Exotic or Dangerous: Anti-Blackness & Orientalism
There are specific reasons why Asian spirituality + healing modalities are 🤑 commodified and exotified while African continental and diasporic modalities face dog-whistle religious racism.
🚨Spoiler alert! It's orientalism + anti-Blackness.
As someone who has studied and practiced both continental and diasporic East Asian and West African healing + spiritual modalities for more than a decade, I can say with certainty that the life-giving medicine in both regions is potent. But in the popular imagination, one is exotic and the other is dangerous.
The psychic violence of what Danielle Boaz calls "religious racism" has always been directly connected to material and legal acts of violence against Black practitioners, including in the present day. This is the history of harm that far-right politicians are conjuring when they invoke the signifier of Black people eating animals.
In the white supremacist imagination, the ancestors of Ayiti are a particular target because they used their spiritual technologies to overthrow their enslavers. European and Global North powers have been punishing Haiti ever since.
❤️🩹 Here are resources I've curated as a small practice of religious reparations:
Bridges of Healing: Rediscoving Kinship Across African, Pacific Islander, and Asian Diasporas
Cécile Fatiman and Petra Carabalí, Late Eighteenth-Century Haiti and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba
Palestinian ancestor Edward Said created the powerful theoretical framework of orientalism to interpret the ways the Global North exerts power across Asia. Some of his key insights are:
“The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.”
“In a sense the limitations of Orientalism are… the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region.”
Specific to acupuncture and the herbal traditions of present-day Vietnam, Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, and beyond, Tyler Phan has done powerful work to uncover the orientalism at play. He writes, “According to recent demographic research, the acupuncture profession in the US is over 75% white. The history shows how it got that way.” Read more below.
“The seeds for medical scapegoatism in California first appeared in the 1860’s. Whereas in the 1850’s the early Chinese immigrants had been admired for their industry and frugality, by the 1860’s the Chinese were considered to be “an inferior race” and a “degraded” people. By the 1870’s, the racist argument had broadened in scope, and the Chinese were viewed as “a social, moral and political curse to the community.”
In the dominant imagination, African continental and diasporic spiritual and healing practices are coded as dangerous “black magic” - a direct, colorist attack on powerful liberatory technologies. Meanwhile, equivalent modalities from the Asian continent are exotic and desirable to claim and consume.
Unfortunately, Asian communities do have a history of unwilling complicity and active buy-in to anti-Blackness and white supremacy.
Yet beyond these dehumanizing perceptions and harm is the truth that African and Asian people across the globe have always used our folkways to heal ourselves and our communities. I invite you to join me in finding solace and inspiration in the way the ancestors have left for us to follow.