.JPG "Earthen Spirituality")
Living within a living, loving planet
Black Lives Matter
Myrtle’s Medicine
Apr 14th
The theme of this essay highlights an excellent example of embodied ways of knowing, especially that which has been nearly destroyed by western culture and prejudice.
Myrtle’s Medicine
by Kinitra Brooks,
Artwork by John Jennings
In this essay and podcast, rootworker and conjure feminist Kinitra Brooks reflects on the meaning and beauty of embodied ways of knowing. In a world where the cosmologies of Black women are continually erased and excluded from knowledge traditions, Kinitra revives the lineage that ended with her late great-grandmother, Mama Myrt, who first introduced her to rootworking traditions and inspired her life’s work. In recognizing historical examples of intellectual matriarchs such as Nanny of the Maroons, Zora Neal Hurston, Tituba, and more, she names conjure feminism as a frame where intellectual traditions and rootworking traditions are woven together.
Until next week,
The Emergence Magazine Team
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/myrtles-medicine/
Black Lives Matter
Jul 11th
Black Lives Matter: The Baton Rouge photo hailed as ‘legendary’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36759711
In 1958, I opened the bundles and distributed the Indianapolis Star morning newspaper for our local news agent. There on the front page was a photo of a white man kicking a fallen black news reporter on a street in Indiana. A few years earlier when I delivered on a paper route, my black good friend and neighbour and I entered a restaurant in Peru, Indiana where I chose to buy two cartons of chocolate milk for us. The proprietor said to me. “You can drink yours in here but he will have to drink his outside.” I walked out in a blind rage. My friend calmed me down and said don’t worry about it, I’m used to that. Indiana is not a Southern state.
When president Obama was elected, I thought that finally the American racial illness is healed. How did I get it so wrong?
Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. Yet:
“Calling for a greater sense of urgency in addressing America’s “broader set of racial disparities,” U.S. President Barack Obama told reporters on Thursday that blacks were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites last year.
The Guardian, however, pegged the 2015 rate of death for young black men, specifically, as five times higher than white men of the same age.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/number-of-black-people-killed-by-us-police-still-no-stats-1.3670513