Thank you Mandy Ohman, OnyxRose💛🤍💜🖤🏳️⚧️, Mary Elizabeth, KATIE FULLER, PhD, Aimee Chamernik, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
Available for iOS and Android
Every time I put out a video about indigeneity, my comment section fill up with the same energy. All of my aboriginals. All of my we was the real Indian. All of y’all still commenting on that video of me waxing buddy. I see y’all, and I am not here to dunk on you today, because underneath that comment is a real wound and a real question, and the wound is legitimate even when the answer y’all reaching for is not.
The question underneath is this. If everybody else got a homeland, a language, a cosmology, and a set of grandparents who can tell you which village the family come from, then what do the descendants of enslaved Africans got? What is ours? Where did it come from? Who can say it belong to us?
On Wednesday, August 19th, I sat down with Dr. Catherine A. John, who is a professor and the chair of Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island, who used to teach at the University of Oklahoma, who let a 21 year old George Lee come into her hip hop class and teach, and who has just published a book with Duke University Press called Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice. It drops August 25th. Rashid Campbell was on the livestream, better known as Perfect Prophet, my debate partner, the first African American to ever win top speaker at the National Debate Tournament. The cover artist Ire Asojo was on the call too. And the last chapter of that book, chapter 4, is called “Enter the Dragons of Debate: Rashid Campbell and George Lee’s 2014 Run.”
So yeah, I got a horse in this race. Let me be transparent about that up front and then let me do what I always do, which is bring the receipts and let the argument stand on its own legs.
Because Dr. John is not answering that comment section question the way most people answer it. Most people answer it with a claim. We was here first. We the real Indians. Dr. John answers it with a mechanism, and a mechanism is worth more than a claim, every single time.
Dr. John opened with a number, and I want y’all to sit with the number before we get to the theory, because the number is the foundation and most of us walking around with the foundation wrong.
Of the roughly 12.5 million Africans forced onto ships in the transatlantic trade between the early 1500s and 1866, about 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage and disembarked in the Americas. Brazil received somewhere around 4.8 to 4.9 million of them. The Caribbean received somewhere in the range of 4.1 to 4.7 million. Mainland North America, which is to say the place that became these United States, received roughly 388,000 directly. That is less than 4 percent. The Caribbean and South America together took about 95 percent of everybody who arrived.
Read that again. Less than 4 percent.
Now here is the part where Dr. John quoted her elder, Professor Erna Brodber of Woodside, St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, and Erna Brodber gave us the line that reorganizes the whole thing. Same ships, different stops.
A vessel leave the coast of what we now call Sierra Leone. It stop in Charleston. It go back. It stop in Galveston. It go back. It stop in Port au Prince. It go back. It stop in Kingston. It go back. It stop in Trinidad. Same hold. Same crew. Same ledger. Different port of sale.
Most of us was raised on a version of Black history where the story starts in Virginia in 1619 and stays there, and everything that happened in Kingston or Salvador or Cap Haïtien is somebody else’s business, some kind of foreign Black story that we watch on a documentary. Dr. John’s whole career, going back to her first book Clear Word and Third Sight, has been an argument against that parochialism. What she calls civilizational similarities sitting underneath cultural differences. The patty in Kingston and the hot water cornbread in Bryan, Texas are not the same food, and they are not unrelated food either. That is the marasa trois again. Neither one, neither two, the third thing.
Crazy how the smallest stop on the route became the loudest voice in the diaspora, and then used that volume to forget the other stops existed.
Dr. John said something on that live stream that a lot of y’all scrolled right past. She said scholars don’t like to use the word retentions anymore, because they saying it is much more than just a few retentions.
Let me tell you what she was gesturing at, because this is a hundred year old fight and it is not settled and it is the exact fight that produced the department Northwestern just gutted.
In 1941, Melville Herskovits published The Myth of the Negro Past. Herskovits was a white Jewish anthropologist trained under Boas at Columbia who did fieldwork in Suriname, Dahomey, Haiti, Trinidad, and Brazil, and his thesis was that the myth to be destroyed was the idea that enslavement burned everything African out of Black people in the Americas. He went looking for what he called survivals and retentions. Music, kinship, religion, motor habits, speech patterns.
E. Franklin Frazier, the most prominent Black sociologist alive at the time, went at him. Frazier had just published The Negro Family in the United States, and Frazier’s position was that the Middle Passage and the plantation had in fact been that total, that the Black family and Black culture in America was made in America under American conditions, and that the search for Dahomey in Harlem was a distraction from the political economy of the present. Gunnar Myrdal was skeptical of Herskovits too. Ralph Bunche quoted Myrdal saying Herskovits sees everything in the light of African inheritance. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, on the other hand, praised the effort, which is its own kind of irony given that Herskovits privately dismissed both Woodson and Du Bois as propagandists because their scholarship had a social reform orientation.
Sit with that one. The white anthropologist who built his career proving that Black culture was African called the two Black men who founded the study of Black history propagandists.
Every accusation is a confession.
Then in 1948, with a three year grant from the Carnegie Corporation, Herskovits gathered the Africa related courses Northwestern had been offering since the 1930s into the first interdisciplinary Program of African Studies in the United States. In 1954 the Herskovits Library of African Studies opened, and it is to this day the largest separate Africana collection in the world, over 260,000 bound volumes, 15,000 books in around 300 African languages. In 1957 he founded the African Studies Association and served as its first president. In 1961 Northwestern named him to the first chair of African Studies in the country.
Hold that. We coming back to it.
So why did the field walk away from the word retention? Because retention is an accounting word. Retention implies a fixed original quantity, a percentage lost in transit, and a remainder you can count on the receiving end. Retention treats culture like cargo. It also, and this is the part that matters, positions the scholar as the auditor who tells Black people what percentage of Africa they still own.
Dr. John’s move is to change the verb. Not what did we retain. What did we do. Afroindigenize is a verb before it is a noun. Her formulation on the live stream was that we took what we had inside ourselves, wherever that came from, and used it as the fuel to transform whatever we needed to transform.
That is not an inventory. That is a technology.
I want to end where the stream started, with the artist, because Ire Asojo said something that is doing more theoretical work than most people caught.
Ire made that cover through copper plate etching, which is iterative by nature, you work through version after version to arrive at an image, and then collaged it with paper made from different fiber and bark that she hand dyed. Dr. John asked her to evoke calm and mystery. Then she added joy.
Ire said joy is not always something that comes naturally in her work, and that when she thought about the passages of the book, she kept noticing how often joy sits in relationship to oppressive systems, so she went looking for the subtle forms of joy that a person can experience daily. Quiet forms of joy. Her imagery pulls from trees, roots, water, and dirt, because the connection between the body and the land is both metaphorical and physical, and because that relationship has been estranged through violence, which raises the question of how reclamation happens through that estrangement rather than around it.
Kevin Quashie wrote a whole book called The Sovereignty of Quiet arguing that Black expressive culture has been read almost exclusively through resistance, so that everything a Black person does gets converted into a public political statement, and that this reading, however sympathetic, leaves no room for an interior life. Quashie’s quiet is not silence and it is not passivity. Quiet is the inner life that is not performing for anybody, including for the people who are rooting for you.
Apply Quashie to the elders of Woodside and it clicks. They did not withhold the mermaid stories as an act of resistance. They withheld them because those stories were not for public display. There is a difference between a secret and a private thing, and the entire discipline of anthropology was built on refusing to learn it.
Apply Quashie to Aretha in that church in 1972 and it clicks again. Nobody in that room was making a statement. They were being restored.
And apply Quashie to the book cover. A mermaid, some roots, some trees, calm, mystery, and a joy so subtle you have to stop scrolling to catch it. That is the argument in image form. The severance was real and the interior was never empty.
Dr. John said the line of the whole stream and I made her say it twice. Our ancestors would never have survived if they saw themselves the way the society wanted them to see themselves.
Three fifths of a human on paper. Muhammad Ali said second class means you driving a Cadillac and first class means you driving a Rolls Royce, and we was way below that. There is no way you survive that if you internalize it as an accurate description of who you are. So they didn’t. They built somewhere else to stand and they put the deed in the music.
And then, as Dr. John put it, when the art comes out, it is expressing the horror and the pain and the beauty at the same time, and people feel that, and they want a piece of it, and they cannot understand how people who had nothing made that. Some of them look at us and say they don’t know what they have.
We know what we have. We have always known what we have. That is exactly why we don’t tell you everything.
See, Clark reminds us that the third term is where the knowledge lives, that neither pure Africa nor pure America will explain us and the pairing itself is the point. Ferguson teaches us that an institution that can fold you in can fold you up, and that the affirmation was always revocable. And Oyěwùmí makes us admit that the category we call mother was doing structural work our inherited vocabulary was never built to see.
Book drops August 25th. Amazon has it, Duke University Press has it, the link is in this post. Go get it, read the chapter, and then we are bringing Dr. John back on for a Socratic conversation about what came up in it, because that is how we do it over here. We support Black authors in Education Is Elevation.
Shout out to y’all for tuning in. Education Is Elevation. I done got hungry. Trying to see if the wife gonna go for a little lunch or something, you know. And I see y’all.
Research over MeSearch.
Less than 4 percent. Of the roughly 10.7 million Africans who survived the Middle Passage, only about 388,000 landed directly in mainland North America. Brazil took around 4.8 million. The Caribbean took around 4.1 to 4.7 million. If your Black history starts and stops at the US border, you are working with 4 percent of the evidence and calling it the whole file.
Same ships, different stops. Erna Brodber’s phrase is the correct unit of analysis. One vessel hit Charleston, Galveston, Port au Prince, Kingston, and Trinidad on the same circuit. Cultural differences across the diaspora sit on top of what Catherine John calls civilizational similarities, which is why the third thing produced by any two diasporic communities tells you more than either one alone.
Afroindigenize is a verb. The old question was how much Africa did we retain, which treats culture like cargo and makes the scholar the auditor. The better question is what did we do with what was left, which treats culture like a technology. Cut off from the root does not mean cut off from the capacity to grow one.
Culture was never decoration, it was infrastructure. Zora Neale Hurston’s functional definition, recovered by John, is that culture means whatever moves the spirit in a way that keeps you alive. The blues, the shout, the sanctified church, hip hop, and two Black debaters rapping in round 8 of the NDT are all the same machine doing the same job.
They are closing the departments in the same season the book is dropping. UT Austin folded African and African Diaspora Studies into a generic unit. Kentucky suspended Louisville’s Pan African Studies doctorate. Iowa moved to close African American Studies effective July 1, 2026. Northwestern staffed the oldest African studies program in America down to zero this month. The curriculum was never dependent on the department, and that is both the comfort and the indictment.
I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise
The book itself
John, Catherine A. Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice. Durham: Duke University Press, 2026. Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People series. Released August 25, 2026. Cover art by Ire Asojo.
John, Catherine A. Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
The central frame
Clark, Vèvè A. “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness.” In Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, edited by Hortense J. Spillers, 41 to 61. New York: Routledge, 1991. Reprinted in part in Theatre Survey 50, no. 1 (2009).
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987).
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003).
The archive and the retention debate
Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941.
Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.
Gershenhorn, Jerry. Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Eltis, David, and David Richardson. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. See also slavevoyages.org for the underlying estimates.
Jamaica, Woodside, and blackspace
Brodber, Erna. Woodside, Pear Tree Grove P.O. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004.
Brodber, Erna. The Continent of Black Consciousness: On the History of the African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day. London: New Beacon, 2003.
Brodber, Erna. Myal. London: New Beacon, 1988.
Stewart, Dianne M. Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Culture as survival technology
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938.
Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Nation, June 23, 1926.
Quashie, Kevin. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
The severance and its theorists
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008).
The Black and Native question
King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Gender, motherhood, and the material ledger
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. What Gender Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Stewart, Dianne M. Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage. New York: Seal Press, 2020.
Walker, Alice. “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” Ms. magazine, March 1975.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.