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It seems counterintuitive: rest as a radical act, a vehicle for educational and social change and racial healing. Yet the connection became real to Shawn Ginwright, a Harvard professor, community organizer, and social activist, one sleepless night back in 2001.
“I was teaching at Santa Clara University” in California, and his wife, Nedra, had just given birth to their daughter, he said. At the same time, “I was the executive director of a nonprofit in Oakland and constantly raising money, and I was leading a series of youth organizing sessions with young people.”
Ginwright thought he could power through the increasingly heavy workload. But he couldn’t outrun the run-and-gun pressure he’d piled on himself.
“I woke up in a sweat, and I just couldn’t sleep,” Ginwright said in a recent interview with Ed., a journal of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. “I was so stressed and worried about failing to raise money, not being good enough at teaching, and, most importantly, not being there for my daughter. I walked into the living room and broke down crying.”
He tried to suppress it — “One voice, the strong baritone Black man, stood up and said, ‘Hey you a grown ass man. Suck it up and keep it moving’” — but tears erupted into full-on, “snotty-nosed” sobs. But then, said Ginwright, whose work focuses on poverty, underserved Black youth, and healing racial trauma, “another voice, one that I’d really never heard before, said, ‘It’s OK, man — you are so hard on yourself. Just let go of all this shit you’ve been carrying.’”
His wife heard him, consoled him, and the couple talked. It became clear “that I needed to make a different choice about how I wanted to live,” he said. “I remember reading somewhere this quote: ‘I choose peace of mind, instead of this.’”
With that, Ginwright decided to incorporate rest in a busy routine — not an easy task, given the many different hats he wears in his professional life.
In addition to research and teaching at Harvard, Ginwright is founder of Flourish Agenda, a California-based nonprofit centered on teaching trauma-informed classroom strategies that can help Black youths cope with poverty, violence, and systemic racism. He also runs Camp Akili, designed to build connections among youth of color and help them better understand and deal with their own mental health challenges.
For example, surveys show a disproportionate number of Black students say they’ve had at least three adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, growing up. Those experiences include witnessing or dealing with poverty, violence, or abuse at home.
ACEs, meanwhile, can affect how teachers teach, how children learn, and whether classrooms are disciplined. Studies show children with three or more ACEs are far more likely to have attendance and behavior issues — and suffer academic failure — than their peers.
Reversing those trends is an element of Ginwright’s grand vision: bringing mental health care to young people. His concept is to meet Black and brown youths where they are so that conversations about emotional well-being can happen anywhere — on basketball courts, in beauty salons, or barber shop chairs.
63% of Black teachers reported experiencing burnout, compared to 55% of white teachers.
Too often, people involved in social justice movements, healing racial trauma, or teaching, often neglect their own well-being for the greater good, Ginwright says. “They are expected to grind and burn their way through the challenges. This is particularly the case for social educators, who assume that there is not much time for their own rest because there is so much suffering and injustice in our schools.”
According to the RAND Corporation’s 2023 State of the American Teacher survey, some 63% of Black teachers reported experiencing burnout, compared to 55% of white teachers. Perhaps more disturbing: since the 2022 survey, the burnout rate has increased among Black teachers and decreased for white teachers.
For Black teachers, rest may seem elusive, but Ginwright argues it should be a priority for anyone dedicated to advancing racial equity and inclusion — in or out of a classroom.
Rest “allows us to take stock of what’s going on inside and shatters the myth that the only real social justice work happens outside of us,” Ginwright said. “Rest forces us to reconcile the close relationship between our inner journey and how we show up in the world on the outside.”
Ginwright also insists that rest can be a revolutionary act by upending a bedrock principle of both capitalism and racism.
Equating rest with weakness “has a long history in America, and it is still deeply rooted in white supremacist capitalist culture that views work, labor, and productivity as the bedrock of a healthy economy,” he said. “People of color, in the minds of white America, have primarily been seen as labor to exploit. Rest and leisure are reserved for the white folk who supposedly earned the luxury to rest.”
But for people of color, rest “has to be earned first by demonstrating unquestioned loyalty and dedication to work, sweat, and toil,” Ginwright says. “Slave labor is just one of many examples of how the idea of rest as weakness permeates our society. This also applies to Mexican farm workers in the Central Valley of California and the Chinese whose labor created the intercontinental rail system.”
Experts also believe rest can be an act of racial healing. Because racism inflicts trauma on our bodies, the argument goes, any effort to heal racism begins with healing our bodies; therefore, rest is a form of inoculation against the virus of racism, and healing through rest can have a ripple effect in our communities.
Ginwright concurs.
“When we understand how rest inequality is systemic and historical, we can create new policies, practices, and programs that encourage and support our need for rest and leisure,” he says. “We collectively free ourselves from the impact of white supremacist capitalist culture when we center rest in our personal and professional lives.”
