A New Vocabulary for Racial Healing

Esther Armah sought a change of scenery for her own emotional well-being, so she relocated to Accra, Ghana, some years back, and now tends oranges in her backyard. It wouldn’t make sense, she says, for her to preach emotional justice — a term she coined in her work centered around racial healing — and not put it into practice.

Now, through her writing, advocacy, and the Armah Institute of Emotional Justice, she is building a global movement rooted in honesty, storytelling, healing, and rejecting respectability politics.

The Roots of Emotional Justice

Indeed, “rejection” is a concept Armah embraces. She says that in the work of emotional justice, one must reject narratives that center whiteness. One must also reject sacrificing one’s own mental health for the sake of others. One must reject the idea of policing each other’s Blackness across the diaspora. And one must reject the idea that, although the diaspora is global and nuanced, it doesn’t mean that white supremacy doesn’t affect all parts of it.

“I call myself a global Black chick,” Armah says. Born to Ghanaian parents in London, Armah became a journalist and lived in New York City before switching paths to pursue advocacy. A chance meeting with two different wives of embattled African leaders — Winnie Mandela in one interview, Ntsiki Biko, the wife of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in another — prompted her to change course.

“I still carry what I’ve learned in my journalism career with me,” Armah says. “Storytelling informs how we move through the world.” 

Now, as the founder of the Armah Institute for Emotional Justice, Armah not only tells stories, but also gathers them. Through the institute, Armah leads training on unlearning “the language of whiteness” and embracing wellness, love language, new thought, and honest conversation.

Armah has embarked on a career as a speaker, trainer, and author. “Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing,” her first book, was published in 2022. For one project, she gathered 300 stories, equally divided between the continent, the United Kingdom, and the United States, about the oral histories of Black doctors and nurses. 

Keeping herself grounded in her own well-being has also meant having more honest conversations about her personal life. “I talk more about how I’ve attempted suicide,” Armah says. “It is something I’ve grown comfortable with talking about.” 

To be clear, Armah is not a doctor or therapist inviting others to discuss their experiences with self-harm or otherwise, nor is the concept of emotional justice designed to substitute as mental health counsel. But part of emotional justice, Armah says, is not only to acknowledge the emotional weight we all carry, but to also recognize the burden – and calling it such – does not always come from one’s own circumstances. Emotional weight can be lessened, Armah says, by acknowledging white supremacy as the cause and working to decenter it.

Connecting Across the Diaspora

For Black people across the diaspora, the process is different and measured, depending on their location in the world and their lineage. 

“Black Americans live with the trauma of slavery,” Armah says, which has created racist systems and infrastructure in the United States that don’t exist in, say, Ghana, where she calls home. 

Ghana, sometimes, “is a place where people feel everything in Ghana can be less than…and that everything is better than Ghana,” Armah says, pointing to insular conversations that exist on the continent that don’t exist elsewhere in the world.

Armah leaves room for not every Black person to feel as connected to the continent, as the common thread across the diaspora is rejecting the notion of apologizing to your oppressors, something Armah took to heart around the time of heightened Black Lives Matter action in the wake of the murder of George Floyd murder in Minneapolis. 

Too often, she says, people hurt by systemic systems of racial oppression give too much grace in the hope for reconciliation. “I reject that,” she says firmly.

Currently, Armah is developing a curriculum that fosters emotional justice among men. In the years she’s been doing the work, she’s spoken and been in community with several women, but she understands that the nuances and intricacies of Black men doing the work are different. 

There is also an increased focus on health equity, as Armah travels from organization to organization, encouraging those in power to recognize the real link between mental health and physical health. If the weight of emotions can affect one, it will undoubtedly affect the other.

“The umbilical cord of our humanity has been cut by white supremacy and its offspring, racism,” Armah writes in her book. “Emotional justice offers us a new way to bind, to heal, and to win.”

This article was originally published to Word In Black on September 12, 2025.