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Shamanism, Racism, and Hip-Hop Culture Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice Series Editors Dwight N Shamanism, Racism, and Hip-Hop Culture Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice Series Editors Dwight N. Hopkins and Linda E. Thomas Published by Palgrave Macmillan “How Long this Road”: Race, Religion, and the Legacy of C. Eric Lincoln Edited by Alton B. Pollard, III and Love Henry Whelchel, Jr. White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity By James W. Perkinson The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God By Sylvester A. Johnson African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod By Anthony B. Pinn Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic Edited by Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins Transformative Pastoral Leadership in the Black Church By Jeffery L. Tribble, Sr. Shamanism, Racism, and Hip Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion By James W. Perkinson Shamanism, Racism, and Hip-Hop Culture Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion James W. Perkinson SHAMANISM, RACISM, AND HIP-HOP CULTURE © James W. Perkinson, 2005. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-6786-2 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53031-1 ISBN 978-1-4039-7918-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403979186 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2005 10987654321 Dedicated to the genius and incorrigibility of those who have resisted This page intentionally left blank Contents Series Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv I. White Supremacy, African Sorcery, and Euro-Christianity 1. Beyond Occasional Whiteness 3 2. Modernity’s Witchcraft Practice 17 II. Black Creativity, Shamanic Remedy, and Afro-Polyphony 3. The Gift/Curse of “Second Sight” 45 4. Constructing the Break 85 III. Hip-Hop Ferocity,American Mortality, and Trance Trickery 5. Rap Rapture and Manic Mortality 117 6. From Mega-Lith to Mack Daddy 137 IV. Market Liturgy, Indigenous Pedagogy, and the White Body 7. Monstrous Polyphony/Tricky Antiphony 161 8. The Body of White Space 179 Notes 203 Bibliography 215 Index 225 This page intentionally left blank Series Editors’ Preface Following up on his groundbreaking first book, White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity, Jim Perkinson continues to gift us with the novel (and usually hidden) self-examination of a white middle class, middle aged, American male. Perkinson begins with the unique- ness of his childhood socialization between African American con- strained space and white American voluntary boundaries, including the borders and taboos of interracial dating. The vignette exposure of himself serves as metaphor for the larger narrative argument that anchors the entire book. The result is a series of cogent theoretical chapters on Witchcraft and Shamanism, markers of white and black beings, respectively in the United States. Moreover, Perkinson is an accomplished poet—as well as a community organizer and professor who has lived in inner city Detroit for a couple of decades. Consequently, the rhythm and rhyme of his writing show us how words on paper can actually talk to the reader and bring meaning to the ear as words in song mode. The theoretical academic approach couples with the popular poetic form because Witchcraft and Shamanism morph into disparate configurations. Here, Perkinson performs the act of conjuror. How? By betraying the silence over white male racial entitlement and siding with the black community’s syncretistic creativity of survival and double living. Furthermore, Perkinson writes this book to act out conjuration on himself. In fact, as he asserts directly, part of the journey of producing this book is to turn the scalpel of knowledge discovery on himself—what he calls “self-exorcism.” For conjuror (magician?) Perkinson, the attendant question is: what are the cultural and spiritual underpinnings of modern white supremacy and black political (and spiritual) counter-resistance? Witchcraft is white supremacy in the United States, or, more exactly, it is what the structure, culture, and psyche of white America carry out x Series Editors’ Preface in effect on black people in the same country. American identity is constituted by white entitlement and black disenfranchisement. At root, to be an American is to purchase ownership in the historical memory and current acceptance of white Christianity. For, Perkinson persuasively substantiates, white Christianity birthed and continues to suckle the Witch of white supremacy. Without Christianity, no white skin privileges. One could rapidly add, “no male perks,” too. Racialized witchcraft defiles the black body by casting a curse or spell on ebony physiognomy. Othering people of African descent within U.S. borders, simultaneously, as if like magic, creates the identity of white people. Both groupings are part of a symbiotic ontol- ogy baked into a witches’ brew. Ultimately, witchcraft harms black and white folk. But blacks, in the conceptualization of Perkinson, aren’t waiting for that “ultimately.” They have crafted their own spiritual–psychic– material way of being in the world. African Americans transformed themselves into the practice of Shamanism—a reading back from the position of the bottom, a comprehensive and multilevel cavalry of resistance. The black Shamans offer the best outlet for Witchcraft. Shamanism calls Christianity back to its primordial or initial radical- ity of the founders of the religion. This is so because enslaved Africans/African Americans did and still do re-appropriate modalities of negative (white) Christian witchcraft and make these forms into a magical likeness of what Christianity was meant to be two thousand years ago. To indicate these concurrent activities of curse and counter- resistance, Perkinson presents two chapters on Hip-Hop. Jim Perkinson’s book represents one definite dimension of the black religion/womanist thought/social justice series—pioneering conceptual work and boundary pushing effort. The series will publish both authored and edited manuscripts that have depth, breadth, and theoret- ical edge, and will address both academic and nonspecialist audiences. It will produce works engaging any dimension of black religion or womanist thought as they pertain to social justice. Womanist thought is a new approach in the study of African American women’s perspec- tives. The series will include a variety of African American religious expressions. By this we mean traditions such as Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Humanism, African diasporic practices, religion and gender, religion and black gays/lesbians, ecological justice issues, African American religiosity and its relation to African religions, new black religious movements (e.g., Daddy Grace, Father Divine, or the Nation of Islam), or religious dimensions Series Editors’ Preface xi in African American “secular” experiences (such as the spiritual aspects of aesthetic efforts like the Harlem Renaissance and literary giants such as James Baldwin, or the religious fervor of the Black Consciousness movement, or the religion of compassion in the black women’s club movement). Dwight N. Hopkins, University of Chicago Divinity School Linda E. Thomas, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This work represents the fruit of many years of quiet incubation and not so quiet cogitation and wrestling. In many ways it is merely a late and continuous effort to give expression to a depth first opened up in me at age four in my backyard before a huge sycamore tree as after- noon shadows lengthened and my young body first felt the premonition of loss. It was a sweet sadness that touched indefinably that day and has haunted ever since. Later adult years in the inner city of Detroit, when hot sun bubbled tar seams in the concrete and ribs cooking on steel drum stoves announced Labor Day respite from work, a different kind of sweetness, attended by a different kind of sadness, would crosscut my earlier experience. In either case, something of the ineffa- bility of beauty, appearing side by side with its demise, has marked my memory and provoked an impossible quest to express ever since. Whatever of ancestry and unrequited struggle for justice, whatever muted voices of haints and saints and devils such irresolvable longing partakes, I owe it—them—my life and my creativity. More prosaically, I wish to thank my parents, my many companions over the years of laboring in urban enclaves of poverty and university ghettos of literacy, my teachers on the street and in the classroom alike, my students who have challenged me to dig deeper, confess more profoundly, laugh more robustly, think more complexly. And
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