The pillars of healing justice (HJ), rooted in abolition and anti-capitalism, are transformative justice, disability justice, reproductive justice, environmental justice, and harm reduction.
Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (p. 137). North Atlantic Books.
Healing justice is rooted in the philosophy of Liberatory Harm Reduction. The lifeblood of each is self-determination, the belief that healing and growth happen best inside long-term relationships, and the right for people to choose how and when they engage the allopathic medical model. They both demand that healers and health care providers fight systems of power, like the medical industrial complex, prison industrial complex, and carceral social work. These systems form a dangerous web that interrupts our ability to get care on our own terms.
Healing justice and Liberatory Harm Reduction are inextricably tied up together because they are both about the active strategies that people use to collectively heal and push back on the medical model/industrial complex. The MIC tells people that the only way to have an acceptable body is to be nonsick, nondisabled, nonfat, and non–drug using. The MIC tells us that we cannot have a normative body if we use it to make money via selling sex or use our bodies to regulate our trauma via self-harm. We cannot have acceptable bodies if we decide to not take our psychiatric medication, accept (or struggle with) our eating disorders, or if we hesitate to buy whatever supplement or prescription we are told to without being called “noncompliant,” in “denial,” or “resistant to care.”
Liberatory Harm Reduction and healing justice both are largely ignored by activists and popular thinkers because it is uncomfortable. Both require doctors, social workers, legislative policymakers, healers, and organizers to make room for the fact that their ideas of bodies, safety, and health leaves out enormous swaths of our communities. It requires us to make room for the reality of what it means to show up in our bodies exactly as we are without anyone asking us to leave, change, or conform. At this point, ideas of health, wellness, and self-care, which may have been ideas that initially existed outside the MIC, are now so intertwined with capitalism that they have become lost to those of us who are committed to dismantling the medical industrial complex and disconnect it from carceral thinking and systems.
Empowerment means being in control of your choices—it means self-determination and body autonomy—regardless of whether those choices make healers uncomfortable.2 For healing justice strategy to live into its full intention, it must be able to hold me as a complicated person, as someone who wants to feel better and yet does not want to be cured, as someone who wants to be whole and yet cannot be forced to be “embodied,” as someone who wants to stay alive and may make choices you think are dangerous. Drug users, people in the sex trade and street economy, sex workers, those of us who self-injure, survive violent homes and relationships—we deserve strategies that value us. The ability to make change in our own lives and make change in the communities we live in—that is our power.
Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (pp. 91-92). North Atlantic Books.
Healing justice is memory work. The work of reclamation. We remember despite the intensity of personal and collective violence happening over and over again to the bodies of our ancestors and their children. We are their descendants. We have survived.
Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (p. 4). North Atlantic Books.
Healing justice is not yours to consume. It is our collective birthright that the ancestors fought and died for.
Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (p. 2). North Atlantic Books.
Healing justice is memory work. The work of reclamation. We remember despite the intensity of personal and collective violence happening over and over again to the bodies of our ancestors and their children. We are their descendants. We have survived.
Sometimes a healer needs grounding. Sometimes while providing the grounded safe space and the paced healing words for everyone else, a healer needs Earth to crawl into. An earthen embrace. A healing movement needs soil to sink roots and send branches. Healing justice is Earth based and alive. And every healer needs a home.
In Auburn, Upstate New York, Harriet Tubman, daughter of a lumber expert, built a home for herself and her family and the many like her who know that freedom was not freedom without care. Did you hear that? Freedom is not freedom without care.
Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (p. 19). North Atlantic Books.
