African American Folk Healing

Conclusion

Conclusion I do Reiki, I do the mind-body integration and the whole brainwork, and I do the color therapy . . . and flower essences. . . . And I use gemstones, and crystals and crystal elixirs. I use some vibrational work related to the ancestors. That’s very African and Native American based, but [what] I’m doing is a kind of new form that I got in a dream state from my ancestors. . . . One thing that I did say, even when I was 5 or 6 years old, is that God has been everywhere on the planet and has given a message to all people. And all of those messages are correct, nobody has a patent on the truth. And Jesus didn’t get everywhere, and God is not that limited. —Sokara, interview with author This book has considered various aspects of the fully American story of African American folk healing. Through slavery and Jim Crow, black bodies were socially constructed in negative frameworks to justify their oppression. Black Americans countered this dehumanization with other constructions drawn from a cultural base that retains African cognitive orientation. Thus, the social construction of black bodies has overlapped with the cultural constructions of health and wellness. Throughout this exploration, we have seen how African Americans have interacted with white and Native Americans, and we have seen the processes of hybridity writ large as African Americans have used healing to counter negative American images. Many of the voices and views we have encountered are often unseen or misunderstood in the wider American cultural landscape. The misunderstandings become part of the story as African Americans interact with oppression and respond to their marginalized status through concepts of wellness that are grounded in holistic views of the human person. To intentionally break that holistic framework—as 163 white slave owners and racists have done—was believed by black people to result in serious physical, mental, and spiritual consequences , such as a tragic death or debilitating illness. White Americans , meanwhile, have seldom been aware of the ways they are judged and their bodies read by black Americans. This is one example of the chasm between black and white Americans that has facilitated mutual misunderstandings. The sociocultural gaps that segregated African Americans from whites conversely created spaces where black cultural forms such as folk healing could continue. However, these counterconstructions of identity and wellness, even based on long-standing African cognitive orientations, can be dangerous. Most of the people I interviewed continued in a state of health throughout my writing of this book, but one woman, committed to using folk methods solely, died, in her fifties. Whether she died of the illness that she used folk healing to treat is unknown to me. Her probably avoidable demise is a tragedy that may lead some to condemn folk practices, yet many African Americans have died in equally tragic ways while under the care of institutional medicine. Simply put, numerous African Americans continue, with cause, to demonstrate a lack of trust of institutional medicine. I once accompanied an elderly black woman to her first chemotherapy treatment for cancer. The attending nurse, also black, asked the patient, “Do you know why you are here?” I was stunned by the question. After the patient interview was over, I queried the nurse about why she had posed it. She responded that because many African Americans are referred to other places by their medical doctors without also being informed of their diagnosis or treatment plan, she has learned to ask whether they have been given this information. Oftentimes she becomes the one who informs the patient about his or her state of health. This story highlights the ongoing difficulties facing African Americans as they contend with institutional medicine. Of course, many people of all races are uncertain how to access services, even if they have some form of medical insurance, but this may be particularly so for members of the African American community. Greater cultural competence is the sine qua non in resolving the cultural gaps between African Americans’ and institutional medicine’s sometimes oppositional cultures. This story contrasts with the feeling of satisfaction reported by the woman who later died. She was happy and comforted in her choices 164 Conclusion for healing work, trustful of black folkways healers. As we saw in the reports from the Folk Archives, she saw actual results from folk methods . Her approach in using solely black folk healing...