Welcome! Thank you for your help with the launch! The goal of this page is to provide you with information, graphics, and content for you to share on your social media platforms. Please contact us with any questions you have. Our social media manager Allie Noble can be reached at anoble@ivpress.com.
Hashtag, Links to Purchase, Tagging
- Hashtag: #PermissionToBeBlack
- Launch date: February 23, 2021
- Links:
Header Graphics
...
Coming Soon Graphics
Quote Graphics
Endorsement Graphics
Blank Graphics
Launch Graphics
Free Chapter Graphics
Quotes
“Jay-Z gave words to my pains that my body knew I had but my mouth could not put into words.”
“We need the soul-searching power of God’s Spirit to flow through his people to value our lives or we won’t make it. We, Black men and women, need the permission to be Black, permission never granted to us in light of of America’s history.”
“I am writing this book to redefine Blackness and establish a new “Black card”, so to speak. Carriers of this card will no longer be ashamed of admitting that past traumas have hurt them. They will embrace the truth that it is healthy to learn how to understand trauma and heal from it.”
“(God) gives us permission to be fully human-physically, mentally, and spiritually. He gives us permission to be fully who he made us to be as people of the African diaspora with glorious “Black” skin. God gives us permission to be vulnerable. Permission to be whole. Permission to be Black.”
“What I learned from living as a Black man in Detroit is you are not allowed to say you are struggling with inner turmoil.”
“What is normal and embedded in the Black identity is the existence of holistic terrorizing trauma.”
“You have the permission not to pretend anymore.”
“The tendency I have experienced within the Black community is to internalize the distressing and disturbing physical, sexual and emotional abuse we or our loved ones have experienced or witnessed. Because of legislated limits on our humanity throughout American history, we must grieve the fact that what we’ve called normal was a traumatizing existence.”
“We need to acknowledge and address the painful fact that we (Black community) have been targeted by society in a way that has silenced us, paralyzed us, and prevented us from processing the holistic nature of who we are for over four hundred years. We address it by saying, ‘No more,’ by acknowledging that although society is not tilted in favor of the Black community, we can live free and healed.”
“There is hope that our past does not predict our future.”
“The lenses traumas give you are wounds, emotional and mental hurts, and you see everything through them. Understand, if these wounds are not healed, your body internalizes them and your loved ones--despite your well intentioned motives--will pay for it because you have not learned to say the most significant three-word phrase there is: That hurt me.”
“Throughout history, the Black experience has meant engaging in the practice of killing our emotions. This goes against God’s design for us as people.”
“Blackness redefined means we refuse to be different from our authentic selves or to convey an emotion differently from what we intuitively know to be true and are designed to express.”
“Blackness redefined rejects the ‘traditional’ belief that we must conceal and edit pieces of ourselves for acceptance and progression.”
“Blackness in America is defined by who can endure the most pain without processing and admitting that it hurts.”
“You have the permission to hope, to be Black and truly hope.”
“Our Blackness was rooted in rules of old that kept our people in bondage and kept us silent as we were just trying to stay alive. But we accepted what we were told about ourselves. It was a type of animal conditioning that now needs to be broken. There is so much more we need to break to set others free.”
“I hope this book pushes Black folks into an awareness that what has been called Blackness in a traditional sense is not God’s best for us.”