Rest is the opposite of capitalism's "grind culture," which only values people for their production output. This system exhausts people to the point of collapse. Without rest, there is no capacity for resistance nor dreaming of a better world.
According to the mission of The Nap Ministry, the folks at the forefront of nap activism, this work seeks to "honor, reimagine, and recapture the dream space that was stolen for centuries."
The "nap gap" is real: Black folks & other people of color are more likely to have sleep issues than white people due to the stress of racial oppression. This intersection with other forms of inequality leads to both physical and mental health disparities as well as decreased productivity at work (which factors into income inequality!) Self-care is a necessity for all oppressed folks who are healing from intergenerational Trauma--Black women especially.
Did You Know?
The concept of "zombies" as we know it can be traced back to the lore of enslaved folks in 17th-century Haiti (then saint-domingue). The majority of the Slaves brought into the french colony from Africa were worked to death within a few years. A very scary idea for an enslaved person was zombiehood--no agency over their own bodies, even in the afterlife.
Rest is not something you must earn. Napping is a political act in a society that values its inhabitants for our productivity and capacity for overwork. What privileged few are allowed to rest, and who chooses?
The well-documented racial sleep gap "shows that Black Americans are five times more likely to be sleep-deprived than their white counterparts (1)." This is about more than just sleep. The nap revolution, led by theologist Tricia Hersey, has roots in slavery when more slaves were whipped for oversleep than anything else (2). In Haiti, zombie lore permeated the culture of enslaved people for whom death was the only escape from the brutal horror of slavery on sugar plantations.
The Importance of Self Care
Self care and rest are cornerstones of revolution; without it, martyrdom will consume you. Dealing with oppressive authorities can feel crushing, witnessing the people around us stay disenfranchised and under-resourced and disregarded, explicitly excluded from growth and prosperity. To combat this, we must take action in our own lives, our own communities, for our own health.
Self care is about more than just bubble baths and long sunset walks. Self care, especially for women of color, necessitates the decolonization of our minds. To truly care for ourselves, we must process and then destroy the concept of ourselves that was created and limited by the white supremacist patriarchy in which we live. This might look like finally accepting all of your emotions as valid, even the ones that correlate with stereotypes (e.g. Angry Black Woman). It's okay to be angry—in fact, it is only right to be angry in the wake of injustice. It is self care to make Good Trouble.
Self care comes from systemic nurturing, not individual boot-strapping. We may feel so disempowered that we feel that nothing will ever change, but that's not true. We cannot control other people, but we can change and grow ourselves and our communities and our cultures in collaboration with our allies. To do this, we must decolonize our minds..
To survive white supremacy, we must cultivate safe spaces to heal intergenerational trauma, whether those spaces be in a journal or in a race caucus at work. Self care is surviving the systems we've been thrown into, like roses growing through concrete until we can break through and thrive in the sun.
Nap Activism
Rest is the opposite of capitalism's "grind culture," which only values people for their production output. This system exhausts people to the point of collapse. Without rest, there is no capacity for resistance nor dreaming of a better world.
According to the mission of The Nap Ministry, the folks at the forefront of nap activism, this work seeks to "honor, reimagine, and recapture the dream space that was stolen for centuries."
The "nap gap" is real: Black folks & other people of color are more likely to have sleep issues than white people due to the stress of racial oppression.
This intersection with other forms of inequality leads to gaps in both physical and mental health as well as decreased productivity at work (which factors into income inequality!)
Self-care is a necessity for all oppressed folks who are healing from intergenerational Trauma--Black women especially.
