Hello.
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
I know that some of us are
still in the hallway trying
to grab some food, but I
think it's important for us
to get started.
Welcome to the third of
our speakers-- I mean,
third of our lectures
in our series this year,
"Afro-Brazil and
the Black Diaspora."
This has been important
for us in terms
of trying to shape and expand
our narrative of Brazil
in terms of its participation
in the formation
of the African diaspora,
and especially in terms
of how we think about Brazilian
studies and African diaspora
studies here at Brown.
I would like to
thank several people
in terms of making this happen,
my colleagues in Afrikaana
studies, and that is
Dzidzienyo and [INAUDIBLE],
which is quite
unique here at brown
to have so many folks in
one department focusing
on Afro-Brazil.
The Watson Institute, the
Pembroke Center for Research
and teaching on women, the
Department of Religious
Studies, the Department
of Anthropology,
the Center for Latin American
and Caribbean studies,
the Brazil Initiative,
especially the hard work
of Ramon Stern, who has
made all of this possible,
and every detail
come together nicely.
I think it's important to
thank all of these folks.
I think it's a
grassroots initiative
to make anything
happen here at Brown.
I feel like in my
prior life I must
have been a fundraiser
of sorts, but I
think it's wonderful to
have Rachel Harding return.
I should also mention
that Rachel Harding,
and I know that you'll maybe
say this in the introduction,
was a student in Anana
Dzidzienyo class,
and this is where a lot of
the ideas first started.
So I would like to also
say that her books are
on sale in the lobby, and she'll
be available for brief signing
once this event is over.
It is also a great
privilege, and it's wonderful
that I welcome my
colleague, Andre Willis, who
will introduce Rachel Harding.
He is the Willard Prescott and
Angie McClellan Smith Professor
of history and religion
in the Department
of Religious Studies.
Welcome, Professor Willis.
[APPLAUSE]
I deeply appreciate the ability
to stand here today with you
all, and get this
nourishment in terms
of both the food
and the dialogue
that we're going to have
after the rich presentation.
Thank you to Professor
Keisha-Khan Perry
and the entire
Brazil Initiative.
I just want to do a
quick introduction here
for a former brown
undergraduate,
and also Sister Harding earned
a Master of Fine Arts here,
I believe.
So, Rachel Elizabeth Harding is
a poet, historian, and scholar
of religions of the
Afro-Atlantic diaspora,
assistant professor of
indigenous spiritual traditions
in the ethnic studies department
at the University of Colorado
Denver.
Dr. Harding writes
about the conjunction
of religion, creativity,
and social justice
in the experience of communities
of African descent in the U.S.
And Brazil.
She is the author of two
books, "A Refuge in Thunder:
"Candomble and Alternative
Spaces of Blackness".
That's on Indiana press.
This is a crucial text in
Afro-Brazilian religious
studies.
She's also written more
recently, "Remnants:
A Memoir of Spirit
Activism and Mothering."
Co-written With her mother,
Rosemarie Freeney Harding,
on the role of
compassion and mysticism
in Arican-American social
justice organizing.
That text is
available out front,
and it's published by Duke.
I'm getting to know her
mom through that text,
but her father was an integral
figure in my own development,
brother Vincent
Harding, for anyone
who studies
Arican-American religion,
has to come to
the brook of fire,
and the marvelous
individual that's
known as Vincent Harding.
So I want to ask you to
please welcome Sister Rachel
Harding with that in mind.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much for
that lovely introduction.
And I'm very happy to be
here, for many reasons.
As professor Willis
just told you
I'm a former student
of this place
and have lots of
wonderful memories.
One of my favorite professors
is right in front of me,
and I hope that a number
of you who are here
are taking advantage
of his presence.
I'd like to thank Professor
Keisha-Khan Perry, and Anani,
and the faculty from the
Department of Africana studies
who've invited me to
come and talk to you
today about my work.
And I'm grateful to
the Watson Institute
and the other cooperating
centers on campus as well.
When I studied here,
another of my teachers
was George Houston Bass.
How many of you know that
name from rights and reason?
Right.
He was the founder,
with Rhett Jones,
of the rights and
reason theater.
And in his classes and in
my conversations with him
outside of class, George helped
me recognize and appreciate
the tremendous transformational
power of black folk culture.
I remember how the
plays he produced here
would dig deep into reservoirs
of African and southern
African-American
ritual resonances.
They're psychic and
emotional landscapes
were populated with
ancestral specters, masks,
songs that mixed blues
and spirituals with West
African percussive
rhythms, rituals
for the cleansing of ancient
and very present violences,
and stories that
were undoubtedly
among the progenitors,
whether he knew it or not,
of the Afro-futurist
movement that has developed
so powerfully in recent years.
George's understanding
of theater
as a space for engaging
the complex meanings
and meetings of
blackness and modernity
found echoes for me
in the work of one
of my graduate mentors, the
scholar of religion, Charles H.
Long.
In Long's influential
text, "Significations",
he suggests that for
people of African descent
in the Americas, religion has
been a primary means by which
they have oriented themselves
to the fullest possible meaning
of their humanity.
That is to say, it has been in
the context of the new world
religions created by enslaved
people and their descendants
that those black men,
women, and children wrestled
with the question
of how to stake
claim to their humanity
in a fundamentally
inhumane situation.
How to recall and
reaffirm who they really
were in spite of what the
dominant and oppressing society
might say about who they were.
In other words, for Long,
and for the children
of Africa in the
new world, blackness
became essentially
a religious task.
I start from this understanding
of Afro-Atlantic religions
that I study,
particularly Candomble
and the mystic Christianity
of the rural southern United
States, but I suggest
that this perspective
is true as well for Cuban
[INAUDIBLE], Haitian Vaudou,
the Winti traditions of
Suriname and over a dozen
other black religious
expressions that
emerged in the new world
in response and resistance
to slavery.
Even though my current
work is focused
on women who draw on
the mystic resources
of Afro-Atlantic
religions in the mid
to late 20th and early
20th first centuries,
it's important to recognize
that the traditions they embrace
have provided generational
tools of navigation, survival,
and re-imagination in the
midst of traumas, historical,
ancestral, and
personal, that continue
to afflict the profoundly
unequal places we have all
come to call home.
I also start from a recognition
that the methodologies
of conventional
scholarship often
leave little room for those
modes of interpretation
that are not easily considered
logical or objective.
In this way, academic
discourse can
occlude more than it reveals.
Obstructing the history,
insights, traumas,
and resilience's
of those who exist
on the underside of modernity.
Whose sources of meaning
and power represent
an uncomfortable, yet
incontrovertible remnants
of the making of the America's.
So how do we get from this start
to the subject of my lecture
today?
The resources of
mysticism and mothering
that I will discuss
this afternoon
are among the interpretive
tools I believe
that African-American and
Afro-Brazilian women can offer
toward a collective
effort at dis-occlusion
and recovery of some other
kinds of intelligence
about the new world.
And intelligence replete in
the communities, histories,
and strategies of
black women, but which
has been hidden, muted,
in conventional scholarly
conversations about
their history.
And even in conversations
about the tools
of social transformation
and community building.
I am both a scholar
and an initiate
of the Afro-Brazilian
religion, Candomble,
one of the major African
based ritual traditions
in the Americas.
And for those of you who don't
know much about Candomble,
it's a real elaboration
of West and Central
African understandings
of the world
with some aspects of Catholicism
an Amerindian influences
from the late colonial and
imperial periods in Brazil,
during which the religion
developed the formal structure
it now carries.
Like most indigenous
spiritual traditions,
Candomble is centered around
cycles of human connection
to the life force and natural
elements, wind, Earth, water,
fire, etc.
and rites of
balance and healing.
I'm also the daughter of
historians and activists
grounded in traditions of
African-American religion.
And what I share
with you today is
informed by years of
reflection and participation
in Candomble communities,
n Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
As well as by oral
histories that I've
collected of African-American
women who were participants
in the southern
freedom movement,
or the civil rights movement,
including my own mother's
story.
Brazil, as many of
you know, is home
to the largest
population of people
of African descent outside
of the continent of Africa.
It shares with the United
States and other countries
in the Western hemisphere
a centuries long history
of enslavement and
structural marginalization
of black people.
Following in the wake of the
civil rights and Black Power
movements in the US, cultural
and political mobilizing
efforts for Afro-Brazilian
human rights grew significantly
in the 1970's, 80's, and 90's.
And though these
have successfully
challenged some of the country's
entrenched racial inequalities,
most notably perhaps
in federal commitments
to affirmative action in
education, blacks in Brazil,
like their diasporic
cousins in North America,
continue to suffer
disproportionately
from poverty, unemployment,
health and education
disparities, state sponsored
violence, incarceration,
and inadequate political
representation.
Scholars of political organizing
in both Brazil and the United
States indicate that
while men are often
the most visible representatives
of racial justice struggles,
women are commonly the principal
organizers at the grassroots
level.
In the case of the US southern
freedom movement of the 1950's
and 60's, for
example, black women's
participation in civic and
religious associations.
Their work as full time
activists and movement
organizations like
SNCC and CORE,
and their radically
inclusive hospitality
was essential to
campaign successes,
as well as to the nurturance
of a sense of family
and beloved
community among those
who joined in the struggle to
bring the American nation more
in line with its stated ideals
of democracy and justice.
In more recent years
women in working
class Afro-Brazilian
neighborhoods
in the state of Bahia have
taken important leadership
in developing
community responses
to a range of problems,
including drug violence, land
dispossession,
police killings, and
Neo-Evangelical Protestant
attacks against religions
of African origin.
My work looks primarily
at this comparison.
Black women in Candomble
communities who are active
in social movements in Brazil
with a focus on the state
of Bahia from the
1980's to the present,
and Afro-North American women
involved in racial justice
organizing in the US
In the 1960's and 70's.
In many of the oldest and
most traditional terreiros,
or Candomble temple
communities, women
are the Supreme ritual leaders,
[INAUDIBLE], they're called,
who direct the
ceremonial cultivation
of divinized forces of nature,
known as orishas or nkisis,
or voduns.
In the working
class neighborhood
of [INAUDIBLE], where there
are over a dozen terreiros,
and where I have concentrated
my study and participation,
female adherents
in Candomble are
central to community building
efforts and activists campaigns
around a variety of racial,
gender, and economic justice
issues.
In exploring the moral
and mystic universe
of Afro-Brazilian and
African-American women
activists my intention
is to suggest
a way of bringing black
women's voices, wisdom's,
and experiences of spirit into
the academic sphere in a manner
that approaches their
meaning on their own terms
and avoids oxidisation of
these mystic engagements
with the world.
My approach is essentially
that of a woman analysis.
Let me take a few moments
to talk about the terms
I'm using before
sharing some examples.
Womanist and
womanism are concepts
that entered the national
lexicon in the mid 1980's
with the publication of Alice
Walker's collection of essays,
"In Search of our
Mothers Gardens."
And although the terms may have
been new, womanist analysis
focused attention on political,
social, and historical
phenomena in light of
values that have long
been important to the
survival of black communities
in the Americas, inclusiviity,
a strong motivation
to struggle collectively
against structural inequalities,
creative/unorthodox unorthodox
approaches to problem solving,
such is the willingness
to make a way out
of no way, and concern for
the well-being of women,
their families, and
their communities.
The approach is similar
to feminist, subaltern,
and postmodern theoretical
frameworks in that it
privileges the moral and ethical
perspectives of people who've
been marginalized
by the structures
and processes of modernity.
Womanism, however, is marked
by a profound intersectionality
that addresses not only race,
gender, class, and sexuality,
but joins these in an
integral way with spirituality
and religion as a vital element
in the lives of women of color.
As Laili Phillips
writes, "Black women,
and other women of
color, are generally
not afraid of or skeptical
about spirituality.
In this light, they are
emblematic of the majority
of humans, for whom a
relationship with the spiritual
world is actual, palpable,
meaningful, and valued/"
Black women and other women
of color also recognize
the political implications of
this spiritual relationship
in ways that few more
academically or ideologically
inclined perspectives do."
Unquote.
In the plainest
sense mysticism can
be understood as unmediated
intimate encounter
with the sacred.
In the context of religions and
cultures of the Afro-Atlantic
diaspora, I use
the term to refer
to a variety of practices
that emphasize attention
to the presence of spirit.
Simplistically seen sometimes
as superstitious, or worse,
as demonic, the attention
to dreams and visions,
interpretation of
signs, embodiment
of spiritual presence
or possession,
transformative
prayer and singing,
divination, sacred dance,
healing and cleansing rites,
communication with ancestors,
communion with nature,
ritual retreat or cloistering
and [? obiga ?] sound,
a ritual initiation,
are all mystic elements
that have historically
been found
to greater or lesser degree
in the religious life
of black communities
throughout the diaspora.
These are also elements that
black women activists in Brazil
and the United States have
utilized in their efforts
to build and sustain, defend
and transform communities
under great duress,
and to organize
collective resistance to a
range of structural injustices.
Mothering, as understood
by womanist scholars
such as Phillips Delores
Williams and Cheryl Thompson
[INAUDIBLE] is a
concept that includes
the biological birthing
process, but extends
to encompass the generation
of ideas and solutions
to family and community
problems, as well.
Mothers are also those who
provide spiritual guidance
and divination, eldering and
mentoring of younger people,
and who create kitchen table
spaces for conversation
and collective
discernment, women
centered spaces of
hospitality and inclusion.
Women who embody
these roles are often
identified as mothers in
Afro-Atlantic religious
and community context,
whether or not
they have birthed children
from their own bodies.
For today, I've identified
six examples, four from the US
and two from Brazil,
that demonstrates
some of the ways in which
black women in both societies
make use of mystic
means and mothering
strategies in the context
of social justice work.
The women profiled here
make explicit connections
between their
activism and the ways
they connect with spirit,
whether understood
as ancestors, orishas,
nkisis, voduns, or god,
for help and guidance.
Again, while such connections
are not unusual in the world,
they have not begun
to be explored
by scholars with the fullness
and sincerity they deserve.
Example one, the courage songs.
Scholar, musician, and
former SNCC activists,
Bernice Johnson Reagan, writes
about the transformative power
of African-American
religious music.
In particular the sacred
songs of the black church
that became anthems of protest
and instruments of audacity
in the midst of the
southern freedom movement.
In an interview in
1997, Reagan discusses
how she and fellow SNCC workers
and other community members
in Albany, Georgia
in the early 1960's
used African-American
congregational singing
to alter the energy
in mass meetings
or on demonstration lines.
Such that people who
might realistically
be fearful for their lives would
instead gather the confidence
to face violence, and sometimes
to move would-be attackers
to a less offensive position.
The experience of a Episcopalian
lay leader, Ruby Sales,
who is also a former
SNCC activist,
highlights one of
the ways in which
African-American sacred
singing is understood
to embody and enable connections
to ancestral tenacity's
in the face of
hardship and injustice.
In 1963, in Hayneville, Alabama,
Ruby and three colleagues,
two white men and
another black woman,
approached a gas
station to buy sodas
after protesting at
a segregated swimming
pool with a group of
young movement volunteers.
Ruby was first to reach the
door of the establishment
and was met there by
the armed white owner
of the station who immediately
cursed her and threatened
to kill her.
Within seconds, Ruby's
friend, Jonathan Daniels,
an Episcopalian
seminarian, pushed Ruby out
of the way of the loaded gun,
and in almost the same instant
the station owner
opened fire and killed
Jonathan instead of Ruby.
In the months that followed,
Ruby received threats
that she too would
be killed if she
testified against the murderer.
In her interview
with the Veterans
of Hope Project in
1998, Ruby explained
that she was able to conquer her
fear of testifying by singing
the sacred music
that had been created
by her enslaved
ancestors and taught
to her by her
grandmother, spirituals.
Songs like, "How Did You
Feel When You Come Out
Of The Wilderness?",
"Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray",
and "We've Come
This Far By Faith".
Ruby said that even before
this particular tragedy, when
she was learning the songs
at her grandmother's side,
she experienced the
enlightening minor tones
of the music as links to the
suffering and the strength
of people who had
come before her.
And in her own distress, the
young activist instinctively
called up the music
that she associated
with the moral and spiritual
courage of her community.
Ruby says that as
she sang the songs
she felt her ancestors
rising in her voice,
accompanying and
encouraging her.
Ultimately, she was able to
get up on the court room stand
and tell her story.
Even today, as she continues
her activism through the Spirit
House Project and
investigations of state
sponsored violence against
black men, women, and children,
Ruby sings the old
songs for strength.
And when she sings, quote, "I
don't just sing it in my voice.
There's a rattle in
my throat as deep
and old as my
grandmother's voice.
It connects me.
It allows me to move from one
historical period to the next.
And to really get to the souls
of where black people are.
It's in that moment,
through song,
that I'm able to feel
something other than myself.
I become part of a community.
I become part of a struggle."
Unquote.
This use of African-American
sacred sound to induce courage,
and the ancestral connection
that Ruby Sales infers
from the singing, are
examples of the way
a mystic sensibility
functions among many
of the southern
black women who were
active in the freedom movement.
Example two, the ancestral call.
Ruby Sales impulse into action
via the songs of her ancestors
is echoed in the experience
of another activist
for black human
rights, Valdina Pinto.
Valdina Oliviera Pinto is
a Makota, a ritual elder
in the Angola
tradition of Candomble,
who assists the
[? taharro ?] leader,
and is responsible for
training new initiates,
caring for incorporated nkisis,
and offering instruction
to the religious
community as a whole.
She is one of the best known
and most widely respected
environmental justice
advocates in Bahia,
and her activist work is firmly
grounded in her experience
as a devotee of Candomble.
In her recently
published memoir,
"Meu Caminhar, Meu Viver".
, Makota Valdina writes about an
experience she had in the early
1970s at a [? mocondo ?], a
Candomble funeral ceremony.
At the time, Valdina was
a primary school teacher
and a catechist in
the Catholic church
where, due to her growing
awareness of racial justice
issues, she was
beginning to question
the demonetization of
Afro-Brasilia religions
by Catholicism.
At the funeral rite she
watched from outside the circle
of participants, as
she was not at the time
initiated in Candomble.
And she recalls that it was an
odd and uncomfortable feeling
that grew for her,
standing as a mere witness
to this striking moment,
a ceremony of remembrance
of the African origins of the
person who had recently passed.
Valdina remembers
hearing her grandmothers
and great grandmothers
voices, not so much
as a distinct sound
in her ear, more
like a sensation of knowing,
still with great clarity
and directness.
She says her ancestors
were asking her why she
was standing on the outside.
Telling her that
she needed to be
part of the ceremonial circle.
Valdina writes, quote, "It
was as if I was surrounded
by all of my relatives
who had passed on,
even those I hadn't
known, and even
those who were not
Candomble devotees.
I think that's the best
way to explain what
happened to me in that ritual.
The ritual which, I
think, is the most
profound in Candomble."
Unquote.
This event marked the activists
in a very significant way.
And it was at that
moment, she explains,
that she determined to
leave the Catholic church
and to work for the
respect and human rights
of Afro-Brazilian people
from within the tradition
of Candomble.
Example three, dreaming
strength and guidance.
Dreams and signs are a
very common, but again
infrequently discussed
mystic resource
in the lives of activist
African-American women.
While these aspects of black
spirituality are not usually
disparaged by
institutional religion,
[? Evan ?] [? Sherow ?] notes
that the historic graphic
emphasis of scholars on
the black church, as such,
has often obscured the many
examples of African-American
affinity for mystic and
supernatural understandings
of the world.
When her 14-year-old
son was brutally
murdered in Money,
Mississippi in 1955
for saying, "bye,
baby" to a white woman
as he walked out
of a general store,
Mamie Till Mobley was undone.
Compounding her
grief was the horror
of the way her child had been
maimed as his life was taken.
His body so horribly
disfigured that the only way
she could positively
identify him for the coroner
was by a school ring.
For a generation
of African-American
who were children
and teens in the 5's,
the image of Emmett Till,
lying in an open casket,
his face barely human from the
ravages of his mutilations,
was a watershed
moment in their lives.
It was similar, in a sense,
to the way Trayvon Martin's
murder settled into the bones of
another more recent generation.
In spite of the pressure
from white Mississippians
who urged her to bury Emmit
in the state where he died
and avoid additional
public scrutiny,
Mrs. Till Mobley decided to
bring her son's body back
to Chicago and hold an open
casket funeral, quote, "So
that all the world could see
what they did to my boy."
Unquote.
Till Mobley said
that in determining
what course to take
she first discussed
her decision with her mother.
Then she said she had a
dream that convinced her
of the rightness of her choice.
It confirmed for
her that she was
capable of going through the
trauma of a public funeral
for her son, and that
this activist gesture was
a good and needed thing to do.
Till Mobley is in a
long line of black women
who have taken guidance and
encouragement from dreams
and visions in the service
of justice and human rights.
One of the most
striking examples
of this approach to wisdom
comes from the experience
of Harriet Tubman,
perhaps the best known
of the conductors of the
Underground Railroad,
that network of women and men
who risked their lives to help
enslaved people make their way
to freedom in the 19th century.
Harriet is recognized as having
freed hundreds of people,
and served during the Civil
War as a spy, a scout,
and a leader on the raid-- a
leader of the raid on Combahee
ferry in South Carolina, where
union forces liberated 700
African-American's.
In telling her story to
writer Sarah Bradford,
Harriet said very
little, if anything,
about her relationship to
formal structures of church
during her childhood, But
was very conscious of what
she described as a family
legacy of spiritual gifts that
included her father's
ability to foretell
the future and her
own capacity to access
unmediated divine guidance
for the well-being
of her passengers, and for her
own strength and perception
as she navigated woods and
rivers, towns and back country
roads, leading people
out of slavery.
Tubman had received a
head injury as a child
and she was said
to have suffered
from frequent fits of
somnolence, or sleeping spells,
as a result for the
rest of her life.
Often, her uncanny foresight
and discernment came to Harriet
in the midst of the spells.
At other times, they came
via dreams and sleep,
in waking visions, and in what
she described as miraculous
answers to prayer.
Biographer Jean Humez
writes that there
are many stories
of Harriet avoiding
capture while she was rescuing
enslaved people, which Tubman
attributed to God
answering her pleadings.
Humez writes, quote,
"God was Tubman's name
for the source of
visionary guidance
for her anti-slavery action.
Prayer enabled her
to tap directly
into the source
of such guidance."
Unquote.
For Harriet, the
successes of her activism
on behalf of her
people, her bravery
in the face of
overarching odds, are
to be understood in terms of
her intimate communications
with spirit and the aid that
came as a result of prayer.
Example five, the
corn blessings.
Another example of
the combined uses
of mystic and mothering
sensibilities as resources
for community activism comes
from the terreiros [INAUDIBLE]
in Salvador.
Late one night in August
2006, loud gunfire
sounded just outside the
ritual community's walls,
and soon people were
heard running along
the narrow maze like
alley, descending
from the side of the
terreiros into the heart
of the urban neighborhood
where the temple is located.
Two young men have been killed,
and two young women wounded.
The community was in shock.
Crack cocaine and other
drugs were a growing problem
in Salvador, one of the
largest cities in Brazil.
And while the
violence of the city
had not reached the notorious
portions of Rio de Janeiro,
there was tremendous
fear and anxiety
about what the
murders practically
at the doorstep of the temple
meant for the tight knit
working class
Afro-Brazilian community.
The [INAUDIBLE] of the
terreiros Mae [? Val ?],
had been organizing in the
neighborhood for more than a
decade, sponsoring literacy and
citizenship education classes
and arranging training projects
in traditional folk arts.
Hoping to steer that many young
people who had dropped out
of school to finish
their educations
and develop skills that would
enable them to make a living.
Her own teenage
son had been killed
a few years prior in similar
violence in another city.
From her position as an
activist, a religious leader,
and a community
mother, Mae [? Val ?]
consulted with the
orishas and the caboclos,
the indigenous spirits of
Candomble of the temple,
and determined that in
addition to increased demands
for employment and
quality education
for the neighborhood's
youth, there
were rituals of
cleansing and healing
that needed to be done for
the community as a whole.
The following year
on a Friday, which
is the day consecrated to
[INAUDIBLE], the orishas
of peace, close to the
anniversary of the murders,
Mae [? Val ?] gathered
her initiates,
members of other Afro-Brazilian
religious communities
in the vicinity, and
any neighborhood members
who wanted to participate.
And with donations of
white corn and borrowed
heavy gauge extra
large steel pots,
the [INAUDIBLE]
orishas and other women
prepared large quantities of
unsalted, boiled, white corn
kernels.
When these were
cooked and cooled
the caboclos were invited to
come and bless the community
with their healing energy.
The caboclos, as
I was saying, are
the Amerindian, the
indigenous spirits,
of the Amerindian people of
Brazil, who, like the orishas,
manifest in the
bodies of devotees.
So when the corn was
cooked and cooled
the caboclos were invited to
come and bless the community
with their healing energy.
They manifested in the
bodies of devotees,
and threw the corn in
a ritual of cleansing
from the roofs of nearby houses.
Tumbling the sacred
food onto the streets
below so that the asphalt roads
and concrete walkways looked as
if they were covered in snow.
White corn is a sacred
food of [INAUDIBLE],
and is often used in rites
of purification in Candomble.
The caboclos offered the kernels
as a head to toe ritual bath
to anyone who wanted it.
The ceremony, held annually
now, is an intense moment
of reflection, remembrance,
and psychological healing
for the Candomble communities,
and for the larger
neighborhood.
These examples from the
Southern United States
and from the Northeast
of Brazil are just
a hint of the way in which black
women have availed themselves
of resources of community,
history, ancestry,
and spirit in their work for
the rights and well-being
of their communities.
Of course, none of
these interpretive tools
is generally
recognized as rational,
but that hasn't
stopped the women,
and it shouldn't
stop the scholarship.
These alternative modes of
making sense of the world
do exist and have
profound meaning
for the people who employ
them in their daily lives.
They also have meaning,
I would suggest,
for a deeper and more nuanced
approach to understanding
the struggles,
trajectories, and insights
of people of African descent
throughout the Americas.
Example six, dreaming
the Pachamama's.
I'll close my lecture
today with a section
from my mother's posthumously
published memoir, "Remnants",
which I co-wrote and edited.
And which is largely about
precisely the subject
of mysticism as a resource
for social justice
activism in her life,
and in a certain meaning
of African-American
religious culture.
So the section that I'm going to
read is called Pachamama's two,
and it begins with a dream that
I had when my mother was sick.
Let me just give you a
little bit of background.
So my mother, with my
dad, was an activist
in the southern freedom
movement in Atlanta, Georgia.
They were interesting
enough representatives
of the Mennonite church to
the Southern Freedom Movement
and worked with Martin
and Coretta King and folks
from SCLS and SNCC
and CORE, mostly
on efforts at racial
reconciliation.
And in the early and mid 90's
my mom began to get very sick.
And by 1997 we had no idea
what was going on with her.
She was losing a lot
of weight, and she
was-- we took her to probably
dozens of doctors in Denver,
and nobody could figure
out what was going on.
Ultimately, it
was determined she
had a very, very rare
complication of adult onset
diabetes called diabetic
neuropathic cachexia.
But it was in the context
of figuring out her illness
and figuring out what to do
with it that she began sharing
some stories with me about
her life and her experience,
and we began working on
this project together.
So what I'm reading-- let's
see, how are we doing on time?
You're all right.
Good.
Great.
OK, so I'm going to read two
short sections of the book.
One is the Pachamama circle one.
The other is
Pachamama circle two.
And Pachamama circle
one is about a dream
I had when my mother
was sick, and how
this concept of the
Pachamama's, who
are spiritual mothers
of the world, basically,
appeared in the dream, and
then when my mom and I did
with that idea.
So this is chapter
37 of "Remnants".
It's called Pachamama
circle one, Rachel's dream.
And this is written
in my mother's voice.
"My daughter saw the Pachamama's
in a dream when I was sick.
It was after I had been
diagnosed with diabetes,
but before we started going
to other doctors and hospitals
to figure out what was causing
all of the complications.
Rachel had the dream just at
the beginning of her sojourn
with me and the pain.
She says it was a good thing.
She said she needed the
clarity it gave her and even
the reproof.
It was startling and beautiful.
this dream.
And it made her
a little ashamed.
So she didn't tell me
about it right away,
but a year later,
when we were doing
the bunting fellowship in
Cambridge, and so much mercy,
and heaving, and magic
were circling around us,
she shared it with me.
And I pulled it close to
my heart, and I loved it.
I heard echoes of
myths and stories
I had carried for years
from Mama Freeney",
which was my mother's
mother, "and Mama
Lysa", my mother's grandmother.
"And grandma Rye", my
mother's great grandmother,
"and from things I
discovered on my own.
A few days before the
dream the two of us
were in a grocery store,
and my daughters say
had something to me
sharp and unkind.
I turned away in the
aisle because it stung.
I felt like she had slapped
me, and we were both trembling.
Then she had the
dream, and this is
how my daughter told it to me.
There were five
Pachamama's, maybe more,
but I remember five spirit
women standing in front of me.
The women were standing
together facing me.
They were different
heights, but all tall.
They were grown
women of full stature
in long, tunic-like dresses.
Different colored dresses, some
with ribbons flowing from their
seems.
There was a black
Pachamama, and an Asian one,
and one who looked
indigenous to the Americas.
They were all of
different races and it
seemed they each
had responsibilities
for particular people,
though overall they
shared a collective identity.
and collective obligations, too.
There was also a
white Pachamama, .
This one was yours, mom.
She was a large sturdy woman,
both gentle and serious
at the same time.
She was protecting you
behind her skirts, kind
of standing between you and me.
She said to me, 'what do you
know of mothering?' It was
a reprimand, a way of telling
me I could not approach you,
I could not touch you,
if not with gentleness.
She would not let
anyone harm you.
I heard the dream, and I
loved it, I told my daughter.
I loved the idea of it.
The These women protecting the
world, guarding each other's
children who
belonged to them all.
As we worked on
"Remnants" the Pachamama's
became a powerful
recurring motif for us.
A source of stories,
ritual ideas,
and an autobiographical
legend in
dance that I imagine for
Cleo Parker Robinson's dance
company.
It was as if the presence of
the Pachamama's in the dream
unearthed for us other rooted
memories of the spirit mothers.
We saw every life
form in the universe
reflected in their
blessing and continual care
across all generations and
across all geographies."
So the next piece I
read is chapter 38,
and that is
Pachamama circle two,
Sue Bailey Thurman
and the Harriet's.
And for those of you who may
not know the name of Howard
Thurman, Sue Bailey Thurman.
Sue Bailey Thurman's
husband, Howard Thurman,
was a 20th century
African-American mystic
theologian, educator,
minister, and writer.
He was a mentor to
Martin Luther King Jr.
And other activists thinkers
of the Freedom Movement.
And an advocate for
a more ecumenical
inclusive Christian tradition.
He was the first
African-American chaplain
at Boston University.
And he and his second
wife, Sue Bailey Thurman,
were active in national
and international efforts
at interracial
reconciliation, and helped
found the Church of the
fellowship of all peoples,
which was the first
interracial congregation in San
Francisco, California.
And the Thurman's work friends
and mentors to my parents,
so that's who
Howard and Sue were.
Pachamama circle two, Sue Bailey
Thurman and the Harriet's.
It starts with an epigram.
"The quiet ways we develop
to protect ourselves,
each other in slavery.
The glance, the sent
word, the straying.
Safety construed of
open lacework silence,
a circle of energy, a circle
of protection in the world."
Again, this is my
mother's voice.
"In her later years I would
visit Mrs. Sue Bailey Thurman
at the town house
in San Francisco
where she and her husband
had lived together.
We were old friends.
And after Howard Thurman
passed st. Vincent
and I felt a special
concern for Mrs. Thurman.
We saw her as often as we could.
I always loved those visits with
that gentle, brilliant, elegant
woman.
She had traveled the world
and was knowledgeable
about many things.
She was a writer, a civic
organizer, a profound thinker.
And like her husband, she
had a deep abiding interest
in mysticism,
justice, and peace.
Once, as I was arriving, walking
up the hill to her house,
I had the sense of
something unsafe.
You know how you can get
a feeling of something
not quite right?
I felt that.
I was nearing the house so
I kept walking toward it,
but with my awareness keen to
the circumstances around me.
By the time I reached
my destination
Mrs. Thurman was
downstairs waiting for me.
Now normally she didn't
meet me downstairs.
Normally she'd wait for
me to ring the bell.
And then she would
buzz me in and I'd
climb the stairs to the
main entrance to the house.
But this time she was
downstairs in the foyer
and she was opening
the door for me,
and I could feel she had been
sending protection out to me
just like I had felt
my mother, mama Freeney
do once years ago as I came
up to the door of the house
at 41st and Wentworth.
I didn't know
exactly what it was
I was perceiving as I approach
Mrs. Thurman's place, just
something not right.
A possible danger to me.
Anyway, I felt it.
And then I felt protected.
When we got upstairs to her
living room we were silent.
She and I sat and the two of
us went quiet inside ourselves.
That's what we would
do when we needed
to sense the presence
of this circle,
this circle I'm telling you.
Howard Thurman has a story about
this kind of care and danger.
I heard him tell it a
few times, and a version
is printed in his book,
"The Luminous Darkness."
in the story,
Thurman is traveling
by rail road in a ride
from a small southern town
late at night where he is met
by a black man he doesn't know
with a message to be cautious.
Thurman has disembarked to
wait for a connecting train
and the man approaches him
unannounced and begins walking
alongside him, explaining
that there is tension"--
can you guys hear
me if I don't use--
"Explaining that there
is tension in the area
because the sheriff was
killed that afternoon,
and it isn't safe for a
black man to go into town.
He advises Thurman to sit
in the segregated waiting
room with this suitcase in
full view in front of him.
So that any white
man approaching
will see that he is a stranger
waiting for a connecting coach
and he will be less
likely to be harmed.
The man doesn't talk long.
He has met every train that
has arrived during the night,
and giving the warning to black
passengers as they got off.
Thurman told this story
from his own experience,
but he also told
it as an example
of what was typical among
black people in that time.
It was indicative of the
way, if there was danger,
someone would be sent to
warn you, to protect you.
Living In this country
in the 1920s and 30s,
especially in the south,
required a certain sensitivity,
an attunement to jeopardy,
and an understanding
of one's connectedness as
a black person to others
who shared your vulnerability.
That awareness was
put at the service
of individuals and families, as
well as the larger community.
The concern was not solely
for racist violence,
although there was that.
It was also generally a concern
for protection of people
who might be in danger.
It was something
that black people
had to be constantly aware of.
And so I think we developed
a certain discernment about.
I think women have a
heightened sense of this,
and they would send
people to look out
for those who might be at risk.
This was the kind of
perceptiveness Mrs. Thurman
carried.
My mother had it, too.
Mama Freeney used to
just send us places.
Go there, you know?
Go sit by Mrs. so-and-so.
Go here.
And we didn't ask
why, we just went.
She would tell us to go check
on neighbor's or younger nieces
and nephews.
My niece, Jean, remembers
how Mama Freeney dreamed
ways to help people in
situations, to know when
and what to do.
My mother would talk about
who she had seen in a dream.
People dead and gone
and what they had told
her should be done.
There's a story I've been
thinking about that I
want to tell in my voice.
There is a group of
woman, they are women,
and they are also spirits.
They live all over the world,
among the world's people,
and they are connected
to each other,
but their connection is secret.
The women are all African,
because we are all African.
They are the daughters
of the first mother.
The women carry a knowledge
and tradition of protection,
a wisdom of transformation.
It is not a spoken knowledge.
It is not something
anyone talks about.
It's in the body, glimpsed
from an angle when
they are slicing onions, or
braiding hair, or setting
the limbs of a poem.
Mostly, you can see
it when they dance,
or when they are
sitting utterly still.
It is a gene, an
element of their selves
that rests in the mitochondria.
It vitalizes their bloodline.
These women are
vessels, and founts.
They are a source.
The ones who remember what it
is to be human in the world.
They preserve this wisdom
in the art of their lives,
cultivating it in stories,
in the way they move,
in the paintings and
pots they sculpt.
In the fearlessness
of their fighting.
They carry this
knowledge in their bodies
as they go about their tasks and
the encounters of their days.
And they pass it on quietly.
Their children, all
of their children,
have a bit of the inheritance.
It's like a seed, but it won't
bloom until they too are older.
And it is the female mind
that passes the wisdom along.
These women are of every
race, and every shade of skin,
and texture, and color of hair.
Their bodies are of every
size, but all of their spirits
are tall.
They are physical,
and they are ethereal.
These are the Pachamamas,
the protective spirits
of the earth.
So named by the
people of the Andes
mountains and the
Kichwa language.
They are the most
ancient spirit mothers.
Sisters to [INAUDIBLE]
and [INAUDIBLE].
They are all connected.
Wherever they are they
recognize each other.
You know, my mother
told me there were many
Harriet's, Harriet Tubman's.
She told me whispering, as if
it was something to be shrouded,
still to be protected,
this fact, this sisterhood,
so that they could rise again
to help us when we need them.
My great grandmother, grandma
rah, said she had met Harriett.
Said she knew of other women
to, who stole into the swamps,
into the night peril's.
One, two, three, seven
people behind them.
Following their lead
and out of slavery.
In my story these women
are all Pachamamas.
They are part of that
circle of protection,
that circle of grace
that has been here
since the beginning
of the world,
since the beginning of people.
They have promised to take
care of each others children
all over the world.
So you cannot tell who
will love you by race,
who will shelter
you just by nation.
They are all our mothers, and
we are all their children.
In slavery time some of
these women look like.
The caramel tan of
their faces, muscled
forearms, and exposed feet
contrasted with the stark cream
color of their legs,
of their backs,
when the masters lifted
their clothes to beat them.
These women, all colors,
helped each other.
The ones who worked in the
big house sending messages
to others in the field.
Tell [? Menty ?] to go tonight.
They gonna sell her and
her children tomorrow.
The ones who worked in
the cane, in the cotton,
in the smokehouse, dredging
out the canals for muck,
chopping wood and making
bricks alongside the men,
found a meeting ground in
a hush harbor someplace.
Steady patting feet and
the backs of their babies,
moaning in a presence that's
shored up their hearts for more
struggle, more strength.
And these women in slavery time
who had been through so much,
whipped until they bled.
Their hands scarred.
Their faces and breasts scarred.
Because these were the
most beautiful parts
of their bodies.
These women found their way
into the Pachamama circle.
And there's something
that they must do,
the women in this circle.
They have to go to water,
to a river, to an estuary,
to the ocean side if
they can reach it.
Even just to a deep well if
there's no other water around.
They have to go to water, and
dip their cups into the water.
Dip their pales into
the war, and drink.
There's a root they find nearby.
They find a plant where roots
go deep down toward the water.
A thick root, bitter in taste.
And they dig this
and they share it.
And the newest one, the one
who is coming into the circle,
the put a little of the
chewed root at her temple,
and at the top of her head,
and they cover her head
with a cloth.
She sleeps there by the water.
And they leave
food by the water.
What they have, they offer.
If it's Summer, maybe some
corn, or a plate of greens
cooked up with a
little salt pork.
If it's winter, maybe
they'll leave corn meal,
or make some [INAUDIBLE] and
set it there with stewed beans.
In slavery time, the
Pachamamas were Harriets.
And later they were
[? Alaidas ?] and Bessies.
And they became
Sue Bailey Thurman,
and Elizabeth
[INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE],
and Katherine Dunham,
and Mina, and Billy,
and Shirley Graham Du Bois, and
Ella Baker, and Septima Calrk,
and my mama, and grand
mama and great-grand mama.
They are Cleo Parker
Robinson, and Ann Brady,
and Dolores Huerta.
And Rachel know,
Mary King Jackson.
We have so many.
Women who stand
mid-current in the river,
giving fresh water
to the tribes.
Showing us how to be well again.
They are the
warrior reconcilers,
the healer sorcerers.
They are the scientists,
conjurers, guides.
And they are mothering,
they are mothering nature.
Drawing their circles of
protection and power around us,
even as we look elsewhere.
Teaching about how to be
family, how to live like family.
How to live with some strength
and care in your hands.
How to live With some
joy in your mouth.
And how to put your hands
gentle on where the wound is
and draw out the grief.
How to urge some kind
of mercy into the shock
stained earth so
that good will grow.
These Pachamama's, let me
tell you something about them.
Let me tell you something
about the way they mother.
They stand sometimes just
a little bit on that side
of uncertainty, just across the
edge of where you don't always
know what they might do.
What they are capable of.
I think about
[INAUDIBLE] the orrishas
of salt waters, the sea mother.
She is quintessential,
abundance, and maternal energy,
affectionate, generous with
her love and her resources,
feeding the world from the
affluent waters of her womb.
But the ocean is a mighty
woman, Rachel, and [INAUDIBLE],
when necessary, or as
the moment strikes her,
can discipline with a swiftness
insisted and devastating,
even wrathful.
Imposing her strictures
with fierceness and force,
belying the steady regular
rhythm of her day to day whims.
So there is this about
the Pachamamas, too.
The great surge, the
mountain, the whirl wind
that rises quickly
from the solar plexus
and rushes wherever it must go,
lifting grounded things high
into the air.
This is the circle
I'm telling you about.
All this is the circle.
There are a lot
of things, Rachel,
that the family
doesn't talk about.
Mystic things that
occupied Grandma Rye,
and her herbs, her
medicines, her silences.
If you listen to the older
cousins, to my sisters,
without asking them
directly you'll hear.
Some of the things that Camp
say about how people were afraid
of my mother, Mama Freeney.
Well, that's where Mama Freeney.
Got it from, from Grandma Rye.
Also, the very quick
way that Alma always
says our great
grandmother was Christian,
as if to head off any
possibilities to the contrary.
Some of these things are
secret, and some of them
will never be spoken.
Not from rule or
restriction, but because they
don't live in the language.
They live in the body.
They live in the gesture, and
the way the rays of the sun
radiate off of the
Pachamamas' backs,
from their shoulders,
their heads, their hands.
Some of this is not
something you talk about.
It's in the body,
like the Holy Ghost.
It's in bone, in blood, in the
soft space under the tongue,
resting."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
That's very kind of you.
Thank you.
So, I'm excited
to talk to people,
to hear your questions,
and your comments.
Yes?
Wow.
That was just fabulous.
You raised-- you're doing
really interesting comparison
work between Candomble
and Afro-American
religiosity, which I think is
just-- I have so many questions
to ask, but I want to ask
one specific one, which
has to do with the encroachment
of Evangelical Christians
in Brazil.
And the number of
Afro-Brazilian's who
see Evangelical Christians
as a sources of spiritual
is important, as a
[INAUDIBLE] of that.
How do you understand that?
Because clearly,
the Catholic church
failed for many people who seek
out in many of the churches
some deepness that
is important to them.
And we know how
that is also being
driven against the
Afro-Brazilian religious
traditions.
So I was just wondering how
you understand that question?
Would you remind me
of your name, please?
Jim Green.
Jim Green.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jim.
Yes.
The way in which the
Neo-Pentecostal Evangelical
churches in Brazil--
Could you use the microphone?
Of course.
It's a little easier to hear.
The way in which Neo-Pentecostal
Evangelical churches have both
built a very strong presence
among particularly working
class Afro-Brazilians, and at
the same time have demonized
Afro-Brazilian religions
is something that is
of tremendous-- a cause of
tremendous distress to people
who practice Candomble,
[INAUDIBLE], [INAUDIBLE],
other Afro-Brazilian traditions.
And it has, I think,
a fascinating irony,
because Pentecostalism, as such,
is a tradition that comes out
of, in many ways,
African-American religiosity,
with the Azusa street
folks out in Los
Angeles at the end of
the 19th the beginning
of the 20th century.
What is particularly disturbing,
I find in my conversations
with folks who are
on the ground dealing
with these issues in
Brazil, is that what
the Neo-Pentecostal
churches are essentially
saying to the Afro-Brazilians
who come into there community
of participants or
believers is that who
and what your ancestors were,
and believed, and practiced
is demonic.
And in order for you to get
away from, or be converted away
from, the devil, you have
to let go of your history,
you have to let go
of your ancestry,
you have to let go of what
grounds you in the world
as a person of African descent.
And so it is not only
distressing, in many ways
it's abusive at the level of
denying the essential humanity
of people of African
descent who have
practiced indigenous
religions for many, many, many
generations.
So what I find is
that particularly
within the community
of activists coming out
of Candomble, there is alwayy--
in all of the manifestations
and all of the demonstrations
and public efforts
at bringing attention
to different kinds
of inequalities, there's
always the insertion
of the issue around respect
for Afro-Brazilian religions,
and the necessity of
marking the respect
for the religion as part
of respect for the people.
So that if you really have
respect for Afro-Brazilians
as people, if Black
Lives Matter in Brazil,
then black religions--
Afro-Atlantic religions also
matter as valid traditional
ways of connecting
with the infinite.
So, yes, it's a serious issue.
Yeah, I really found
this to be rich.
I deeply appreciate it.
I'm glad you're here.
Thank you.
Both when I introduced
you I was glad you were
hear, but now I'm even
more glad you're here.
So I'm curious about
something, and I
want to-- forgive me
for not looking at you,
I want to see if I can get
it straight from my scribbles
here.
Ultimately what I'm going
to ask you is three very,
I think-- well I'm going to ask
you three questions that sort
of help situate what you said
in a more critical framework,
or if you don't like that,
I want you to tell me
why you know like that, right?
So because you're doing
a lot of work here.
So with this kind of wisdom
from the spirit world,
if we just kind of
provisionally frame it
as that, so this wisdom
from the spirit world,
there epistemological
claims in there.
There's some other
kind of intelligence.
There's existential
claim you're making.
That it provides meaning--
it gives our humanity
a kind of meaning.
A political claim, resources for
social justice, and activism.
There's psychological
claims you're making,
alternatives modes of
mating sense of the world.
You also build in a critical
claim about the discipline
of religious
studies, it includes
more than it reveals
when it begins
to talk about black folk.
It doesn't have the grammar.
So and then there are
claims about the body,
and we can go on.
And I'm on board
with this entirely.
It's very rich, I
think, a kind of poetic,
synthetic, sort
of hybrid reading.
It's lovely in many ways.
So here is the kind
of critical framework
I'm going to ask if you want to
play footsie with, if you will.
So, what happens
to this richness?
So if we look at
African-American life,
just part of the story about the
spirit mama's-- the Pachamamas
here-- was about water.
I'm thinking of Flint.
It's about river's, I'm thinking
about places that are dried up.
So, connected to that, can you
tell us some of the problems--
some of the ways in which
these spirit traditions have
themselves done forms of harm,
and how might one mitigate
against those in your reading?
And there finally,
and this one's
a little more theoretical, but
this is just my own curiosity.
This is where my brain goes.
So the spirit wisdom,
and I'm invested
in the political
concerns that you raised,
what is the catalyzing event,
to use a theoretical term, what
is the event that takes the
Spirit works and turns it
into a political work?
Now that's a bifurcation
I know that in many ways
you don't want.
However, it seems to be that
there have to be effective ways
to talk about the
distinction to show how
one might collapse more easily.
So I'm going to shut
up there and see
if I've thrown something
that's useful for you
to share with us.
And if not you can
ignore all that.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
So let me start with
the second piece,
and tell me your
first name again?
Andre.
Brother Andre.
So my sense, and I'll
start with the US context
and then we can make some
comparisons to Brazil.
But my sense in looking at
the-- both the writings,
but particularly the interviews,
conversations with women
who have been involved in the
southern freedom movement,
and who talk about
the way in which
these resources of music,
and spirit, and prayer,
and visioning
influenced their work.
I don't know that they
would say that there
is a meaningful distinction
between those experiences
as experiences separate
from tools of inspiration
for their work as activists.
And let me go back
maybe to the example
that I gave you of Ruby
Sales and the spirituals
that she learned
from her grandmother.
So as she-- in the story
that I shared with you,
the piece that I didn't say
was that she was actually
so shocked and distressed
by what happened,
her friend being
shot in front of her
and the threats to her life,
that she actually became mute
for several weeks.
She wasn't able
to speak, but she
was able to sing these songs.
And for Ruby, the songs
were so integrally
a part of the
instruments that she
and her family for
generations had
used to build reservoirs
and resources of strength,
that she could use them for
whatever kinds of strength
she needed, whether it was
in this kind of extreme case,
being able to speak the truth
about this man who murdered
somebody in front
of her, but who
was threatening her and
her family with death
if she testified.
Or it might have
been a simpler case
of having to confront a
friend or relative who
she was in some-- no,
having some conflict with.
So, you know, whether it's
a smaller matter or a larger
matter, the point is that the
songs, as a spiritual resource,
as a mystic resource,
were something
that she would call
on no matter what.
And so, my sense
is that she's not--
she didn't see them separately
as a tool for her activism
separate from other
parts of her life,
but she saw herself as
someone in this line of people
part of who's
responsibility in the world
was to continue
the freedom seeking
impulse of the
African-American community.
That's just part of how
she understood herself.
So I don't know
if some of it had
to do with her coming
of age in a time
and in a place
where there was just
a certain kind of
understanding and encouragement
to that kind of work, so
that there wasn't a need
to say that we have to--
that some of these things
are used only for a secular
means, and some of these
are used for spiritual
means, and some of these
are used for
movement organ zing.
That they were all a
part of the arsenal
that she had available to her
as a young woman in Alabama,
who were raised by people who
felt a sense of connection
to generations of
folks before them
who had access to these things.
I guess what I'm saying is
that I don't know that they are
absolutely instruments and tools
for the work of social justice,
but I don't know that there's
a matter of separating that out
from the way that people
just live their lives.
I don't know if that's helpful
Tell me some more about where
that question is rooted.
And I'm also
interested in what you
were saying about-- the question
about where these traditions
may have been unhelpful.
Well say more about that then.
No.
That's-- so I'm asking--
Oh.
You gave the example of Flint.
I was just saying--
on that one I
was saying, not to diminish
the beauty of what you laid out
here today, but to
say, how can we use
these things as resources now?
And why that may be less
accessible than you and I might
like them to be?
That is, how come we
don't have millions
of folks acting like your mom?
OK.
Answer.
Well, I guess the first
place I'd start with that,
Andre, when my mom was
living and she and my dad
would do workshops often with
people at schools of religion,
seminaries, but
also with people who
were doing religiously,
spiritually grounded
social justice work.
And one of thing that they
tried to do very often
was to help people understand
the way in which we are,
all of us, connected to
traditions of people who
have a tremendous
amount of faith and hope
for what the best of
the country could be.
Now, we don't, I think,
as a society in general,
have a lot of encouragement
in that direction.
certainly not from
mainstream media,
or even from some
of the methodologies
that we use to teach,
to kind of keep
our minds focused on those
generations of people before us
who were really
committed to turning
this scarred and beautiful place
into the best that it could be.
But I think that that
tradition actually does exist,
and actually still
exists for many of us.
But it's not always in the
places that we look for.
Certainly the break
down of the US
as a major industrial
conflict has
meant that, whether in
terms of individual families
or communities, there's
a lot less coherence.
Not just for African-American's
but for working people
as a whole, then there was
when my mother was younger,
back in the 60's and 70's.
But at the same time, I think
that there's something about
the way in which people coalesce
around the wisdom keepers
in their own lives
and communities ,
so whether that's mothers,
grandmothers, uncles, aunts.
And if it's not
in blood families,
extended family or
folks who you go
to to get some counsel
in difficult moments.
I think that there are ways
and traditions of accessing
a larger understanding
about what it is to be human
in the world that come from
paying attention to those kinds
of relationships, and paying
attention to those kinds
of wisdom's.
But it's not something
that we can easily
have access to from-- in the
way that mainstream [INAUDIBLE].
