My dad was a Pentecostal preacher for a small Black denomination right outside Chicago—an elder and pastor in the Church of God in Christ. My mama went into labor while in Sunday school and, instead of rushing to the hospital for my delivery into the world, remained to get her lesson and worship a little while longer. From birth, I was incubated within this special place of Black autonomy, Black spirituality, Black community organizing and Black radical care.

I watched my dad preach sermons from the pulpit that imbued me with the knowledge that my Black body and divinity should not be bound by the violent thoughts of white supremacy. Within the four walls of the church, I experienced what freedom felt like. The people who surrounded me guided and uplifted my existence for what they knew God saw—a divine human being worthy of rest and care, simply because I was alive. My Blackness was not seen as a problem. In the words of James Cone, the father of Black liberation theology, “Blackness is God’s gift to humanity,” and therefore Black bodies become a sacred site of liberation.

This grounds the vision for the organization I founded in 2016, the Nap Ministry; it is our North Star. Our goal is to uplift sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue.

Our “rest is resistance” framework came to me while I was a seminary student studying Black liberation theology. Fittingly, it came to me while I was napping—sleeping in an attempt to save my own life as an exhausted Black woman. The idea took further shape in my mind as I continued researching in archives. I realized I had been navigating decisions from a space of toxic urgency. I began to experiment with the radical notion of deliberately and forcefully slowing down. My rest practice became a place of solace, restoration, resistance, reparations and connection. The refusal to grind thus became a political act.

When people first stumble upon the Nap Ministry and discover it is an organization that uplifts the liberating power of rest and naps, their minds most likely go directly to visions of soft pillows, luxury beds and the peaceful face of a person drifting off into nighttime slumber. Most would probably not leap immediately to thoughts of white supremacy, capitalism and the commodification of Black bodies via chattel slavery in the American South.

I regularly hear the question, “What does white supremacy have to do with rest?” Indeed, some people are unable to process the ways in which all oppression is connected. At the Nap Ministry, we believe rest is not a privilege or luxury but a divine and human right. There is softness in being still. There is life to be found in leisure.

Our shared history is one of extreme disconnection and denial. We ignore our bodies’ need to rest, and in doing so, we lose touch with our spirit. Our bodies are the only things we ever really own. They are our temples. They are a tool for change, a site of liberation. Our bodies know even when our minds do not.

We exist in a culture that supports sleep-deprivation; we have been brainwashed by capitalism to work at a machine-level pace, and to equate our worth with how much we can produce. The same engine that drove millions of enslaved people into the forced terror of brutal labor on plantations is the same engine driving grind culture today.

Black liberation theology deeply influences our rest movement. “It is a theology which arises from an identification with the oppressed blacks of America, seeking to interpret the gospel of Jesus in the light of the Black condition,” as Cone put it. “It believes that the liberation of the Black community is God’s liberation.”

This thinking boldly gave me the language to proclaim my divine right to rest my sacred Black body while all the world was telling me the opposite. I am a Black liberation theologian. This means I interpret Biblical text through this lens, and I see the text as a liberation document. I have a theology that says, “Jesus is for the marginalized and the oppressed.” The ministry of Jesus in the New Testament was a ministry of radical love; this is solidly supported by evidence from the text. It was my personal commitment to experimenting with the ideals of Black liberation theology that offered space for an exploration around what rest could offer me, my community and the world.

Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. It says, “No, I am enough now, and I am not a machine.” Black liberation theology makes space for the expansive nature of Blackness to heal and dismantle all forms of oppression for all people.

Our collective rest and radical care will save us and will be the foundation for a new world rooted in liberation for all. We will rest.