“Love and Prayer Sustain Our Work” Building Collective Power, Health, and Healing as the Community Health Board Coalition

• Main Authors: Damarys Espinoza, Robin Narruhn
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-12-01
• Series: Genealogy
• Subjects: community organizing; healing; structural racism; biopower; slow violence; unspeakable
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/5/1/3

Over the course of the last few months, we have seen how structural racism has compounded the impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the United States, resulting in disparate rates of infection and death. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how the consequences of deeply entrenched inequities are fatal to BIPOC communities, whether death is a result of the novel coronavirus or the everyday violence of structural racism that manifests as poor health outcomes. We examine the formation of the Community Health Board Coalition (CHBC), a BIPOC-led organization in Washington state, to show how 15 communities have organized for health and healing amidst the collective trauma associated with COVID-19. We note that biopower—literally power over life, the unspeakable—and slow violence have been normalized and escalated in our communities. The use of an antiracist lens and decolonial practices have assisted us in our survivance (survival and resistance). We use autoethnography and testimonio as decolonial theory and method to give voice to individual and collective experiences that brought us to our roles as CHBC founding members and inaugural cochairs.