Greetings Friends - This month’s Healing Conversation is with Crystallee Crain, whose activism focuses primarily on peacebuilding and violence prevention. She’s someone who has taken some of her own deepest wounds and turned them into the “medicine” that she she offers to others.
Dr. Crystallee Crain sees healing as a revolutionary strategy for change. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator, with academic roots in sociology, political science, and psychology, and she is a longtime human rights activist. I first met Crystallee in 2009, at a Stop the Violence street vigil she organized in downtown Oakland. She had just started as coordinator of the newly launched Heal the Streets program at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and was a doctoral student in Transformative Leadership at the California Institute for Integral Studies. Whether through grassroots organizations or as a professor in college classrooms, Crystallee consistently bridges the worlds of activism and academia.
A survivor of violence, much of Crystallee’s work has centered on violence prevention, seeking to address the root causes of community, domestic, and State violence. In 2011 she founded Prevention at the Intersections, offering training and capacity building for front line service providers who work to prevent hate-based violence.
Crystallee explains, “My activism is not to destroy, but to regenerate. I teach people how to love each other better. On individual levels, yes, but mostly organizationally and within movements. In my violence prevention work, there's been research, there's been programs, and trainings and courses, but there's also been processes like the Oakland Listening Sessions. In these community forums, we were trying to show folks that they're in the driver's seat of the changes they want to see locally, and to provide space where personal agency can be become the norm. We don’t have to look to our leaders to be the ones that give us the answers. We have them, if we just ask ourselves and one another, talk to one another, engage with one another so that solutions can be found. A lot of my work is solution focused, bringing participatory approaches to the problems that we face, and making sure that directly impacted people are guiding that work.”
I ask how she sees the relationship between healing and justice, and she pauses before answering. “This is complicated for me,” she says. “Justice is not guaranteed. I don't believe it's as attainable and as possible as healing. I believe that we can create just experiences for ourselves, but most of us do not experience justice. Our current 21st century understanding of justice is systems based. And punitive. And abusive by nature. So, it’s complicated for me.
“I've been working with survivors of violence for a number of years. I myself am a survivor. Justice looks different for people with that kind of acute physical injury. Some people need someone to – quote, unquote – ‘pay’ for the harm they caused. That payment can look a number of different ways. For me, I don't want incarceration to be a part of the justice that I get from anyone who's harmed me. But if I take certain actions, then that is an inevitable result. Is that going to give me the healing I want? No. Right? It won't. Can I get healing without justice? Yeah. Most definitely… I know that no matter what happens to us, on some level, we can grow. We can heal ourselves. We're in charge of ourselves, and having that agency motivates me. It gives me hope.”
She notes how often people may get “justice” within the punitive State system, but they don’t get healing. With this in mind, about ten years ago, Crystallee wrote a letter to the adult children of the man her father had murdered when she was a sophomore in high school. “And they were so grateful,” she recalls. “At first, I was really nervous. I was like – Oh, my goodness, what am I doing? But something in my heart felt like I needed to do it. Because they got justice, but they didn't have healing. And I wanted to offer – somebody in our family had to say something to them. These kids are my age. I'm like, if no one's going to say it – and I knew my father wasn't – then I am. So I did. Because even then I must have known that just because there is a punitive outcome – the bad guy went away – is that healing? I don't believe so.”
That commitment to healing is what led to Crystallee’s latest venture, The Everly Collective, based in her hometown of Flynt, Michigan. The day we spoke, she had just received the keys for a three-story building to house this community-based wellness, arts, and social justice innovation hub. She says, “it's a space for movement work, but also respite. And we are a healing justice center focused on social innovation and looking at health equity from a movement perspective. We’re seven or eight months old at this point, and it's been a wonderful experience. First, because this is my hometown. And it's always been something, maybe not this particular kind of concoction of ideas, but I always knew that Flint was with me, and I couldn't not do something that was going to build an institution for the people. So ideally, within the next five years, this place will be completely community owned, and run.”
The vision for the center includes space for community workshops and gatherings, an art studio, offices for allied healing practitioners, and housing for artists in residence.
Given the longevity of her movement work, I ask Crystallee what wisdom she would share with folks newer to activism that she wishes she had known earlier, or that might be helpful to them. She smiles, “it's something I learned from you. As you know, I am very emotionally impacted by everything. I mean, I can barely watch the news. I can I can handle Democracy Now headlines, but there's certain things that I just can't expose myself to. I used to feel like it was my duty to do so, not taking care of the fact that, as a directly impacted person, I might have different triggers than other people. So, it’s okay to set boundaries. Also, it’s okay to be angry. I'm still angry. It’s a natural response. But how we use that anger is important – not to turn it inwards. I remember I would feel so guilty when I didn't make it to an Occupy event. I was so busy and I was still bringing my students to the protests every week. I ran myself ragged… I just felt like I had to.”
“So, what sustains you?” I ask. “Love,” she replies, without hesitation. “I have a lot of love in my life. And I cherish it. One of the greatest things, I think, that came out of the time of covid was my closeness to my niece and nephew. My nine-year-old best friends. Also, I'm taking care of my body. I have chronic pain and taking care of my health makes me feel like I have some level of control over my life. And, like, some understanding of what's coming next. Because in all areas we don't, and that can cause anxiety – which is something that I used to suffer from greatly, but don't anymore. And then, something else that I've been doing are these amazing brain synchronization sound meditations. I literally feel it in my toes when I do it. And things just open up, like you can feel your brain synapses opening up, and I just absolutely love it.”
Since covid, she has also participated a number of online meditation circles. She explains, “If not every month, then every other month, I'm tapping into a group that I'm seeing consistently. Sometimes it'd be cohorts that meet three times a week for a certain amount of time, so I can build those kinds of communities, and have accountability partners.”
Crystallee goes on to share a practice that she’s developed where she builds life affirming statements into her login passwords, so that every time she types a password she is reinforcing healing and self-love. One affirmation that she uses as a mantra is: “I am beautiful. I am strong. I am capable. I am kind, and I am loved.” Another life-giving strategy that she relies on is creative expression. Crystallee is an artist and poet. Her debut performance poem “I Am She” gives expression to the shadows and bright spots of her experience.
As we begin to wrap up our time together, I ask Crystallee about the vision she is working toward. She lifts up things like collective liberation and interdependence, but then gets more specific. “What I feel like I'm building with The Everly Collective here in Flint is this idea that we need ourselves and one another equally. I believe in the power of partnership as an integral part to our ability to thrive under conditions of oppression, and under unhealthy systems that limit our well-being.”
She continues, “I also have a vision where I would love to see a school year in any urban center, anywhere, really, but any urban center, where there's no gun violence… I imagine a world where we all have bodily autonomy. So we wouldn't have to defend ourselves, we wouldn't have to advocate for ourselves to get health care access, we wouldn't have to, you know, beg to be seen. And I would like a borderless world. I identify as a global citizen. I say I sleep in Flint, but I live in the world. And that makes me responsible for the world that I live in, and not just my zip code. It’s a different orientation. But it's the truest one. So when I think about what I'm working for, it’s to get people to a place where those aren't radical ideas. And I'm well aware that the world that I envision is not a world that I may see in my lifetime. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to keep working for it.”
Crystallee concludes, “anything that ever changed, is because human beings made decisions. I'm a motivator for other people to make better decisions. I know that. So I'm going to keep doing it. Because it's working. I mean, better decisions heal hearts. Better decisions get people housed, and fed, and loved. And I'm a part of that.”
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To learn more about Crystallee’s work visit:
Crystallee’s website: http://www.crystalleecrain.org
The Everly Collective: http://www.theeverlycollective.org
Prevention at the Intersections: http://www.preventionagenda.org
The Everly Collective montage:
Thank you for creating this gorgeous profile.
The letter she sent to the children her father had killed especially struck me. What a powerful example of healing outside the limited confines of justice.
This is such an inspiring story of taking the initiative to create healing. Also, I love the idea that healing can happen even in the absence of justice, and we all have the opportunity to create that for ourselves internally regardless of the circumstances in the outside world.