J Blakeson’s (2020) film I Care a Lot is about a power struggle between a white queer woman who is an executive con-artist, Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike), and a white disabled man who is a Russian mobster, Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage). Grayson and Lunyov are in a battle over who will determine the fate of Lunyov’s elderly mother. The film satirizes care as total corruption, using toxic white, bourgeois femininity to express a sinister and evasive form of domination. The premise of I Care a Lot assumes viewers will readily understand a connection between capitalism, state “weapons of mass care,” and interrelated sites of power–courtrooms, older adult living facilities, and psychiatric institutions. After one of her “guardianship” victims dies, Marla Grayson complains that Alan Levitt, a man she is court-appointed to care for, was too young to die with at least five more years of life left to exploit. She needs another isolated and vulnerable “client” to add to her portfolio of victims, people healthy enough to survive overmedication and institutionalization. Surrounded by complicit enablers and a booming elder care industry, Grayson is fraudulently appointed legal guardian over Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Weist), a 71-year-old woman living under her son Lunyov’s protection, using a fake name. Grayson has Peterson placed in a facility and begins selling her house and plundering her assets.

Under racial capitalism, white supremacist notions of goodness, protection, and care justify aggressive laws and a brutal economic system in order to make suffering profitable through the maintenance of harmful social conditions. Blakeson’s movie barely glimpses what happens to people at the bottom of this system; the viewer should know that long-standing economic policies and legalized predatory practices have already filled training rooms with eager caregivers and protectors busy sustaining corporate empires. Watching this film, I (third author) was reminded that pathologizing and victimizing narratives of Blackness and disability have served to benefit helping professions, including the arts therapies, where white women, as the predominant practitioners in the field, can become empowered actors within racist institutions and systems. Coincidentally, these systems are embedded with fantasy narratives of white femininity, which have historically played a role in constructing anti-Blackness in the US, while shaping the institutions that “take care” of or “civilize'' racialized others (Stoler, 1995; Ware, 1992). Meanwhile, the history, presence, and narratives of Black professionals, wage workers, and consumers in these systems are routinely dismissed. Lumpkin (2006) wrote:

At the height of racial justice uprisings in the U.S in 2020, visual narratives associating Blackness and prolonged suffering offered a protective buffer for mental health professions against a growing public critique of state violence (Gipson et al., 2020). Since it must be said that Black Lives Matter, it is also necessary to make other truths explicit. Black Lives Matter as a protest mantra gives voice to a Black queer feminist ethics of care and affective experiences of value. Black people—Black migrant communities, Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming communities, Black disabled communities, Black girls and women, Black cis men—find care for Black lives even when ideologies of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism promise to neglect and destroy Black life.

Authors in this issue make critical contributions to ethics discourse in the arts therapies, providing framework analyses for practices of care in turbulent and hostile environments in education, professional development, and community mental health services. They insist upon practices of care in Black daily life and mourning, using storytelling, creative writing, autobiographical reflection, commentaries, and arts-based research. Although preference for non-literary texts is an accepted bias in mental health academic journals, we recognize how power operates, not only in the politics of citation, but in the exclusion of Black creative and spiritual practices of knowledge production. Arts therapies literature lacks evidence of deep listening and responses to Black lived experience partly as a result of these norms in the academy. The authors who address concepts of care in this issue use their chosen genres of writing, already existing within Black aesthetic oral and literary traditions and academic disciplines that value holistic and textured engagement with Black lifeworlds. We read their writings as a means of undoing white aesthetics as modes of professionalization that function to ignore and erase the historical displacement of Black arts therapists and Black communities.

Leah Gipson, Marisol Norris, Leah Amaral, Johanna Tesfaye, and Anna Hiscox pose the question, “What are you all going to do to keep Black women in art therapy?” as an assertion of Black women’s agency to create safe and liberatory contexts for education. They begin with the significance of their collective participation in the 2018 Critical Pedagogy in the Arts Therapies Conference where Cliff Joseph spoke about the 1974 Art Therapy and the Third World panel (Joseph, 1974). The commentary offers a womanist manifesto for arts therapies education.

Leah Amaral and Johanna Tesfaye use a process of arts-based inquiry that embraces performance and sensory knowledge to address the politics of becoming an art therapist. In their creative essay, they describe a project based on a collective praxis of care and student activism during their time as art therapy graduate students. Reflecting on their experiences of Black personhood in professional and clinical spaces, Amaral and Tesfaye provide a range of emotional insights from co-creating BIPOC, sisterhood/sib spaces. They present their analysis using excerpts of poetry, dialogue, journal writing, and other documentary materials that were used to understand practices of community building.

Jasmine Edwards offers her experiences as a music therapist in the therapeutic performance Turbulence to describe the value of social identity affinity spaces and cross-disciplinary collaboration in the creative arts therapies that seriously grapple with race. She emphasizes placemaking, in particular supportive, culturally responsive, and justice-seeking environments, as vital to the professional development of BIPOC arts therapists. Relating personal meaning-making with relational dynamics that shaped her participation in the performance, Edwards cites the group’s support within womanist ethics of care.

Rochele Royster explores the therapeutic benefits of craft culture activism using a liberation approach to art therapy in her research study on grief of trauma caused by gun violence. She focuses on the role of school- and community-based responses to the violence that impacts young people living in historically segregated Black neighborhoods in Chicago. Upsetting pathologizing narratives of Black people and the myth of Black on Black crime, Royster highlights how children in Chicago Public Schools led a collective living-memorial project to provide care and craft culture activism in their communities.

Whoever writes the story regulates who gets written in and also who/what gets erased. Whoever writes the story controls how the narrative is told and driven. Whoever writes the story governs what gets taken in. Hierarchical assumptions assert that where work is written underscores the inherent value of the piece. Merriam-Webster (n.d.) defines authorship as: “(1) the profession of writing (2) the source (such as the author) of a piece of writing, music, or art.” The idea of authorship as inextricably tied to the written word is a notion steeped in and born from white supremacy. Black peoples have authored many ideas, theories, concepts, frameworks, creative works, and more that have been stolen, co-opted and expressed through the written word by white authors claiming the work as their own. Paradoxically, Black peoples’ theories, practices, and works are dismissed by professional and academic institutions because the works situate outside of white supremacist assumptions and expectations. For these reasons, spaces created by, with, and for Black authors are needed. I (second author) use the word author here in a disrupted sense; one wherein authorship is understood as expressed and communicated through multi-varied methods and modes. In this special issue, several Black authors explore, reveal, and disrupt notions of authorship; they have authored the stories they wish(ed) to read (Toni Morrison) and reflect.

In “Navigating US Citizenship and Colorism in the Dominican Republic: A Black Latinx Art Therapist’s Experience,” Johannil Napoleón addresses the need to decenter white narratives and experiences of power, privilege, and oppression. She notes that this predominant framing and understanding overshadows the needed discussion(s) regarding racial dynamics for BIPOC clinicians in the context of colorism.

In “Song as a Register for Black Feminist Theatre-Making Aesthetic,” Refiloe Lepere asserts the need for writing that centers Black registers. Lepere cites song and poetics as a site for connection and expression among Black women. Furthermore, she highlights the erasure of song, poetics, and Black women’s expressions in current understandings of knowledge production.

In “Tracks on Repeat: An Autoethnographic Poessay,” Britton Williams weaves a narrative connecting the personal, professional, maintenance, and social-cultural. She notes the inextricable connectedness of these domains and the importance of restorying oppressive narratives that seek to remain elusive so that they may remain undone.

Ownership in this issue speaks as much to Black people's validity as creators as it does white people's legacies as pillagers, plunderers, overseers, masters, and lords. This assertion recognizes enslavement and colonialism as a central apparatus by which Black people are treated as property and their creations as material goods. This assertion also comes to bear the contemporary utility of ideological tools of dehumanization that circumvent Black personhood and seek to impose our physical, psychological, and spiritual bondage (Norris, 2020b). As such, talks about Black ownership within the arts therapies amplify the ways coloniality continues to transgress upon Black bodies and possession as a source of legitimacy and power (Norris, 2020a; Thomas & Norris, 2021).

Black people are human beings, living subjects that hold personal and collective agency. We construct lifeworlds that index our ways of being and our active world-making. We have been subjected to theft–physical, epistemological, representational–and subjected to persistent attempts of dispossession. ¹ When Black lifeworlds are pillaged by non-Black people, they are often commodified as social power and professional economy intended to disproportionately benefit those in dominant positions. When Black people are plundered, their bodies are not their own. When Black people are overseen, they are subjected to the white colonial gaze and treated as property expected to act at will by threat of punishment. When Black people are mastered, their autonomy is subverted. When Black people are lorded by man, they are seen as extension–not self-possessed; they are solely expected to be vessels filled. When Black people's spirits are violently demonized only to be conjured and consumed, liberation must occur. White cultural dependence rests on a status of Black peoples as nonentity rather than the ability for white people to produce social heritage (Holland, 2000), self-control, labor, capital, and servitude. The delegitimization of Black people as knowers and creators serves to sustain white dominance and obfuscate white histories of physical, material, representational, and psychological violence. Black ownership as a political pursuit in the arts therapies centers the need to problematize the decontextualized histories of the arts therapies that have led to “vocational awe”²—the set of ideas, values, and assumptions about a profession and the people within it that result in beliefs that sites of labor as “institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique” (Ettarh, 2018, para. 3). This special issue centers the need to authorize the ownership and reclamation of ourselves.

Recognizing problematic formulations of healing, recovery, and salvation within the arts therapies, we cannot help but reimagine and call upon multiple voices to reexamine ideas of possession. The writers of this special issue grapple with the complexities of Black people across multiple spheres. Collectively, they help to articulate the intellectual, epistemological, and representational forms that have long been appropriated by the arts therapies. Black notions of ownership articulated in this issue oppose colonial constructions of empire commonly noted in the arts therapies professions' neoliberal capitalist pursuits. They reinstate the authority and legitimacy of Black people as knowers and creators–the realization of their humanity.

In “How Do You Play When You're Prey? A Personal Exploration into Black Creative Healing,” Natasha Thomas explores the collaborative world-making of the blog project “Black Creative Healing.” Through personal analysis, Thomas asserts ownership of African and African diasporic healing legacies and their reclamation as a means of interrogation, resistance, and care. Similarly, kei slaughter, in “Run River,” offers musical tribute to great great great great grandmother Nancy Maker Brown. slaughter evokes an ancestral memory that problematizes monolithic recounts of lineage and affirms the ownership of familial histories through sonic construction.

In an audio interview, Gipson and Norris discuss the origins of American musical traditions with singer, songwriter, and producer Adrian Dunn in “Black Lives Matter and The Black Messiah Album: An Interview with Adrian Dunn.” Together they critique attempts to exorcise Blackness from popular musical productions and affirm the complexity of Black creativity as a source of radical healing. In the corresponding review, Kennedi Johnson explores the album The Black Messiah by Adrian Dunn and the Adrian Dunn Singers. Johnson contextualizes the “Hopera” within the wake of Black death, grief, and protest in the United States and situates its musical orchestration within a tradition of liberatory struggle.

Rodney Simpson Jr., in “The Butterfly Blues,” stories the hostility of a cis-heteronormative world and the spiritual journey of owning his identity as a Black queer man. Simpson reveals the tensions of faith and embodiment through multimodal artistic expressions. Last but not least, esperanza spalding, in “Black Aesthetic/s as Divine Lover of No End In Sight: The Progenitors of World Altering Resiliency,” provides rhythmic prose that centers Black aesthetic world-making. spalding’s provocations call for the recognition of Black life and life-force as restorative, sensuous, and spiritual offerings. As such, spalding considers Black aesthetical alchemy as a progenitor of place, creation, ownership, and reclamation and an Afrofuturist path to liberation and healing.