soulwork defined
A Framework and Epistemology for Black Liberation at the Level of the Soul
i. the origins
Soulwork is the name I have given to the spiritual, intellectual, and experiential framework I developed while trying to survive my life.
Soulwork was born from burnout. From the betrayal of institutions I had given myself to. Institutions that took what they needed from me and handed back something smaller and more diminished in return. Soulwork was born from the moment I quit my job without a plan, scared and certain simultaneously, knowing only that I could not keep surviving inside systems that asked me to betray myself daily.
I didn’t know then that I was walking in someone else’s words. But I was.
Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, founding mother of womanist theology and one of the most important Black women intellectuals of the 20th century, named the mandate long before I needed it. Her call was for moral agency and sacred purpose in the face of dehumanizing systems: to pursue the work your soul must have, as a theological and ethical imperative. A refusal to let oppression dictate the terms of your becoming.
That refusal is at the root of Soulwork.
Soulwork is how I keep returning to that call. It is the framework I built out of theory and testimony, and the intellectual tradition of Black women who have always made a way out of no way.
ii. the lineage
Soulwork did not come from nowhere. It has mothers.
It comes from Audre Lorde, who insisted that the erotic is a source of power and self-authorization, rather than a horny distraction from serious work. Who taught us that poetry is not a luxury. Who showed us, in her own biomythography, that a Black woman’s life is a legitimate site of world-making knowledge.
It comes from Patricia Hill Collins, who named the matrix of domination: the argument that race, class, gender, and sexuality do not operate as separate systems of oppression but as interlocking ones, producing a structure that Black women occupy at multiple pressure points simultaneously. Collins argued that Black women’s location within this matrix gives them a view of how power actually works that no single-axis analysis can produce, and that centering that knowledge is a methodological commitment to getting closer to the truth about all of our lives.
It comes from the Combahee River Collective, who wrote in 1977 that if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, because Black women’s freedom requires the dismantling of every interlocking system of oppression simultaneously.
It comes from Howard Thurman, who built a theology for people with their backs against the wall and asked what the gospel means to those who live under systems of terror. Who named the “inward sea”: the deepest self that cannot be colonized, that persists beneath everything the world has done to you.
It comes from Katie Geneva Cannon, who argued that Black women’s moral wisdom, the ethical knowledge forged in the land of counterpain under conditions of chronic suffering and forced endurance, is not a lesser ethics but a more complete one. That surviving with integrity intact is itself a form of moral theory.
Soulwork stands in this lineage. It extends it. And it insists, as all of these thinkers insist in their own registers, that the place the world has treated as a site of maximum extraction is also, precisely because of what it has survived, a site of maximum knowledge. Soulwork reorients the question of who knows, from where, and toward what end.
iii. the problem
To understand what Soulwork is responding to, you have to understand what has been done to Black labor, and specifically to the labor of Black women and people of marginalized genders, in this country and in this economy.
Soulwork’s political framework begins with a simple and devastating claim: the entire structure of capitalism as we know it was built on the foundation of Black enslavement. Not alongside it. Not before it. On top of it. It is only because the slave defines absolute unfreedom, the condition of one whose labor cannot be self-owned, whose body is property, whose personhood is categorically denied, that the worker can be legible as a subject who freely sells their labor. Freedom, in this framework, is not a universal condition that slavery interrupted. It is a relative category whose meaning depends on the slave’s existence as its absolute limit.
This regime, what Soulwork calls the Racial Capitalist Labor Regime, has never ended. It has modified its mechanisms while preserving its essential logic: that the Black subject can be defined, managed, and discarded as non-human when the economy requires it. From chattel slavery through Reconstruction’s betrayal, through the sharecropping system and the Great Migration, through deindustrialization and mass incarceration, through welfare reform and the gig economy, the same founding claim persists: that Blackness marks a being whose labor, body, and interiority are available for use without remainder.
And this regime is gendered from its foundation.
Black women and people of marginalized genders have been conscripted into every form of labor this regime has required, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, cultural, reproductive, or communal. We have cooked the food, raised the children, managed the emotions, absorbed the violence, sustained the communities, and produced the intellectual and spiritual frameworks that have kept Black people alive and oriented toward freedom across centuries of organized assault.
And we have done all of this while being told, by the dominant culture and sometimes by our own communities, that our interiority does not count. That our knowledge is not knowledge. That our suffering is not suffering. That our calling is to give, not to become.
But here is what the regime did not account for: that surviving all of that, with your soul intact, makes you an expert. That being conscripted into every form of labor gives you a knowledge of labor, of what labor does to a person and what it could be instead, that no one else has. Soulwork’s argument is that this specific social location makes Black women and people of marginalized genders uniquely positioned to lead the charge toward vocation. Toward labor that makes us more free.
iv. the five pillars
Soulwork is organized around five pillars:
1. Vocation: The Soul’s Relationship to Labor
We distinguish between labor (energy expended), work (labor organized for capital), and vocation. Vocation is labor that makes us more free; it is oriented toward human flourishing rather than profit. We ask: Are you doing the work your soul must have? Or are you just doing some shit?
2. Wisdom: Ancestral, Embodied, and Experiential Knowing
Wisdom travels in recipes, proverbs, and voice notes as much as in books. Soulwork democratizes authorship, centering community elders as co-theorists. We remember, and in remembering, we decolonize knowledge.
3. Community: Relational Knowledge Practices
Knowledge is co-produced and sustained through collective bonds. In Soulwork, we are validated through relational accountability. We don’t heal alone, and we don’t work alone.
4. Advocacy: Translating Insight into Change
Advocacy grounds Soulwork in political struggle and manifests in naming, resisting, and transforming oppressive labor conditions. This is the site where Soulwork becomes praxis.
5. Self-Care: A Restorationist Mandate
Self-care is not a consumer category or a spa day. It is the womanist imperative to tend to the whole self. Ritual, celebration, and joy are ways of knowing who we are beneath what the regime has made of us.
v. the invitation
This framework is for those who have given everything to institutions that gave back less than they took. For those who are brilliant and exhausted simultaneously. For those who know that the work they are doing is not the work they were made for.
What Soulwork offers is a framework rigorous enough to name what is happening and grounded enough to sustain the work of transformation. It offers a lineage, a reminder that you are not the first person to have tried to survive with your soul intact, and that the people who came before you left maps.
Soulwork does not promise ease. The extraction is structural, not a personal failure. It is made by Black women and people of marginalized genders, for us first. Like womanism, it is not exclusive, but it carries two conditions for those who enter:that you cite the source, and that you acknowledge what that source is.
The knowledge here was produced in a social location the world has treated as a site of maximum extraction. To use it without naming that is to participate in the very regime Soulwork is working to dismantle.
Do the work your soul must have.
That is the whole of it.
Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!
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Amazing work. I would love to talk about this with you as it pertains to my work as a chaplain educator.
the betrayal by institutions. My God today.