Q: What makes you such a big expert on spiritual healing of racism?
A: I tried it on myself, and some of my friends tried it, and it worked, and I’m not a big expert on even anything. Good news—you don’t have to be an expert for spiritual healing to work for you. Anyone can do this! The healing modalities I mainly know are Sufi practices, shamanic practices, tapping—also known as acupressure for the emotions—and assorted Al-Anon approaches. Anyone may have mastered more and different techniques, and anyone can apply or invent new ones. And if the mere mention of any of those practices triggers something, that’s great—more grist for the mill!
Q: Isn’t White people doing practices that didn’t originate in Europe cultural appropriation, so, um, maybe we just shouldn’t be doing them, should we?
A: What, in case they might work?
There is not a human being on the planet who is not indigenous to some place and whose ancestors did not practice some form of shamanism, to take one example, and while all of us may not be wizards at shamanic practices any more than we can all play the trumpet like Louis Armstrong, it is the inheritance of all of us just as music is. It’s the place of spiritual experience where we all meet—the original spiritual practice of the whole of humanity. In chapter Four, we can get into this in more detail.
And of course, both things are true. Many years ago, I attended a lecture given by Louis Leakey, whose discoveries of fossils in East Africa pointed clearly to the African origin of human beings. Someone asked him if the first people to make stone cutting tools could be identified, and he explained why not by pointing out that people have been copying each other since forever: if you’ve been hacking away at things with an unworked stone and you see someone using one that’s been chipped to a sharp edge, “you’re going to say, ‘By George, we’re missing the bus!’”
In the documentary Irish Dance: Steps of Freedom, the journalist and dance critic Brian Seibert, speaking of the “long history of Whites taking credit for Black innovation,” concludes that “Whites imitating Blacks and taking credit for it is American culture.” In the same documentary, speaking of the relationship between West African and Irish step dancing, the choreographer and historian Leni Sloan said, “I have stopped looking for the edge of where it ceases to be African and begins to be Irish. . . . All art is assimilation. All music is assimilation. All dance is assimilation.” We might also consider that the legacy of every human being who has ever lived is the inheritance of every human being who is alive.
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