For Black Women, 2023 Will Be the Year of Radical Self-Care

• The radical self-care movement is popular on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram for its rejection of traditional self-care.
• According to radical self-care advocates, traditional self-care is driven by consumerism and individualism.
• Audre Lorde described radical self-care in 1988 as an act that coincides with community care.

In a TikTok video Published in September, Asiyah Muhsin, a women’s wellness coach and consultant for Black women, calls rest a form of radical self-care. “Resting is absolutely necessary to achieve and maintain your health and wellness goals,” she adds. Her video is one of hundreds explaining a “radical” form of self-care that embraces the idea of ​​taking up the space necessary to be a whole person.

“Radical self-care, in this concept, is a rejection of hustle culture. It’s about rejecting this idea that, as human beings, our worth is intrinsically linked to our work, and rather that we are worthy, independent of our participation in capitalism on its own,” said Jasmine Hill, assistant professor of public policy and sociology at UCLA.

The mainstream self-care movement, which exploded in the early 2010s, Hill says, was fueled by the wellness industry’s push to coerce people into purchasing wellness products like subscriptions. massage and bath salts, essentially contributing to more capitalist production.

“While these things can be very relaxing, they are inaccessible to a lot of people from different working-class backgrounds. Plus, you can’t really relax in a bubble bath per se,” she said, adding that “We are people.” , we are not personal brands, so we have needs related to community, food, water and rest.

Healing a different type of trauma

What exactly does radical self-care look like? Rest is the most important part, but it can also mean taking breaks, setting limits on our time, protesting and organizing against the systems that exhaust us, removing ourselves from work, and ultimately recognizing the injustice of situations and fight against this, individually or collectively. “Radical self-care looks like actions that you don’t have to pay for, or that are only available to the elite, but that really push back against the idea that as people we are tireless,” she said. Hill said.

To an outsider, these notions may seem simple or standard. But for Black women in America, who are historically expected to work, serve others, and support the family unit and community, things like resting, quitting a job, or cutting ties with a loved one that create toxicity in your life are a problem. radical act.

“Black women, in particular, because of their place in the racial and gender hierarchy, are called to be constant workers for our families, for our workplaces, for society,” Hill said. “Taking self-care so radically for Black women is rejecting this belief that we are supposed to be super women who don’t need to rest and actively reclaiming pleasure, rest, joy, silliness and all of these things that aren’t typically associated with how black women take care of themselves. Black women are supposed to be.”

Many factors highlight the various stressors that Black people, and especially Black women, face on a daily basis. Whether it’s a demographic that’s grossly underpaid, overlooked in medical settings, overlooked in business opportunities, or faced with daily microaggressions in the workplace and online, simply existing can create daily trauma for black women. And because racism cannot be bought or wasted, resistance, through an active choice to care for oneself and one’s community, becomes a form of self-care that actually enriches the livelihoods of Black women .

Historical roots

“For me, radical self-care means coming back to yourself, it means prioritizing your well-being before that of others. Because if you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of others,” said Oludara Adeeyo, psychotherapist and author of Self-Care for Black Women: 150 Ways to Radically Accept and Prioritize Your Mind, Body, and Soul“. Her book, specifically designed to help black women revitalize their outlook on life, improve their mental health, eliminate stress, and advocate for themselves, mimics that of the life she chooses for herself.

“Radical self-care is different from what people call self-care because it’s a little bit deeper. It really connects you to yourself and it’s about more than just pleasing yourself and rewarding yourself. It s It’s really about learning about yourself and being able to find your voice in this chaos of the world.

Although the radical self-care movement has become a trending topic on social media platforms in recent years, its origins date back to the 1980s. In Audre Lorde’s 1988 essay collection, “A Burst of Light” , she writes: “Taking care of myself is not self-righteousness, it is self-preservation, and it is an act of political warfare. » His version of self-care, which differs greatly from today’s isolated, individualistic version of self-care, coincides with community care.

As writer Kathleen Newman-Bremang said in an article titled “Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Care“ “Community care is about using our power and bandwidth to support and provide for our communities when the systems in which we exist do not. We must ask ourselves what we can do politically, socially, and in our relationships to offset the harm our governments and institutions are already doing to our communities. »

The re-emergence of the movement can be attributed to many factors, but Adeeyo believes it is a combination of the pandemic, recent tragedies in the black community like the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and sharing information via social media platforms. Even though many people may have left the BLM movement online, Adeeyo said, Black people need to look at themselves and find ways to maintain that level of resistance, with radical self-care being one of them. them. It also requires slowing down without feeling guilty for not being consistently productive.

As Hill said: “It’s not about overcoming burnout so you can come back to work and do the same thing again. It’s about imagining what things might look like if we saw a collective problem and solved it, in our communities. , by organizing together to truly transform systems.”