Review: Banning Black Gods: Law and Religions of the African Diaspora, by Danielle N. Boaz

Abstract

This book provides a global perspective on the legal challenges for, and rights violations against, African diasporic religions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Danielle Boaz uses the appellation “religious racism” to refer to the racializing effects of religious freedom laws and the worldwide restrictions of practitioners’ rights and abilities to practice African diaspora religions. She borrows this term from practitioners of African diaspora religions in Brazil, and uses it to draw out the intersections between racism and religious discrimination. With religious racism, Boaz brings together the ways in which systemic discrimination against African-identified religions has qualities similar to and connections with institutional racism. She shows how it has complex historical roots in racial slavery and colonialism, revealing the connections and parallels between forms of discrimination today and the kinds of regulation and oppression faced by Afro-diasporic traditions after emancipation. Some of the cases of religious racism Boaz examines, in places like the Caribbean and southern Africa, also show that white supremacy can continue even without White folks in immediate positions of power.The book is divided into three parts. Each section focuses on a set of African diasporic traditions and a set of legal and rights issues. An introduction to each section provides an unfamiliar reader with basic background on the particular Afro-Atlantic religions under examination. Section one focuses on examples of religious racism against Lucumí, Palo Mayombe, Vodou, Candomblé, and Umbanda from the United States, Haiti, Brazil, and Venezuela. These cases include physical violence against practitioners and places of worship, the restriction and outlawing of animal sacrifice, arrests for exhumations of human remains, and disputes over child and family services taking custody of the children of practitioners because of their religion. Chapter 3 is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the stigma and arrests for the disinterring of bodies against practitioners of Palo Mayombe in the United States, an important and challenging subject that has received little scholarly attention.Section two focuses primarily on Islam and Rastafari and issues of denial of freedoms due to discrimination based on headwear and hairstyles, like scarves and dreadlocks. This section looks at examples from Western Europe, East and Southern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Forms of religious racism under examination include expulsion from school, denial of access to courtrooms, and employment discrimination, among others. This section takes up issues of the sustaining of global white supremacy through Eurocentric norms of dress and hairstyle that also adversely affect access to religious freedom by practitioners of Afro-diasporic religions.Finally, section three focuses on practices that have often been excluded entirely from the category of religion, specifically voodoo and obeah, the latter of which is still illegal in parts of the Caribbean. Boaz points the reader to the irony that while the persecution and criminalization of the practices of (largely White) Neopagan witches have greatly declined, persecution and lack of recognition have continued to plague practitioners of so-called witchcraft identified as African-derived, including in purported bastions of liberalism and religious freedom like Canada and the United States.I did have a few questions after reading Banning Black Gods. The book does not directly engage with conversations within the critical study of religion or the anthropology of law, and Boaz explicitly admits that these are outside the scope of the book. Nevertheless, while she does not overtly engage with religious studies theory, her approach and examples could serve as the basis for a strong argument for the role of redescription and the rectification of categories as steps in processes of racial justice making. This could demonstrate the importance and relevance of religious studies theory and extend the definition of religion beyond the classroom walls. Further questions I had concern conflicting claims to religious freedom coming from multiple sides. For example, how should friction over the exhumation of human remains be resolved between practitioners of Palo Mayombe and the living relatives of the deceased from whose graves Palo practitioners take human remains for ritual purposes? With potentially clashing claims about ethical relations with the dead, how should legal scholars, scholars of religion, and practitioners handle such conflicts?Boaz has formal training and expertise in both law and the histories of Afro-Atlantic religions, but she does not assume a high level of expertise on the part of the reader in either the legal issues or African diaspora traditions under examination. With each section beginning with basic information and background context for the particular rights issues and African diasporic traditions under consideration, this book would be very good for undergraduate students. Provocative, timely, and accessibly written, this book makes important contributions to the study of religion and law and African diasporic religions that will also be of interest to scholars beyond those fields.