EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

Black women’s labor and creativity often are intertwined.

Black people, in general, and black women, in particular, regularly accommodate the reality that class, social and economic opportunity, gender identity, and more, intersect with myriad iterations of coloniality and anti-black racism and confound ideas and efforts to live normally and thrive. During the past 15 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the variety of other normalized abnormal realities they commonly confront, African and African Diasporan peoples also have been more intensely affected by negligent state policies, medical misdiagnoses, difficulty in accessing care and vaccinations, and higher numbers of COVID-19 illnesses and deaths. Throughout the pandemic, many black persons observed COVID protocols while working, stayed near home, collaborated across national and racial lines, and undertook any number of other practices to lessen the challenges and losses. They did what generations before them have done.

While we treasure and celebrate the ingenuity of ancestors (those who made animal entrails, organs, and forgotten parts into delicacies; who stretched meager resources into food, shelter, and recreation for nuclear and extended kin; who attained educational achievements against the odds; and who created businesses from scratch and with opposition), the necessity for their extra efforts to live normally took its toll, and it continues to do so. Recognition of this toll does not mean the extra efforts should be negated or forgotten. On the contrary, it is important to identify and chronicle “extra efforts” (the creativity and ingenuity required in the face of normalized abnormalities) to avoid repetition of negative historical realities, to recognize and learn from solutions provided through creative labor, and to chart a way forward.

Essays in this issue explore the intertwining of labor and creativity by black women. In “The Ghanaian PCG Tent Women Clergy as Revolutionaries,” Grace Sintim Adasi analyzes ways the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG) undervalues and nearly neglects women’s clergy labor, forcing women to determine means of being clergy within the various work contexts in which they find themselves. The result, of course, is that the women create new ministries or creatively offer ministry in non-traditional spaces. While she recognizes their successes, Sintim Adasi also identifies six specific issues and offers recommendations through which the PCG and the women clergy themselves may seek to chart a positive way forward.

In “Rituals of Restorative Resistance: Healing Cultural Trauma and Cultural Amnesia through Cultural Anamnesis and Collective Memory,” Jean Derricotte-Murphy describes in detail her own ingenuity and encourages others to be creative in fashioning rituals that respond to the identities and realities of black people in the United States who still, in Derricotte-Murphy’s words, find themselves “betwixt and between.” Drawing on womanist theory, anthropology, and theater studies, Derricotte-Murphy uses history and auto-ethnography to make a case for creating new “rituals of restorative resistance.” In addition, Derricotte-Murphy describes the labor involved in creating and implementing the new rituals that may be integrated into “Christian” liturgies.

Both essays include reflexive analysis of the authors’ experiences as black women theologians and ministers in Ghana and the United States. Their reflexivity demonstrates ways both authors live the intertwining of black women’s labor and creativity.

Rosetta E. Ross

Black Women and Religious Cultures Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2021. | ©2021 Black Women and Religious Cultures, Manifold-University of Minnesota Press. | All rights reserved.