There are many things I’ve been trying to articulate lately. In an attempt to explain to people relatively new to reclaiming their ancestral spirituality, it has been a real trial to put to words what is wrong both with “traditionalists” who’ve been tainted by colonial influence, and for whom this was done because it was convenient to existing overly oppressive systems, and the “new age” infiltrators attempting to paste Theosophy into African and diaspora spiritual systems.
The easy part has been to say what is and isn’t traditional, and what was good and bad about said traditions. The hard part is to get people to let go of colonialist definitions for deeper things than surface ideology or which “religion” like defining “freedom”.
I see people using words like “independent, critical,” and “free thinker”, things that as you can see if you’ve been reading me awhile, I tussled with years and years and years ago. For a lot of folk though, this is new. They think that because they appear to be transgressive that they are free. They don’t get that transgression is relative, and freedom doesn’t really exist in absolute terms. Yeah, I’m going to say that much like African American men tend to fall down the rabbit hole of “white” mediocrity when it comes to things like “men’s rights”, forgetting that this has to be approached in terms of human rights, same as feminism but more crucial because in real life practical terms, men are most often the ones in positions of economic and political authority. You can’t be pro men really if you are not pro labor, pro parent and pro choice, and for damn sure pro LGBTQIA+. Once you get into pro-only-some-men-who-conform-to-colonial-norms, you fall backwards into being a self fucking mechanism rather than a whole person. Your transgression did nothing to free you.
But hold on there, before you start high fiving me in the plasma realm for pwning the cons yet again, this is where we all gotta take a step back and consider what our own transgression is serving.
I’ll give you a minute.
Put a pin in this.
