Restorative Justice offers a call to the world to transform harmful relationships and communities toward spaces that support healing and well-being. The pursuit of healing and well-being requires that we reckon with the legacy of white supremacy as well as oppression and domination in perpetuating injustice. Fania Daivs (2019) made a powerful call for Restorative Justice Practitioners to engage in practices to developed capacity in communities of understanding race and addressing racism.
Davis described the facilitators dual skill in cultivating spaces of healing while confronting racist injustice the inner balance of the warrior/healer. Davis "invite[s] restorative justice practitioners to cultivate a heightened racial justice consciousness and racial justice activists to embrace a greater healing consciousness. Through the coupling of what [she] refers to as "warrior" and "healer, ' we develop the capacity to fulfill the promise of both the racial justice and restorative justice movement" (p.15).
The Restorative Justice Project firmly believe that restorative justice is synchronous with racial justice. To learn more about race and restorative justice, we recommend the following books:
- Davis, F. E. (2019). The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Healing, and US Social Transformation. Good Books.
- Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press.
- Wadhwa, Anita (2016). Restorative Justice in Urban Schools. New York: Routledge.
- Winn, Maisha T (2018). Justice on Both Sides: Transforming Education Through Restorative Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Valandra, E. C. (2020). Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities. Living Justice Press.