As we mark the tenth anniversary of the historic #SayHerName campaign, police violence against Black women and girls remains a crisis in the United States. What’s changed in those years is a flourishing of organizing, awareness, and scholarship around this issue, and around racialized state violence more broadly. In her latest book, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease, Princeton University anthropologist Aisha Beliso-De Jesús offers a powerful contribution to this growing literature. The book unearths the history of a fabricated medical diagnosis—“excited delirium syndrome”—long used to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Beliso-De Jesús outlines a legacy of systemic racism within law enforcement, fear and criminalization of Afro-Caribbean religions and traditions, and lucrative medical grift that has provided cover for police killings even to the present day. Excited Delirium also explores the powerful community resistance to this horrific violence, as you will read in the following excerpt.
—The Forum
I eagerly waited on the front steps of Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS). The Center allows fellows to invite guests to dine amid the natural beauty of its grounds. With her striking cobalt-blue and dark-red African-style head wrap, Professor Amara Smith smiled as she walked toward me. A scattering of freckles accentuated the deep taupe of her high cheekbones, which framed her penetrating gaze. I had invited Professor Smith to join me for lunch in mid-spring of 2022 to think through excited delirium with someone I trusted, someone who was both a scholar and practitioner.
I have known “Iya Amara” since I was a child in the San Francisco Bay Area orisha community. “Orisha community” refers to the collective of practitioners and devotees of the orisha, divine spirits mobilized by Yorùbá, Afro-Caribbean, and other diasporic religions such as Santería, Candomblé, Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ, and related practices. These communities are centered around spiritual practices, healing rituals, and communal ceremonies that honor and maintain a connection with the orishas, the African-inspired energies of natural forces who connect humans to the divine aspects of the world. She is a celebrated dancer, scholar, and Black queer artist from Oakland. As we embraced, I admired her unabashed African-inspired dress. With full set of elekes (sacred beaded necklaces) on display to the world, she does not hide the fact that she is an orisha practitioner. Iya Amara has been initiated for more than thirty years to the orisha Yemaya, the owner of the ocean, mother of the world. Yemaya is also the womb and spinal cord in the human body. The orishas connect human bodies to elements of nature; they balance our divine connections with the world.
As we chatted in the lunch line waiting to get our food, Iya Amara stood out like a bright star against the striped collared shirts, preppy blouses, and beige slacks of the mostly White fellows. I noticed a few stares. I have become accustomed to academics remarking on my own tempered “ethnic” dress. I bring in aspects of my culture through color, toeing the line of business casual but never fully committed to the more radical style of my youth—a toned-down version of myself, most certainly. Still, my own presence always seems to engender commentary in academia: “Wow! You like color!” or “You always have so many unique hairstyles!” But Iya Amara in our lunch line is an unapologetic breath of Africana power. As we sit at the outdoor table, the sun warming us, I ask her, “Can I record our discussion?” “Of course,” she agrees warmly.
In addition to teaching at Stanford, Iya Amara founded a group of other Black queer diasporic women in the East Bay who together reclaim the streets through dance and performance rituals. Uniting through shared notions of oppression, Afro-Latiné and other Black and Latiné peoples have historically come together in healing networks, rituals of solidarity such as Iya Amara’s group, House/Full of Black Women. These types of communities have historically organized themselves in transformative collectivities, where Black Latiné consciousness has flourished. African diasporic networks have called themselves antillanos to locate their experience within a shared Caribbean archipelago, or they have signaled Black unity across the Americas through use of terms such as afro-descendientes (afro-descendants), afro-latino americano, Negro (Black), and mulato (mixed), among many other terms. These racial formations are circuits of Blackness and Latinidad that defy nation-states and have produced their own religious inspirations.
“Through being colonized in a patriarchal belief system,” Iya Amara told me, “we have been disempowered to, you know, in a way, forget that we are the embodiment of the answer, and the greatest mystery, and the biggest question in our own bodies.” Iya Amara’s critique resonates with other queer people of color and feminists who guide communities to activate Indigenous and African teachings to navigate today’s challenges, allowing for healing despite the enduring legacies of colonialism and slavery.
Iya Amara offers a decolonial approach cultivated among other Indigenous, Black, Chicanx, and Latiné feminists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and many others. In this sense, the work of House/Full of Black Women echoes the scholarship of Black Caribbean feminist scholar M. Jacqui Alexander, who suggests that we acknowledge our sacred connections to one another as humans, particularly as cis and trans women of color who are actively challenging colonial oppressions. Speaking to Afro-Latiné crossings, Alexander describes grieving with and being in ceremony with Chicanx women, sisters in solidarity. Similarly, Chicanx feminist Gloria Anzaldúa writes about such spiritual activism as “a weapon in the fight against colonization,” where her scholarship and poetry offer a remedy to “cure the stunted spiritual condition of internalized” oppression.
Iya Amara’s group of Black diasporic women had inadvertently created a spiritual space when they came together in 2015—in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent uprising in Ferguson, Missouri—that led to the Movement for Black Lives. Iya Amara’s group commenced as a space for Black women to grieve together in the Bay Area. On their initial Sunday gathering, they named their meeting “Grievances and Greens.” Iya Amara had released an open announcement through social media. Black women from all over Oakland and the East Bay attended. Iya Amara and the other organizers were uncertain what was to come. “We just desperately needed a space to vent and be together,” she told me.
“As a spiritualist I should have known,” Iya Amara reflected. The moment the Black women crossed the threshold into the home, they began experiencing possession by different spirits. Iya Amara immediately sensed that these spirits were in need of healing. As she recounted the experience, she put her hands to her neck and mimicked a choking gesture, simulating coughing and retching sounds, to illustrate that the women seemed to be struggling to breathe. It became evident that the spirits taking possession of the women were unable to find peace. Iya Amara quickly discerned that the tormented spirits were of Black people who had been lynched, manifesting themselves within the attendees at the “Grievance and Greens” event.
Iya Amara sensed that these spirits were likely the ancestors of the Black women being stirred and activated through this healing space that she had initiated. Without anticipating this response, both she and another organizer, Iya Tobe, sprang into action. This was not a Regla de Ocha religious function, yet their experience as Lukumi priests allowed them to respond effectively. They began aiding both the women and the awakened spirits. Using ground eggshell chalk (efun), holy water, and perfume, they were able to coach the women back to their normal state.
Iya Amara came to the realization that all her gatherings held a spiritual dimension. From that moment, she understood, in fact, that all her endeavors were deeply spiritual. Consequently, she began enlisting trained priests to assist at her artistic events. As a priest herself, she understood that her position entailed not only “calling the spirits” but also tending to the well-being of the community of Black women, both living and deceased. Recognizing the need to offer appropriate care, Iya Amara embarked on the journey to heal the traumatized spirits that had been deeply affected by the long histories of violence.
“Black women are more likely to be sexually assaulted by the police than we are to be killed by them,” declares Alicia Garza, one of the Black queer women who cofounded the Black Lives Matter organization. “Yet police kill us too: Natasha McKenna and Sandra Bland were killed while in police custody, and questions still remain after their deaths.” Although Black women are killed by law enforcement at lower rates than Black men, this fact does not diminish the precariousness of Black women’s circumstances. In the case of Natasha McKenna, the routine invocation of “excited delirium” as a “syndrome” devised by agents of the state such as medical examiners, paramedics, and police drew on racial- and gender-based reasoning in their assessment of her as physically stronger than an average White woman. As a result, the police deemed it necessary to use more force to subdue her.
In light of their vulnerable positions, it is crucial to recognize that the precarity of Black women’s lives makes them particularly susceptible to racial, gendered, and sexual violence. For instance, Daniel Holtzclaw, a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sexually assaulted thirteen Black women while on duty. Like Charles Henry Williams, Holtzclaw claimed that he targeted Black women because of their “lower social status,” which meant that no one would believe their stories.
“It is hardly even newsworthy when Black women, including Black trans women, are killed or violated by law enforcement,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor asserts, “because they are generally seen as less feminine or vulnerable.” Because of the perception of Black women’s lives as having less value compared to White women, they face a higher likelihood of experiencing brutality and violent deaths.
Even as my research delved into the influence of how the Black predator stereotype has historically been deployed against Black men, I have been continuously reminded that the aggression against Black women is strikingly less visible. This concealment, due to the intersections of race and gender, makes it difficult to discern the profound pain of Black women. It is sometimes only in the examination of traumas in other realms, such as the women attendees of the “Grievance and Greens” event, where one can fathom the deep roots of this violence. It is therefore essential to examine the nuances within data to truly unearth the branches of this horrible historical tree, made up of racial- and gender-motivated pain and torture.
Attorney-activist Andrea Ritchie highlights the unique police brutality in which law enforcement officers target Black pregnant women, detailing a number of cruel cases of police deploying Tasers on them, claiming they could not tell the women were expecting. At eight months pregnant in June 2012, Tiffany Rent, a Black woman from Chicago, was dragged from her vehicle, forced to the ground, tased, and handcuffed while her two young children watched in horror. She gave birth shortly after the incident and received a settlement from the city.
It has been documented that, as opposed to White women, Black women are frequently tased, multiple times, as part of their arrests. According to the Invisible No More Database, in 2007 thirty-five-year-old Milisha Thompson in Oklahoma City died after being tased twice by police. “The death was ruled accidental, and the electrical stun gun was not listed as contributing to the death.” Although Thompson was restrained on the ground with handcuffs when she was tased, her death was attributed to excited delirium syndrome.
The occlusion around violence against Black women often makes it difficult to obtain basic information about what occurs to them when they are killed in police custody. Alicia Garza refers to the infamous case of Sandra Bland. Police ruled Bland’s death in police custody on July 13, 2015, a suicide. A civil rights activist from Chicago, Sandra Bland was found hanged in her jail cell. After being pulled over for a minor traffic violation, the arresting officer, Brian Encinia, perceived Bland to be disrespectful because she questioned why she had been pulled over. Bland was in Texas for a job interview.
The partly released footage of Bland’s arrest appeared to be edited, and it caught Officer Encinia threatening to tase Bland. “I will light you up,” he tells her because she refuses his commands to put out her cigarette and leave her car. Three days later, police found Bland hanging in her cell from a plastic garbage can liner. There is no footage from inside her cell, and her feet were still touching the ground. Her friends and family say that she displayed no signs of contemplating suicide prior to this event. In fact, she had recently received news that she had been offered the job she interviewed for.
Sandra Bland’s death sparked public outcry. Across social media, hashtags #WhatHappenedToSandraBland and #SandySpeaks questioned the official police story of her death by suicide. As a result of this online activism, a more extensive recognition of the bias against Black women emerged, giving rise to the #SayHerName campaign. This social media movement facilitated an intersectional coalition, affirming people’s commitment to pursuing justice for Black women. It emphasized the importance of prioritizing both antisexist and antiracist efforts to shed light on how societal issues like police violence and the school-to-prison pipeline affect more than just heterosexual cisgender Black men. The #SayHerName social justice movement has helped shift the precarity of Black women’s lives and engender public attention.
However, the fight to protect Black women from police violence continues. The same month that police found Bland’s body, there were five other cases of Black women dying in police custody, including eighteen-year-old Kindra Chapman, who was also found hanging in her cell. In many cases where Black women die in police custody, “the cause of death varies—apparent suicide, lack of access to necessary medical attention, violence at the hands of police officers—but ultimately, no matter the circumstances, these women’s deaths are also a product of the policing practices that landed them in police custody in the first place: racial profiling, policing of poverty, and police responses to mental illness and domestic violence that frame Black women as deserving of punishment rather than protection, of neglect rather than nurturing.” In the case of twenty-three-year-old Korryn Gaines, total disregard for her and her child’s life was displayed when police fatally shot her as she held her five-year-old son in her arms on April 1, 2016, near Baltimore, Maryland. Miraculously, her son survived the shooting.
Of the fifty cases of Black women killed by police since 2015, not one officer has been convicted of an offense. Kimberlé Crenshaw and colleagues released the report Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women through the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. (Full disclosure: The African American Policy Forum is publisher of The Forum.) This report argues that “the failure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless Black women killed by police over the past two decades . . . leaves Black women unnamed and thus underprotected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence.” The report confirms that this erasure is not just about missing facts. Rather, the framing narratives of police profiling and lethal force used on Black people need to be accounted for by race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Black feminist cultural critic and Rutgers professor Brittany Cooper discusses this precarity in an important Salon article, in which she states that she “could have been Sandra Bland.” She recalls that she has given “attitude” to police by asking questions about their unfair harassment on at least three occasions. Cooper had also told police she disagreed with their treatment of her. She notes how asking questions of police while being a Black woman in America can be deadly:
I have had the police threaten to billyclub me, write unfair tickets, and otherwise make public spaces less safe, rather than more safe, for me to inhabit, all out of a clear lust for power. On the wrong day, I could have been Sandra Bland. And if a police officer pulled me over for a bullshit-ass reason, I absolutely would have given him the business on the side of the highway. By this, I don’t mean I would have made threats. I mean I would have asked questions.
Seen as threats or as suspects, Black women are easily discarded. This was apparent with the treatment of Elijah McClain’s mother, Sheneen, who as a Black mother was not allowed to grieve the loss of her son. As a result of the historical dehumanization of Black women, their deaths continue to go unnoticed. As Black anthropologist Dána-Ain Davis shows, Black women are constantly at risk, perceived as menacing, and their behaviors never cease to be inspected.
Black trans women are especially vulnerable. In June 2020, guards placed Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette Polanco, an Afro-Latiné trans woman, in solitary confinement after a fight at Rikers Island. Polanco could not afford her $500 bail and had let officials know that she had epilepsy. Guards mandated that Polanco spend twenty days in solitary confinement. Left for long periods without welfare checks, she died on the ninth day. In footage released by Rikers, guards waited ninety minutes before calling for help. No jail guards were charged with any crime in her death.
I see the history of blaming Black and Brown women as especially apparent in the racial laboratory of the social sciences. In 1965, White sociologist turned politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a presidential report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, that argued that Black women emasculated Black men and were thus the cause of so-called broken families. The Moynihan report casually suggested that most crimes in the 1960s were committed by Black American and Puerto Rican people, and that female-headed single-parent households were implicated in the reproduction of poverty. Moynihan saw Black and Latiné mothers as greedy, lazy, and ignorant women producing children out of wedlock, which led to a cascade of pathological effects. Many Black scholars and communities condemned Moynihan’s “blame the victim” approach for not taking into account structural racism and slavery. Still, the deep impact of the Moynihan report lingers long aft er its initial publication. Before he became the first Black American president, Barack Obama famously praised the Moynihan report. First, in his bestselling book The Audacity of Hope (2006), he emphasized the need for Black people to take personal responsibility to overcome intergenerational poverty; and then later, as president, Obama called out what he saw as a “tangle of pathology” in the Black American community that he thought needed tending to, like gardeners prune their plants.
The pruning of unruly Black and Brown women takes shape in the policies aimed at our reproduction. For instance, in 1927 the US Supreme Court authorized the sterilization of women’s bodies to “reduce the number of ‘feeble-minded’” people in society. Nonconsenting Indigenous, Black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and disabled White women were subsequently sterilized as a form of eugenicist population control. Large clinical trials tested the first birth control pill on Puerto Rican women, and between the 1930s and the 1980s, nurses and doctors sterilized one-third of Puerto Rican women on the island. My grandmother Maria Magdalena remembered that as a teenager in Puerto Rico, she hid from American nurses who came to force her and her friends into operations. After Puerto Rican women delivered children, on the advice of their physicians, many would undergo tubal ligation as a form of birth control, unaware that this was permanent sterilization. When my grandmother gave birth to her eldest son in Puerto Rico, she told me that without her consent, the doctors had injected her with a medication to dry up her breast milk, so they could force her to use the unpopular infant formula that was being peddled.
These histories of scientific testing, population control, police violence, and blame are etched onto Black women’s bodies. I saw this most poignantly in the tragic death of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six -year-old Black emergency room technician shot to death by police on March 13, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were asleep in bed when, based on faulty information that Taylor’s ex-boyfriend lived at the residence, a group of officers barged into their apartment with a battering ram. The raid was part of an effort to clean up so-called blight in the neighborhood and utilized police violence to prepare the area for a new housing development. Louisville police, which had a pattern of violating constitutional rights, fired thirty-two rounds into the dark home. Six shots hit and killed Taylor. Police claimed that they were “confused by the burst of their own gunfire;” one officer stated that “he did not realize he had fired his weapon until after the fact.”
The police did not have an ambulance waiting for Breonna Taylor—the inclusion of an ambulance is a common procedure in these types of heavily armed drug raids. Police also wasted crucial lifesaving minutes before tending to Taylor once they realized that they had shot her. Yet the medical examiner said it did not matter that those police officers waited more than five minutes before assisting Taylor, telling reporters from the Courier Journal, “Ms. Taylor most likely died less than a minute after she was shot and could not have been saved.” Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, disputed the medical examiner’s claim. Walker, who was with Taylor when she succumbed to death, witnessed how she “coughed and struggled to breathe for at least five minutes after she was shot.”
Tragedies such as Taylor’s, and those of the many other women killed by police, are part of the long history of disregard for Black women’s lives. From medical testing to prison experiments and sterilization campaigns, Black, Indigenous, and Latiné women have endured the consequences of structural violence, racism, and unjust blame that perpetuate our vulnerability and precariousness. Yet we persist in our struggles despite the lack of accountability and justice. As evidenced by Iya Amara’s group, these women conjure healing methods and acts of love that enable survival even amid genocide.
Iya Amara’s group of Black women take over the streets of Oakland, turning them into ritual spaces. Drawing on traditional Egúngún (the collective spirits of the dead) practices from the Yorùbá, the women enact renegade spiritual activism in city streets, parks, and neighborhoods. Iya Amara recounted how, in one of their ritual performances, the group cleansed an alley in Oakland known for sex trafficking. Among the group was a survivor, a woman who had been trafficked. The Black woman told Iya Amara how that street had been transformed for her.
Iya Amara ensures that these rituals “serve” the Black women as well as the community. “It’s not about us going out and getting exhausted and not getting cleansed ourselves,” she explains. To ensure that they facilitate mutual healing and cleanse the spaces involved, they incorporate their own ceremonial practice during every art project. Like the radiating forces activated by the añá (batá) drums, where the practitioners are simultaneously able to clean people, spaces, and themselves, Iya Amara’s ritual processions are what she describes as “shifting vibrations.”
In Afro-Latiné traditions, there is no such thing as objectivity. Instead, the spirits and orisha are understood to harness shifting power dynamics to mobilize transformation. This is what Iya Amara refers to as “shifting vibrations.” We are taught that the energy of the Great Mother vulture, the spirit-bird (Èyẹ́ Ọ̀rọ̀) in orisha philosophies, harnesses alternative forms of justice. The Èyẹ́ Ọ̀rọ̀ is a “force that is beyond definition.” She is considered the womb of the universe that channels the energy of the cosmos, and she is recognized as a protective container that shields you from danger. Orisha practices use an enclosed calabash, or clay pot, as the protective covering to channel this power, mirroring the roundness of the mother’s belly and the embrace of the earth.
The Àjé are described in Western terms as “witches,” however they conjure the feminine energy of life and death. The Àjé use the medicines of the living energy of plants and trees, which are themselves understood as portals of power, to make healing potions and powders. They are considered warriors who, with their bird’s-eye gaze (Èyẹ́ Ọ̀rọ̀) and medicinal abilities, behold and judge action in order to exact cosmic judgment. They are feared as “the ones with two bodies” (abaarà méjì) because they grasp the destinies of humans. These “mysterious flying beings” function as an alternative formation of justice.
Iya Amara tells me about how her group of diasporic women conjure these flying abilities in their cleansing rituals in the streets of Oakland, California. Brujas have always been seen as fearsome by patriarchal cultures precisely because of their ability to expose, she reminds me. Feminine power has the ability to soar “above the landscape of daily life, with eyes that can penetrate the darkness,” uncovering secrets to reveal what is hidden. The observing and enforcing energy of the sorceress-bird is thus a form of Afro-Latiné sacred justice that, unlike the “eye for an eye” logic of Christianity that renders accountability through punishment, produces energetic change through observation. These spiritual examinations are like infrared light or radio waves that allow us to pierce through dense fog or detect molecules—they are the observer effect.
Priests like Iya Amara draw on this energetic sensibility to shift the world in particular directions. Even as this force has been significantly diminished through Western positivism’s hold on modern society, there are many who continue to wield this energy in order to produce alternative models of justice and accountability.
For example, two weeks after the street cleansing pro cession against sex trafficking, Iya Amara told me that several officers of the Oakland Police Department (OPD) were arrested for trafficking an underage girl. Iya Amara is confident that the ritual cleansing helped that abuse come to light: “I won’t say we take full credit for that [OPD sex scandal], but I will say that we were a part of that vibrational shift.”
Sitting there with Iya Amara, thinking about the Black diasporic women who came together in ceremony and the lynched spirits who showed up at Iya Amara’s “Grievance and Greens” event, asserting their presence to have a kind of contemporary reckoning, I thought of the Black women victims of Charles Wetli’s racist diagnosis, and sensed that they had stirred something in me. I realized they did not want me to be sad for them, but instead observant with them. Wetli’s media campaign to assassinate their spirits after they were murdered did not work. In the tradition that Iya Amara and I share—as well as in this book—they are resurrected as revolutionary spirit guides who are working to dismantle the racism that tried to cover up the crimes committed against them from the afterlife. Reinforcing the quest of this collective egun, Iya Amara reminded me to validate my own body’s sensings.
You know what spirit feels like; you cannot allow coloniality to strangle your powers.
Iya Amara urged me on: “You have an important story to tell. And you’re the person they’ve called to tell it.”
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.
