Richmond, Virginia, as an epicentre of racialised violence in the United States, carries an outsized burden of responsibility for leading a national effort toward racial and economic healing. Richmond’s generational trauma remains embodied in public policy and the psyches of dislocated descendants. These policies were originally rooted in a colonial worldview that exaggerates and fabricates biological determinants for social categories like race, gender, and age. This paper examines the transformative potential of a Collective Healing Circle practice to explore how biologically contrived social categorisation impedes spatial justice, gender equity, and racial healing.
Richmond’s intergenerational dialogue, beginning with race-focused Collective Healing Circles, continued in new form through Youth Leadership Program research in partnership with a focus group of central and south-eastern Virginia youth and young adults. An impending overhaul of Richmond’s land-use policy has presented another fertile opportunity for intergenerational engagement in the public sphere. This paper draws from Richmond’s Collective Healing Circles, youth researcher perspective, and proposed zoning district survey as its core wells of data which, together, expose connections between Richmond’s racial history and persisting intergenerational tensions, particularly concerning spatial and economic justice.
Young Virginians’ struggle for access in shaping our own futures indicates marginalisation not only along racial or gender lines, but age also. Recognising youth and young adults as a marginalised identity allows the braided threads of these stories to foreground the consistencies in colonial worldviews that determine social status by race, gender, and age. The interrelated nature of these forms of social classing reveals the demand for intergenerational dialogue as a necessary component of our social change-making strategies.
