A Space For Us, published by Beacon Press, is the first comprehensive guide for leading BIPOC affinity groups.

In answer to the few resources supporting facilitators leading this work, A Space For Us provides invaluable guidance for those committed to challenging white supremacy, healing racial trauma, and taking collective action.

Meeting in racial affinity groups is a common practice in anti-racist, social justice, diversity, and similar forms of educational endeavors.

These groups provide a structured space in which participants can explore how racism personally impacts them, process specific experiences of racism, receive validation and support from their peers, heal, and strategize next steps for challenging racism, white supremacy, and internalized racial oppression.

In A Space for Us, Michelle Cassandra Johnson brings her over 20 years of experience leading dismantling racism work to provide the first affinity groups guide made for BIPOC communities.

This essential guide will:

  • Provide an understanding of the racial hierarchy and how it has impacted Black, Indigenous, and People of Color differently.

  • Define and share common manifestations of internalized racial oppression.

  • Define anti-Blackness and provide skills to interrupt and address it.

  • Share rituals, practices, and sample agendas for affinity groups.

  • Explain when it is useful to meet as one BIPOC group and when it is useful to meet based on one’s specific racial identity.

  • Provide rituals and tools for healing in BIPOC affinity groups.

  • Provide information about how to come back together as BIPOC and white people to strategize and take collective action.

Comprehensive and accessible, A Space for Us offers practical guidance for facilitating effective BIPOC racial affinity groups and will be an important resource for BIPOC communities.

  • A Space for Us is a helpful introduction for bodies of culture seeking to facilitate affinity spaces for other bodies of culture in an inclusive, emergent, and trauma-informed way. Johnson provides tools, strategies, and practices for fostering the communal healing spaces that in turn ignite community action and liberation.

    Resmaa Menakem, best-selling author of My Grandmother's Hands & Monsters in Love

  • BIPOC affinity groups are powerful medicine, and facilitating them calls for skill, discernment and heart. I am grateful for this compassionate, nuanced examination of how BIPOC affinity groups can blossom as breathe-easy spaces of healing and power. Michelle Johnson generously shares a wealth of practices, stories, reflections, and questions that will shine light for both new and seasoned facilitators.

    Victoria Santos, Director, Center for Healing & Liberation

  • What an incredible body of work for Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color to center healing and restoration. Important. Vital. Right on time. A Space for Us is a beacon of light and love for those most directly affected by systemic racism who seek a way and place to heal, recover, and thrive. Read this book with your whole heart if you are ready for real, true liberation.

    Justin Michael Williams, author of Stay Woke: A Meditation Guide for the Rest of Us

  • Michelle Johnson has created a wonderful offering in the form of this book, providing extremely necessary guidance for BIPOC folx on how to facilitate and navigate caucus spaces - for us and by us - with the spirit of loving-awareness and fierce authentic compassion at its heart. A must-read for BIPOC facilitators and practitioners dedicated to furthering this type of healing work, for the benefit of all sentient beings.

    Dr. Sará King, CEO & Founder: MindHeart Collective

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I long for a world in which we all have what we need and where we don’t tear each other down as white supremacy works to tear us apart. I long for a world in which white-bodied individuals and communities risk everything to dismantle white supremacy and a world where we, as BIPOC people, can spend our time dreaming, resting, deep belly-laughing, singing, rejoicing, and sharing together in circle and ceremony. I believe in us, and as a facilitator of many groups, including BIPOC affinity groups, I believe in the power of what we can do as we hold space for and with one another.

Michelle Cassandra Johnson

Join Michelle & Stephanie Ghoston Paul for a special online series focused on how to lead Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Affinity Groups . The next series begins on January 27th!

A Space for Us: A Guide for Leading Black, Indigenous, & People of Color Affinity Groups

May we all be free. May we all find peace. May we all heal. May there always be a space for us. Asé. And so it is. It is so.