The Black Rest Podcast

In this episode of the Black Rest Podcast, host Deja Carrington is joined by the esteemed Dr. Joan Morgan, Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. Together, they delve into the transformative power of rest as a form of resistance and a catalyst for creativity within the global Black community. Dr. Morgan shares her insights on the Black Rest Project, exploring how rest can serve as a revolutionary act that replenishes the mind and body. Tune in to discover how embracing rest can lead to profound personal and societal change.

In this episode of The Black Rest Podcast, Dr. Deborah Willis, a visionary photographer, scholar, and director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture, joins Esther Armah, CEO of the Armah Institute of Emotional Justice to explore the radical, emotional, historical, and deeply personal meanings of Black rest. Together, they trace how a nation built on the backbreaking labor of enslaved Africans shaped Black people's relationship to rest, worth, guilt, and exhaustion. From Otis Redding’s quiet rebellion in “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” to photographs of Black domestic workers simply sitting, breathing, being, Willis redefines rest as an active, necessary space of healing. She shares her own struggles with rest, the guilt she carries, the labor she inherited, and the rare places where her body finally exhales—often 30,000 feet in the air. This episode asks: What does rest feel like in a Black body? Who creates rest for Black women? And how do we imagine a future where Black rest is not an interruption of labor—but a birthright?

In this powerful and intimate episode, host Dejha Carrington sits down with Dr. Treva B. Lindsey, a scholar, writer, cultural critic, and co-founder of Black Feminist Night School, to explore why rest is not merely restorative but revolutionary for Black people globally. Dr. Lindsey reflects on her childhood in Washington, DC, where chosen kin, community care, and the freedom to try (and fail) shaped her creative spirit. She opens up about witnessing burnout in her educator parents, navigating elite institutions as “the only one,” and the long unlearning required to embrace rest without guilt. Through stories of writing America, Goddamn during the grief and isolation of 2020, Dr. Lindsey reveals how pleasure, naps, communal connection, and deliberate care became essential to her survival—and key to finding her most authentic voice on the page. Together, Lindsey and Dejha examine rest as a political act, a refusal of extraction, and a condition that makes dreaming possible.