The WELLTH Exchange | February 2026

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Where healing, joy, wellbeing, and liberation are shared as our true wealth.

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Culture Is Medicine: How Memory Heals Us in a Crumbling Empire

“They tried to bury us… but they didn’t know we were roots.”

THE MUSIC BENEATH THE NOISE

When Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl LX halftime performer, I was excited. I had heard of him and danced to some of his music, but I couldn’t consider myself a fan. I met a guy who attended two concerts during Bad Bunny’s Residency in Puerto Rico - what he described was phenomenal.

That’s what drew me into learning more about him. I knew the hits. But when I really sat down to listen to the lyrics, the intention, the roots - I found something deeper.

His music is a love letter to his people. It’s rhythm as resistance. It’s culture as memory. It’s sonic medicine - loud in its pride, soft in its grief, and rooted in the ancestral soil of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

And that made me curious:How many of us, especially across the Black diaspora are carrying that kind of memory?How many of us are missing the healing right beneath our feet because we’ve been trained to forget?

CULTURE ISN’T DECORATION - IT’S HOW WE SURVIVED

Culture isn’t just music or food or slang or art. It’s how our people endured what should have broken us. It’s what held us when empire tried to erase us.

It’s the rhythm in the protest chant.
The seasoning in the greens.
The pause before we say, “Chile…”
The moment in church when the organ hits that chord and the whole room knows.

Culture is communal medicine:

Shared language
Shared foods
Shared rituals
Shared pain
Shared joy
Shared memory

It’s also how we remember who we are, who we come from, and how our people “got over.”

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.” ~ Toni Morrison

Our healing isn’t just individual. It’s collective. Cultural. Communal.

THE SCHOLARSHIP: CULTURE AS A POLITICAL TOOL FOR HEALING

Across time, Black scholars, freedom fighters, and thinkers have understood the power of culture to resist domination and restore identity.

Frantz Fanon: Culture is a weapon of resistance for colonized people. Reclaiming culture is decolonizing the mind.
bell hooks: Community and love are healing forces - and culture offers both.
Sylvia Wynter: What we think of as “normal” (Western culture) is only one way to be human. Cultural remembering is reclaiming our full humanity.
Joy DeGruy: Healing intergenerational trauma includes recovering the cultural practices that were stripped through slavery and colonization.
Gloria Anzaldúa: Cultural multiplicity is power. Mixed identities, like Bad Bunny’s Afro-Caribbean expression, are bridges, not burdens.

In 2026, as empire strains under its own weight, through fascist policies, banned histories, rising surveillance, and environmental breakdown - the people still have song. The people still have language. The people still have each other.

SPOKEN WORD

This piece is a meditation on cultural memory — a love poem to the ways we, as Black people, have always carried medicine in our mouths, in our music, in our kitchens, and in our bones. It’s about the rituals that saved us. The rhythms that refused to die. And the deep knowing that we are not just the survivors of history — we are the keepers of it.

This is for anyone who’s ever forgotten how powerful their people are. This is “The Inheritance.”

“The Inheritance”

I went looking for peace and found it in a cast-iron skillet,

in a drum beat,

in the laugh that broke through

the silence like a psalm.

They called it noise. I call it memory.

Memory of how we made it - on scraps and syncopation,

on rhythm and resistance,

on knowing how to build a life

from the bones they threw us.

Culture is not a costume.

It’s a compass.

It tells us how to move

when the earth shakes.

It’s a whisper in the kitchen,

a holler in the choir,

a remix in the back of the bus

where survival sounded like basslines.

They tried to take the drum.

We became the drum.

We are the hymn and the hush,

the griot and the griot’s grandbaby.

We are the reason they wrote us out -

And yet we write ourselves back in.

So go ahead.

Say it out loud:

“I am the culture. I am the medicine. I am the proof.”

REFLECT: CULTURE AS MEDICINE

Take the next four weeks to move through your own cultural memories. Each week is a portal. Go slow. Go deep.

Week 1: Language

What sayings, accents, or rhythms shaped how you speak?
Write down a phrase your people say that holds truth. Say it out loud.

Week 2: Food

Cook a meal that connects you to your people.
What memories or stories live in that dish?

Week 3: Sound

Build your healing playlist (or use the one below).
Which artists feel like home to you?

Week 4: Ancestors

Call an elder. Ask them: “What helped you get through?”
Light a candle. Tell a story about where you’re from.

Culture Is Medicine – Experience WELLTH Playlist on Spotify

This playlist is a sonic journey across the global Black diaspora — from the soul-steeped streets of North America, to the drum-heavy coasts of the Caribbean, to the ancestral rhythms of the African continent, and the Afro-Latin pulse of Central and South America. These are not just songs — they are sound memories: lullabies, protest anthems, healing rituals, freedom calls. Each track was chosen for its emotional resonance, cultural weight, and power to reconnect us to who we’ve always been. Together, they form a kind of medicine: grounding, celebratory, rebellious, and deeply alive.

North America

Nina Simone – “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”
Lauryn Hill – “I Get Out”
Kendrick Lamar – “Alright”
Solange – “Cranes in the Sky”
J. Cole – “Love Yourz”
SZA – “Good Days”
Aretha Franklin – “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
Donny Hathaway – “Someday We’ll All Be Free”
Mahalia Jackson – “Trouble of the World”

Caribbean

Bad Bunny (Puerto Rico)– “El Apagón”
Buju Banton (Jamaica) – “Untold Stories”
Chronixx (Jamaica) – “Skankin Sweet”
Bob Marley (Jamaica) – “Redemption Song”
Koffee Jamaica) – “Toast”
Celia Cruz (Cuba) – “La Vida Es Un Carnaval”
Etana (Jamaica) – “People Talk”
Shabba Ranks Jamaica) – “Roots & Culture”
Boukman Eksperyns (Haiti) - “Ke’M Pa Sote”
Kassav’ (Martinique & Guadeloupe) - “Zouk-la Se Sel Medikaman Nou Ni”

Central/South America

Luedji Luna (Brazil) – “Banho de Folhas”
Barbatuques (Brazil) - “Baiana’”
Bia Ferreira (Brazil) – “Cota Não É Esmola”
Susana Baca (Peru) – “Maria Lando”
Daymé Arocena (Cuba) – “Madres”
ChocQuibTown (Colombia) – “De Donde Vengo Yo”
Xenia França (Brazil) – “Pra Que Me Chamas?”

Africa

Burna Boy – “Destiny”
Youssou N'Dour – “7 Seconds” (feat. Neneh Cherry)
Angelique Kidjo – “Agolo”
Wizkid – “Blessed” (feat. Damian Marley)
Sona Jobarteh – “Gambia”
Fatoumata Diawara – “Nterini”
Fela Kuti – “Water No Get Enemy”
Ayra Starr – “Bloody Samaritan”
Miriam Makeba – “Pata Pata”
Tems – “Free Mind”

CALL TO ACTION

This month, don’t just survive. Remember.

Reflect. Reconnect. Reclaim. Create rituals. Call your people. Write down the words that raised you. Cook the food that carried you. Dance to the drums that remind you: You come from more than this moment.

"We must remember that memory is an act of resistance.” ~ Christina Sharpe

Experience WELLTH | February 2026.

A space where healing meets Black memory, collective care, and cultural liberation.