The Meaning of Mother in Louis Farrakhan's "Mother Wheel": Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Cosmology of the Nation of Islam's UFO

Finley, Stephen C.

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfs027

Cited by 16 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Studies of Stephen Finley and others have revealed that black people do, in fact, claim to have been abducted. In addition to Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam (Finley, 2012;Lieb, 1998;Bakker, 2013), we may include Prophet Yahweh, Riley Martin (Finley, 2016), and musicians Sun Ra (Szwed, 2012;Youngquist, 2015) and George Clinton (Finley, 2016).…”

Section: Abductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism

Asprem¹,

Strube²

2021

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Section: Abductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism

Asprem¹,

Strube²

2021

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Section: Abductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Race and (the Study of) Esotericism

Bakker¹

2020

New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism

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The case I wish to make in this essay is simple: race matters in and for the study of esoteric ideas and practice. And how could it not? Esotericisms do not develop in a vacuum, but in particular social, cultural, religious, economic and political contexts. These contexts continue to be marked and shaped by-and in turn inform-what W.E.B. Du Bois so incisively called the "color line."1 Developed in 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk but still poignant, Du Bois coined this phrase to name the visible and invisible lines of demarcation between racial groups. Even as "race is an idea, not a fact," as Nell Irvin Painter (2010, p. ix) famously and concisely put it-and even as racial categories are fluid constructs and not static, fixed identities (Omi and Winant, 1994)-the color line continues to have real-life consequences. This includes explicit forms of racism, like violence and political disenfranchisement, along with implicit racial biases. Examples of such biases are the pervasive inequality in employment, education, health care, and housing, as well as a continued imbalance in the academy when it comes to the study of the history, present, and potential futures of white people and people of color. Racism thus operates in and through systems and structures-and not merely on the level of individual beliefs or actions-that offer advantages for certain racial groups, and disadvantages for others. Racial discrimination comes, moreover, in ever-new forms, and manifests in ever-new ways-in our contemporary moment, such manifestations are often masked or hidden under the guise of the "post-racial" and various forms of "color blindness" (see, among many others, Alexander, 2010;Bonilla-Silva, 2003;Goldberg, 2015). The "color line" is, therefore, neither stable, static nor fixed, nor is it always easily recognizable, nor is its influence always immediately apparent.There seems to be, then, a rather obvious rationale for why perspectives on race matter in and for the study of esotericism. A focus on race will help us to better understand some of the contexts out of which past and present esotericisms emerged, thereby shedding light on why and how certain esotericisms are the way they are. In turn, the study of the intersections of race and esotericism might proffer a new vantage point from where to study processes of 1 Du Bois spoke primarily about the United States, but later scholars have expanded this notion as the "global color line" (

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Black Bodies In- and Out-of-Place

2022

In and Out of This World

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The Meaning of Mother in Louis Farrakhan's "Mother Wheel": Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Cosmology of the Nation of Islam's UFO

Cited by 16 publications

References 3 publications

New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism

New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism

Race and (the Study of) Esotericism

Black Bodies In- and Out-of-Place

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