11 Search results for "hoodoo"

The Sensual Betrayal of ‘Sinners’
by Michael J. Ivory, Jr. The day I told my Pentecostal preacher parents I didn’t want to attend church with them anymore, I remember feeling a profound freedom. For once, I chose my Black queer body’s peace over witnessing my existence being raked over hellfire coals. No more shallowed breath at the altar. No more […]
Erotic Communion: Black Women’s Pleasure in ‘Sinners’
by Juahl Ganaway In a scene ripped from The Sugar Shack, the character Pearline (played by the stunning Jayme Lawson) stalks across the stage purring the lyrics to “Pale, Pale, Moon,” the Brittany Howard-penned song that feels more like an invocation than a performance. “I wanna sing Like I hear the crickets do I wanna […]
African Traditional Religions prepared me to grieve my mother
I’ve learned it’s best not to try to control how the memories of my mother show up, or what emotions they are wearing when they enter. This one is dressed in a rare crossbreed of inconsolable laughter and a stabbing sob, and it’s seeping out of my iphone from wherever the speaker is located on […]
When the Ancestors tell you to go to therapy
There aren’t enough accessible therapists to go around. I met this reality after an Ifa divination that I got while I was in Cuba, and my dreams for an entire year afterward, told me that I needed to focus on my mental health. My ancestors were LOUD about the mental work that I needed to […]
Exclusive Interview: Hari Ziyad reveals the cover of their memoir
RaceBaitr editor-in-chief and writer Hari Ziyad describes their upcoming book Black Boy Out of Time (Little A, March 1, 2021) as part memoir, part social commentary, but its ambitions push it beyond even this genre-bending interpretation. What began as an attempt to detail their life as a Black queer person growing up with 18 siblings […]
How I use ancestor veneration to navigate my Mother’s Death
by Hess Love Sometimes I feel like a motherless child… a long way from home- Negro Spiritual Sunday is Mother’s Day. And the grief of losing my mother regularly brings me to my knees. I don’t imagine this day being any different. Sometimes my grief is a distant shore, sometimes the water of it wades […]
The Spotlight
BYP is launching our featured writers’ program, called The Spotlight. These four writers will publish one piece per month for a year on topics of their choice. These writers have been hand-picked by us and we’re excited to welcome them onboard. Here are our current Featured Writers! Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His […]
Millennials aren’t skipping church, the Black Church is skipping us
Washington Post columnist, Christine Emba, published a piece on Oct. 27, titled Why millenials are skipping church and not going back. Emba declared millennials were interested in gaming, ambitiously building their careers, or just too busy to make time to attend service. While Emba isn’t necessarily wrong in her assessment, I couldn’t help but notice […]
How learning to work with my Ancestors created a relationship of reciprocity and parental support
by Taylor Amari Little My Ancestors are my protectors. No, really. Truly ride or die. It is imperative that you know this. As you probably know, sometimes parents ain’t shit. Though this is nothing unusual of cisgender heterosexual men in U.S. society. For me, that was my father who was absent for the majority of […]
Call me Akata: Reclaiming our birthright as Indigenous and African people born on American soil
by Chelsea Neason In 1964, Malcolm X made history with “The Ballot or the Bullet”. With this speech, he proclaimed a bone-shaking truth: Black people born in America are not Americans. In Detroit, MI during one of the most impactful decades of visible Black resistance in the United States, Malcolm declared: “We are Africans, and […]
The Black church isn’t one-dimensional either: How Gullah-Geechee people subvert Christianity to retain Black history
By Ari Colston-Johnson To many, the Black Church calls to mind horror stories of cisheteropatriarchy and theologies shaped by colonialism, white supremacy, and respectability politics. But coming of age in the Gullah-Geechee African Methodist Episcopal (AME) tradition, the Black Church was a foundation for my radical politics, a space for community and Afrocentric syncretism, and […]