Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

Summary, part 5

Healing Justice

The best kind of healing is healing that… (p. 97-98)

• Is affordable;

• Offers childcare;

• Needs no stairs;

• Doesn’t misgender or disrespect disabilities or sex works;

• Believe people who are disabled when they say they are hurt;

• Listens to people who are disabled when they describe what they need; and

• Understands that people who are disabled are the first and last authority on their bodies and mind.

What is healing justice?

Healing justice is a...

“shift in how we think of movement organizing work to think of it as a place where building in many pauses, where building in healing, where building in space for grief and trauma to be held makes the movements more flexible and longer lasting” (p. 107).

Healing Justice was a movement created by QTBIPOC individuals in 2004. The Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, a collective of queer Black and brown Southern organizers, helped to define the healing justice movement. The healing justice movement is meant to reclaim traditional healing methods within Black and brown communities while expanding what health and healing practices look like.

When thinking about healing justice, we learn that we should be spaces of healing and that healing is real work towards disability justice. Healing justice also reclaims the traditional healing methods of BIPOC communities, which were destroyed by capitalism privatizing healthcare.

Piepzna-Samarasinha heals people through reading tarot cards or working for a rape crisis help hotline or teaching medical students consenual sexual health exams. Sick and crazy people can heal each other through means beyond a traditional medical model, and it is still healing.

What is NOT healing justice?

The mainstream idea of healing––one where people are either sick or well, fixed or broke––is deeply ableist. Disability justice and anti-ableist healing justice reframes this thinking “towards being autonomously and beautifully imperfect” (p. 104).
Additionally, Piepzna-Samarasinha cautions the following:

“If white healers slap ‘healing justice’ on their work but are still using the healing traditions of some folks’ cultures that aren’t their own, are primarily working and treating white middle-class and upper-class people, are unaware or don’t recognize that [healing justice] was created by Black and brown femmes, are not working with a critical stance and understanding of how colonization, racism, and ableism are healing issues … it ain’t healing justice.” (106)