The Journal: A Legacy for Black Women
It’s 2026, the proclaimed “year of the analog” and here we are: Black women anticipating our next journal purchase to add to our journal ecosystems, exchanging pen recommendations and jumping head first into the journaling practice. The motive ranges from content creation to self care to resistance to the erasure of Black history in the present US administration/ moment in history.
No matter the journal/notebook chosen, I celebrate any reason a Black woman procures a blank book to write herself. But for those of us who sense an urgency to keep journals but don’t know where to begin, I wanted to produce a list of imperatives that would encourage you to keep a journal beyond the joy of furnishing the habit with delightful stationery products, and beyond the diluted reasoning that pervades social media spaces and communicated by influencers whose journaling practice is a vestigial expression of capitalism, is void of conviction and is overall “for the gram”. Journaling is about documenting ourselves in our own voice, but it’s also about separation from the noise of violent systems and ideas so as to become who we are destined to be. Journaling is about agency and AUTHORity: It’s your choice to arrive to take your place by identifying what hurts and hinders so as to accept ideas, conduct and declarations that will cause you to sojourn in wisdom and Truth. No other human being can cause you to break the brainwashing that’s influenced you wherever you are; the congenital frameworks that lens your worldview and ideologies. YOU make the ultimate decisions to notice what must be broken, shifted and denounced in your life; YOU notice the lies in argument with the truth of your being seeking to be born through you, and YOU choose to change into your true form so that you can handle the glorious.
Journaling is apprehending the instances in life where the Divine is leading you from shift to shift, understanding to understanding. It’s honing a keen ear for the Creator’s spontaneous lessons on how to be who you are. It’s ancient and futurist. It’s the incubation of release and accepting how you must change. It’s learning to identify revelation and proverb. It’s practicing your voice on paper so it can be fearless in speaking. It’s chronicling the instances in life where you are being made, shaped, honed and challenged to become. If your journaling practice does not cause you to cease being a useful tool to violent systems, then you’re doing it wrong. I said what I said.
Why Black Women Should
Keep a Journal (2026)
Journaling is chronicling our becoming, realizing and understanding.
You are stepping into your legacy. There’s an entire lineage of Black women diarists into whose continuum you are stepping when you begin to journal. No matter who you are, the journaling practice lets every Black know that with the journal and pen we have a mother. In the journals of Black women diarists we have a literary “genetic code” that shows us whose journals to which our own entries are perhaps “related”. Or it could vary over the course of your life. There are days when you might write through hard times and lesser resources like Carolina Maria de Jesus or like Nanct Elizabeth Prophet. Other days you might feel the adventurous spirit of Juanita Harrison course through your pen onto your pages. And should you carry a baby maybe ancestor Laura Hamilton Murray is with you as you are documenting the sojourn and marriage while carrying a life. Or maybe your documentations of life, work, friendships and other relationships while dealing in the waves of change, achievement and yes, racism aligns you with Alice Walker’s journals as a matriarch in diarist literature. Whoever the case, journaling tells Black women that we are NOT MOTHERLESS.
Journaling is how we preserve the indictment. As Black women we are flanked by violence of all forms and it’s on us to journal the indictment of this violence instead of internalizing it. Indictment is naming, framing and understanding of reverberations of violence in the future to denounce it in the present. To indict one must know history, cause and effect and bel able to identify good versus evil in all of their deceptive forms. The journal is where we chronicle learning these lessons in our everyday lives. Everyday you are getting a lesson in identifying what you thought was good that is really evil. What you thought was right which is truly wrong. Agents you thought were of light but who are really agents of darkness. It’s not always easy but the sojourn—as lead by the Divine— strengthens us in indictment by showing us who the criminals are.
And this is why it’s important that you are ruthless in your intolerance for every form of violence: any sympathy you have for abusers, users, manipulation, etc. will hinder you from journaling the indictments you must preserve. You must learn how to become intolerant of what the design of Western systems teaches you to tolerate with media brainwashing and rewarding of white violence, Black cultural defectors and perversion framed as mediocrity. You need to learn the costumes of evil and the propaganda that gives you affection for that which is ultimately perverse, vile, disfiguring, and ancestrally irreverent.
If you don’t know what or who is violent/wrong/diabolical/egregious then how will you document indictments? If you have an admiration for perverse, violent, lying, scheming, manipulating individuals and soul-breaking systems then how will your journals preserve indictment?Journaling initiates us as a living witness. Living witnesses are those who see what happened, record the truth as they witnessed it, and preserve their testimonies so that when the time comes for them to speak, their words identify those who are evil and what such evil people do in the dark. Living witness testimonies expose the violent ones, name the violence, delineate the crimes committed, and fearlessly denounce wickedness. Initiation to be a witness requires knowing how to identify truth. We learn this along the journey, and keep the chronicles in our journals.
Journaling reinforces our importance to history. We are a continuation of the ancestors, and our presence in these times as descendants of a powerful, resilient, and indefatigable people is no less than significant. When we write in our journals we are preserving our times in our voice; keeping the intuitive chapters of our lives for our future selves— and future generations.
Journaling is warfare. It wages war against erasure of Black history and Black peoples. Journaling is warfare against the psychological warfare of racism’s apartheid violence. It is warfare against demonic powers that are at work to thwart your purpose and cause you to hesitate with mandate. Containing our outpour, the journal helps us determine our conduct and ascertain how we might conduct ourselves along our sojourn. And in the warfare of journaling we are introduced to our weapons, to the instruments available to us through the power of memory and imagination that equip us to decline the invitations to sell our birthright, shut down diabolical arguments with our
The Journal is where you NAME NAMES. In a world that calls things everything but what they are, the journal is where you can break the gaslighting imposed by apartheid systems. Within these systems of violence it is is a criminal act to call violence by its name. So when you come to the journal you are naming what your white colleagues call “weird” as violent. You’re calling what your workplace calls “training” TORTURE. You’re calling that passing comment deemed as “innocence” CRUELTY. This practice is what guards you from lies and keeps you from participating in telling those lies to the future generations.
Journaling facilitates deprogramming. There is no meaningful sojourn without change, and a key element of change as a Black woman is deciding to deprogram from faulty, infectious, maligning, hindering beliefs, hypnoses and spells that have been installed into us in this western system. The journey of deprogramming is difficult and takes TIME— I repeat, it takes TIME. There’s discovery, grief, rage, and then realisation. Deprogramming is intense and mandates documentation because who you are is actively changing from moment to moment, day to day due to being available to lessons teaching you what is that should not be and what you’ve always done that has been rooted in lies all along. It’s where you finally have the strength to question what you’ve been told is cemented as truth and to topple such things into their rightful place so that you can take yours. If you’ve seen Harry Potter (I watched it for the first time this past week), deprogramming is your Hogwarts: that’s where you learn what you aren’t so that you can learn your magic, love.
You must document the changing of your mind and the abandoning of being one woman to transform into another through the deliberate, intentional shifting of understanding and renouncing of old ways. This is where your power comes to you, where you are introduced to your mandate as a sojourner— because mandate can’t reveal itself to you as long as you are under the hypnosis that enables you to do the bidding of those who hate you. The brainwashing required to participate in capitalism with involuntary disregard for the daily theft, violence, injustice and exploitation is part of being here— and it’s what we must interrogate and BREAK so that we can see things as they really are, exposing the conspiracies against or lives and becoming the weaponry against that which is weaponised to keep us in a state of diminished, hyper-entertained, numb, consumerist addicts.
You owe it to your future self to journal the arrival and the dawning of your clarity as a sojourner who’s significant to your era.
I hope these points I’ve made give you the clarity to write in your journal from a place of resolution, cultural effectiveness, Divine and ancestral call and response. I implore you to keep your records because this is your legacy. Keeping our books is how we prevent the entrance and corruption of false gospels written to keep us under the control of their cursed ordinances. Deeper than Christianity, I am referencing the gospels that gave colonisers “good news” while constructing a hell you do and do not recognise.
Matriarchal duties include mothering those who are yet unborn in whatever capacity of mother or elder we have been called to operate in (because everyone might not have/ want to have children). Our job is to love ourselves generationally, and this means that we look into that which has hindered, intercepted, brainwashed, hurt, assassinated, violated etc. and we expose, expel and execute [kill] them in writing. We are called to search out matters; to break delusion by facing that which has sought to drown, denature and distract us with the sharp object that is the pen, warring against that which wants to remove our gaze from the truth, to soften our zeal with opiate side conversations, and to beckon us away from our paths with
We cannot build out of fear. We must build our archives from a place of love. Love envisions in expanse. Love imagines. Love kills the lies. Love records wrongs and imagines—leaving blueprints for such imaginations. Love causes you to enter into your right mind. Love is truth and testimonies. Love testifies to indict. Love isn’t just talk, it’s written proverbs and wisdom in action.
Love is Divine.
Books are love.
Keep your books.
