"Exploitation of ideas, culture, and religion are slicker and craftier 
than what most of us have read about in history or seen in PBS documentaries."

Remember Whoopi Goldberg's Oscar winning performance in "Ghost." she played a faux-psychic, who became an emotional and spiritual medium for the deceased (Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. Through Whoopi, Demi Moore got a good-bye kiss from Swayze.) The gift of sight, ESP, and psychic phenomena have saturated pop culture. In the 1980's, the American market place gave birth to institutes, seminars, and private practitioners answering the demand for medical and spiritual methodology "hidden" or ignored in the West. Since then swarms of legitimate and ersatz "New Age" businesses have discovered an un-tapped gold mine in Eastern philosophy and the spirituality of impoverished nations. 

These "products" were first marketed to the upper and upper middle class. The American market place responded with high-priced seminars and retreats. The growing demand among the middle and working class for affordable alternative health care and spiritual guidance was ripe for capitalism's staple resource—exploitation. Television's plethora of psychic networks and those hired to represent these new enterprises, African-American women, reflect nineties-style mysticism in black face. 

Exploitation of ideas, culture, and religion are slicker and craftier than what most of us have read about in history or seen in PBS documentaries. African-Americans have made attempts to reclaim and re-formulate religious and spiritual practices lost during the Middle Passage, colonization, and slavery. Demonized in the accounts of early Catholic and Christian missionaries in Africa, victims of Biblical interpretations justifying slavery, and the focus of political diatribes on the downfall of the nuclear family, African-Americans, and Black women in particular, have waged a persistent battle against cultural genocide. Kwaanza, rites of passage ceremonies, ancestor worship, and literature have brought us closer to knowing about our collective past. 

Though Black women have made great strides in different sectors of society, stereotypes have continued to distort the realities we live. Black women have been cast literally and figuratively as the plantation mammy. Today, the "mammy" has taken on more subtle forms. As the primitive and ancient draws more and more public curiosity, Black women take center stage as the neo-colonized personification of these concepts. 

Currently, the entertainment industry is confronted with demands for more cost effective production. The association of Black women with Black Magic or Voodoo has resurfaced in the demand for low budget "New Age" philosophy and entertainment. Exploiting the sacred holds serious profit potential. Televangelism represent just such a market-driven concept. Today's psychic networks, represented by African American actresses and singers faced with possible unemployment offer opportunities to escape more obvious forms of exploitation. Or does it? 

In the instance of the infamous, "Psychic Friends Network", singer Dionne Warwick invites viewers to try psychic or tarot card readings from a "trained" psychic for a few dollars a minute. These psychics become "Best Friends" and confidantes. Whether or not ESP or psychics are real is not at question. Rather, the exploitation of the concept is of my concern. The psychic informercials use an Oprah-esque format to attack easy prey—America's growing sense of alienation and spiritual insecurity. 

Collectively, we have all searched for the meaning of community and its familiar microcosm, family. During slavery, Black women were emotional guardians and mediums for the White Master's family and her own. Even after slavery formally ended, Black women continued to carry this burden as low wage earning domestics. In later years, her apparent strength and tenacity turned her into the overbearing, castrating Jezebel. Senator Moynihan of New York attributed the downfall of the African-American family to Black women in his 1960's report to Congress. The Black women's "mammy" image has resurfaced in the marketing of psychic networks, as Americans less expensive emotional mediums on their quest for love, friendship, and meaning in capitalist society. 

Late night television hosts Nell Carter's Psychic Revival Network. This bizarre hybrid of televangelism and an African American family reunion is an instance when psychics serve as counselors and Nell "Gimme a Break" Carter  becomes an all-loving and accepting mother to the audience. We can dismiss our doubts that Carter has shed her mammy kerchief, when she quips to guest Eric Estrada, "I ain't making you no fried chicken." During scenes from a so-called family picnic, she offers everyone a free reading and reminds the viewer that, "At the Psychic Revival Network, you are more than a friend. You're family." Because African Americans are also a lucrative target market, gospel-like music is played during the program to appeal to more spiritually conservative Blacks. Ironically, the downfall of the Black family becomes a symbol of family and magic simultaneously. 

Estelle Rolle is another "blacktress" who epitomizes family. Her most notable performances were as a mother in a television production of "A Raisin in the Sun," a maid in "Maude," a struggling mother in the ghetto in "Good Times" , and most recently, a maid in "Driving Miss Daisy." Today she appears in a commercial, sitting at a kitchen table, encouraging people to ease their "state of mind" and call a psychic network. Jane Kennedy, the woman who portrayed Captain U'huru on 1960's Star Trek is another Blacktress following in Dionne's footsteps. 

What makes Black women so appropriate for this line of work? Psychic Networks go back to basic human desires rather than false notions of the primitive or mystical. Greeks classified love as loyalty, which is felt for community or family; platonic love in the form of friendship; agape love for community; and eros, generally known as romantic love today. Black women have come to represent the source of such love. They are ideal symbols for psychic networks because they continue to be viewed like the "mammy" who cares for the family, knows of dark magical forces, changes her fate in the face of what seem to be insurmountable odds, and appears exotic. 

There is a dangerous symbiotic relationship between psychic networks and African-American women, initiated by neither involved party. Nineties' exploitation is the true mysticism. Marketing geniuses and television producers have managed to turn anyone or any idea outside Judeo-Christian tradition into an abstraction. Like a young child marveling at high wire circus acts, I am continually amazed by our free enterprise system's ability to exploit the spirituality of Africa and the East and call it entertainment. 


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Updated 3/1/97