A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill
▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube
Dr Joy DeGruy speaks from a place of profound personal and intellectual honesty about what it means to grow up Black in America — proud of one’s heritage and yet daily confronted with the dissonance between the ideals of equality and the lived reality of structural dehumanisation. Her academic work, she explains, did not come from her four degrees; it came from the recognition that she had never been taught about her own people, their contributions or their suffering.
The conversation traces the concept of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome — the intergenerational transmission of trauma from centuries of American chattel slavery — and the way unhealed historical wounds become encoded in behaviour, self-perception and community life. Crucially, Dr DeGruy insists that healing is not about guilt: it is about recognition, agency and working together. When people know better, they tend to do better.
She reflects on the African concept of “I see you” — a gesture of acknowledgement, belonging and love that speaks directly to the wound of invisibility — and on the radical ethics of love she places at the centre of the path to social transformation. Love, she argues, in combination with truth, destroys the lie on which systems of oppression depend.
As Scherto observes in their exchange, love is a movement, an action, that shortens the distance between people — the relational starting point for healing. And healing, Dr DeGruy is clear, begins with each of us: your scope of power starts with you.
This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).