“Color Beyond Race in an Afro-Cuban Religion” by Elizabeth Perez

April 27, 2006

Source: The Martin Marty Center

http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/archive_2006/0427.shtml

On April 27, 2006 Elizabeth Pérez, a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, wrote for the The Martin Marty Center, "Sometimes I forget the sight of myself, dressed top to toe in white: white head-wrap, white sweater, white petticoat, with snow-covered boots in the winter or, in the summertime, white sandals. A passerby might inquire, eyeing my grocery bags, 'Can I help you carry that, sister?' assuming that I am one of Chicago's estimated 285,000 Muslims, and that the scarf covering my hair is a variation on the hijab, or veil. In fact, I am an historian of religions, specializing in Caribbean initiatory traditions that crystallized during the transatlantic slave trade. My work focuses on the conversion of African-Americans to the Afro-Cuban religion popularly called Santería, and termed Lucumí by practitioners. I am conducting ethnographic research in a house of worship that is also a private home, located on Chicago's South Side. To participate in rituals designed to propitiate ancestors or the pantheon of gods called 'orishas,' I must wear the right—white—clothes, out of respect for the community at the heart of my study and the almost synaesthetic understanding of color that permeates Lucumí religious life... But it is not only the color of my clothes that sets me apart in this neighborhood. No matter how ruddy I become in the freezing cold, my fellow bus and train riders view me as racially 'white'... Pausing for a moment to reflect on Chicago's tragic history of segregation, housing discrimination, racial violence, and urban planning failure, I consider the situation: For residents of the South Side, what passes for normal is the absence of faces that appear white, Latino, or Asian on at least one leg of their daily commutes. This is, to some extent, also true of the community I study..."