What does race have to do with religion and cults?
tl;dr EVERYTHING
Whose religion gets to be religion? Whose religion is a cult? Welcome to the core question of the semester, y’all.
What we’re reading/listening to:
- Keeping It 101, “Intersectionality”
- Lorde, “Open Letter to Mary Daly”
- Bayoumi, “Racing Religion”
- Giovanni, “Ego Tripping”
- Shange, “a laying on of hands”
- I also uploaded a basic intro to NRMs slideshow — check it out
Discussion prompts:
- How does Lorde help us understand intersectionality?
- What does Bayoumi mean by “religion determines race” (50)?
- How do Shange and Giovanni help us imagine Black womanhood as Divine?
- Based on our assignments for today, what does race have to do with religion and cults?
Intersectionality
Word of the day/week/century, folks. Crenshaw theorized intersectionality to address overlapping oppressions, and most specifically oppressions overlapping in the experiences and lives of Black women.
As. Prof. Morgenstein Fuerst said on the episode: “[Crenshaw] said that…she was looking to think about the ways in which sometimes Black women’s experiences of discrimination and oppression are similar to white women’s experiences of discrimination and oppression, and other times Black women’s experiences of discrimination and oppression are similar to Black men’s experiences of discrimination and oppression. But as a population that is both Black and women, Black women’s experiences of discrimination and oppression are not only about race, nor are they only about gender… The takeaway message — and I think what’s vital to us here — is that Crenshaw argued that divvying up Black women’s unique experiences into ‘woman and ‘Black; totally hides the ways that discrimination and oppression both work. So to rethink discriminations and oppressions we need to think intersectionally.”
We used Audre Lorde’s response to Mary Daly to illustrate how oppressions can intersect, and how complex identities can and should help us rethink the Divine.
Within the community of women, racism is a reality force in my life as it is not in yours. The white women with hoods on in Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have to say, but they will shoot me on site. If you and I were to walk into a classroom of women in Dismal Gulch, Alabama, where the only thing they knew about each of us is that we were both lesbian radical feminists, you would see exactly what I mean. The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries to deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonalities as well as our difference for them beyond sisterhood is still racism.
- Audre Lorde, Open Letter to Mary Daly
Lorde insists that just because she and Daly experience discrimination and oppression on the basis of gender, that doesn’t mean their total experiences of discrimination and oppression are the same. Nor will images and stories about white goddesses necessarily be liberatory to Black women or women of color.
Evan asked a helpful question over on twitter:
check out the thread for more on Daly & Lorde!
Also Carolyn made Daly memes and they’re great.
Racing Religion
Religion determines race.
- Bayoumi, “Racing Religion,” (50)
Bayoumi helps us think about how religions are racialized: that is, how we come to associate religious belonging with certain physical characteristics, mannerisms, languages, regions, and other ways of being in the world. His article demonstrates that race — and specifically whiteness — is not fixed. (And Carolyn illustrated the contingency of whiteness for us on Twitter!)
Pay particular attention to the ways religion is racialized on national borders: people become white (or not) while attempting to enter the U.S.; they are made white (or not) via forms and file clerks. We’ll see a similar racialization process — what Weisenfeld calls the formation of religio-racial identity — in New World A-Coming. We’ll also spend a lot more time considering the ways immigration legislation shaped the American religious landscape.
Black Womanhood as Divine
I included these last two pieces because too often when we hear stories about Black women, they are stories about overcoming adversity or surviving trauma. Those stories are valid, but they are not the only or the most important things about Black women.
Several of the groups we’re studying this semester were led by Black women, and I wanted us to engage with celebrations of Black womanhood as a manifestation of the Divine.
Giovanni, “Ego Tripping”
The first piece I had you look at is poet and scholar Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego Tripping.”
I turned myself
into myself
and was Jesus
- Nikki Giovanni, “Ego Tripping”
You can see her reading her poem here:
But when I think of this poem, I always think of the way it was performed on “A Different World,” which was a spin-off of the Cosby show focused on a fictional Historically Black College. In this clip, you can see the students confronting damaging stereotypes of Black women and girls (like Aunt Jemima) and reclaiming a powerful historical lineage — a theme we’ll return to when we read Dr. Weisenfeld’s New World A-Coming. Check it out:
(If you look closely, you can see a very young Jada Pinkett-Smith among the dancers.)
Note the religious imagery in this poem, and that religion here is a source of power rather than only oppression.
Shange, “a laying on of hands”
This movement is an excerpt of Ntozake Shange’s epic choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. The section you listened to, “a laying on of hands,” comes at the end of the piece and in many ways resolves the action of the play.
Shange plays with religious language — “laying on of hands” refers to healing or blessing in a Christian context, but she’s also referring to sex here, implying that there is something sacred in laying her hands on someone, having them lay their hands on her, “the holiness of myself released.”
Pay attention to the way this litany allows the actors, all Black women, to reclaim and celebrate their bodies as divine.
i found god in myself
& i loved her/i loved her fiercely- Ntozake Shange, “for colored girls”
We’ll hear these themes emerge again in a number of the groups we’re thinking with this semester. Keep an eye out for their recurrence.
