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Can Black women have thriving friendships with white women in a society steeped in the realities of racism? Can such friendships experience the presence of genuine mutuality?

We Deserve to Heal: Black Women on the Perils and Promises of Friendship with White Women features essays from ten intergenerational Black women who consider these questions through different themes, including identity, belonging, rupture, and freedom. This powerful and perceptive anthology speaks honestly of the beauty and the struggles, the welcome and the wounds.

By centering Black women's voices, We Deserve to Heal actively cultivates authenticity, truth-telling, liberation, and healing. This collection offers validation for Black women and other women of color and also encourages greater compassion within any reader hoping to discover more.

Praise for We Deserve to Heal

“Unapologetic and frank. We Deserve to Heal matters because the complex, centuries-old history of relationships among Black women and white women in this country is too often reduced to platitudes and rooted in false, ahistorical notions of unity and sisterhood.”
—Deesha Philyaw, author of National Book Award finalist The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“We Deserve to Heal's contributors examine race, ethnicity, gender, and misrepresentation in bold and authentic ways. The details surrounding the perils and (failed) promises explored in these stories are nuanced and interesting. With fascism and separatism threatening how we know and understand one another as human beings, this is a necessary book and conversation.”
—DaMaris B. Hill, author of Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood

In 2021, the idea that would eventually become We Deserve to Heal descended on me with such gravity and grace that I knew this idea was my sacred invitation into a not-yet-known journey.

While I am the editor of (and contributor to) this anthology, I am far from the sole author. This anthology is composed of the voices of many contributors! My heart is filled with gratitude for each contributor who said, “Yes!” to being part of this audacious endeavor. Thank you! Little did we know that we were doing far more than writing essays; we were building a community. Ultimately, this endeavor carried with it the power to heal. Truly, we need more ideas in our world that carry the power to heal.

Funding and support from the Louisville Institute and the Collegeville Institute enabled me to turn this dream into something real. Thanks immensely to both of those organizations, thanks for hearing me share my idea and saying you wanted to help support its unfolding. To receive support for one’s dream is a beautiful, cannot-be-quantified thing.