Black Health and Wellness

As Black History Month concludes, we recognize that while it is important, it can be burdensome and upsetting for Black folx in America. What we ask now, how do Black folx recover, rest, and prioritize black health and wellness?

The conversation surrounding self-care and labor grew significantly within the past few years. With the awareness of capitalism and its exploitation people are now setting boundaries in the workplace and figuring out how to make sure they are ready to continue working at their best. While self-care is an essential component of labor, this conversation is largely led and popularized by white feminists. Cis-gendered, white women can often afford the luxury of initiating this conversation and implementing what their version of self-care looks like (Wiens et al., 2021). As a Black-Latina woman, I am hyper-aware that my experience in labor is different from my white counterparts. I also understand that people from marginalized groups have similar experiences. I want to dive into the implications of this white-centered approach to self-care and discuss how Black folx can resist and rest through a Black feminist lens.  

White Self-Care 

The trend of taking the day for yourself to get a massage, get your nails done, and get some shopping done has boomed in a variety of spaces including workplaces, social circles, and especially on social media. The #selfcare tag holds all sorts of “treat yourself to that!” or “you deserve that with how hard you’ve worked.” There is a new collective consciousness of working hard and wanting to indulge as a reward. But who’s having these conversations and enjoying the indulgences? 

Because this mainstream movement requires accessibility to materials and leisure, it’s predominately catered to cis-gendered, white women. These women have the most proximity to those things in comparison to their Black and/or Trans counterparts due to the social hierarchy (Roth & Rios, 2020). Self-care as a mainstream movement becomes problematic when it’s encouraged to partake in, but the nuance and racial dynamics of the act isn’t acknowledged. People of color, especially Black folx, are traditionally in the roles of working-class people. Understanding that taking care of oneself helps with the sustainability of one’s health addresses only part of the issue. The other half comes with understanding who is doing the labor (traditionally), and what they can do to take care of themselves within their means. The information put out into digital spheres and social media is precious. Having information that is so accessible is changing the narrative for so many people who otherwise wouldn’t have it... and it matters who is putting the content out and who it’s being written for. Knowing that this movement is white-centered, the BIPOC working class is consuming information on self-care that is unsustainable for them and their identities. We need to flip the narrative and listen to Black feminists’ take on self-care. 

Black Self-Care and Resistance 

When Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (QTBIPOC) rest, it is inherently an act of resistance to white supremacy.

Black feminists have been shouting about the importance of self-care for decades. Audre Lorde is a fantastic example. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Lorde 1988, 130). The sustainability of the U.S. has always depended on the labor and exploitation of BIPOC. Self-care becomes an act of resistance when it’s focused on resting with the absence of productivity and material (tangible luxuries), and being in solidarity and community with one another.  

When you prioritize resting with no goal, it is an act of resistance. Sleeping in because you can and not limiting yourself for morning yoga. Laying down and watching a movie because you can and not cleaning the house. So often rest days come with stipulations. Let’s challenge what it means to rest unapologetically—with no pressure or expectations for productivity. People of color and Black folx are more vulnerable to health complications due to labor because traditionally, they are the ones doing manual and tasking labor in the U.S. Resting without much movement allows our bodies to reset and regroup.  

Standing in solidarity with community is another theory of self-care brought by Black feminists (Ahmed, 2021). There is a focus in our society to be hyper independent and standing in community requires us to step out of that. It requires interdependency. adrienne maree brown says it best in Emergent Strategy (2017): 

The idea of interdependency is that we can meet each other's needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from. (p. 87) 

QTBIPOC share experiences and social positions, and this makes for a powerful collective. We understand and recognize each other in a way that no other group can. Together we can create environments where we teach, share, and learn from each other.  

Labor is significantly easier when you tune into community as a resource. Labor is significantly easier when genuine rest is prioritized.

Labor is significantly easier when you deconstruct caring for yourself as a product of capitalism and white supremacy in systems that abuse us and reimagine your self-care as radical resting.  

References 

Ahmed, Z. G. (2021). Leading from the inside Out: Contemplative Practice as Radical Self-care for BIPOC Activists. Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, 1, 73–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554477x.2021.1874186 

Caldera, A. (2020). Challenging Capitalistic Exploitation: A Black Feminist/Womanist Commentary on Work and Self-Care. Feminist Studies 46(3), 707-716. doi:10.1353/fem.2020.0049. 

MacDonald, S. Recovering #SelfCare for Intersectional Feminist Futures: Neoliberalism, Self-Care, and Whiteness in Hashtag Communities. Brianna I. Wiens, York University.  

Roth, Z. C., & Rios, K. (2020). Social Hierarchies. In Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences (pp. 5054–5060). Springer International Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1833 

Wiens, B., & Shana, M. (2021). Living whose best life? An intersectional feminist interrogation of postfeminist #solidarity in #selfcare. NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies. Nr. 1, S. 219–242. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16254. 

Related Content