American Apparel, Our Culture Is Not Your Trick, Nor Your Treat (Ebony Magazine)
In 2013, at a time when nearly every aspect of Black life and culture can be bought, repackaged, gentrified and re-sold to the highest bidder, it is still both shocking and appalling to see a makeshift Vodou altar adorning the window of a Manhattan American Apparel location. Recently, my friend Rosella Molina, a Yoruba initiate, saw just that: a larger than life vevé for Papa Legba, a spirit respected as the Keeper of the Crossroads and found throughout the Americas, and three mannequins dressed in a hodgepodge of apparel designed by social media icon/artist Kesh, mixed together with an assortment of pieces from traditional attire that may be found in a Vodou ceremony.
Once Rosella’s mobile photo was posted on Facebook, dozens of enraged people representing various African spiritual traditions, began calling the store to demand that display be taken down immediately. When one African spiritual practitioner asked what was the meaning behind the new display, an American Apparel employee told that it was in celebration of “Halloween”
…Halloween?
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Vodou, which has come to be known as "Voodoo," has been bastardized in popular culture and subsequently demonized within Black communities throughout the African Diaspora. If you visit New Orleans, every other tourist shop in the French Quarter is fully stocked with so-called “authentic” Voodoos dolls meant to seek revenge on one’s enemies. This commercialized Voodoo is one of many grossly inaccurate faces of one of Africa’s most ancient traditions thanks to ridiculous stereotypes created first by French planters who escaped alive from the revolutionary uprising that took place on Saint Domingue in the late 18th century and later, sensationalized accounts of travelers to Haiti in the 20th century.
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