Within Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax’s The Human Encounter with Death is a claim that anxiety towards death can be relieved. As the book itself maps out Grof’s research with terminally-ill cancer patients and their respective psychedelic experiences. Within the bounds of this research is Ted, the only black patient with a qualitative report in the text. His very position within the text serves as a challenge to Grof and Halifax’s argument. Thinking alongside the violent history of racialization and coloniality, I ponder the position of Ted within what was then an emerging discourse of psychedelic science. It is near impossible to piece together a definitive archival narrative of Ted from the fragments of his life curated by Grof and Halifax. But rather than dwelling on this impossibility, I argue that Grof and Halifax’s narrative ambivalence is crucial to imagining the place of blackness within psychedelic science. The silence of Ted lies at the heart of the discipline in its continuation of the historical prescription of blackness as object-thing. My paper asks what happens if the normative tripping that liberal humanism expects cannot be written about through qualitative reports? What if the tripping of Ted rests in alternative ways of knowing that resist the objectification of blackness? I argue that psychedelic sciences have been unable to translate the black trip. The discipline’s failing provides us with potential sites of epistemic rupture that grant new models for black existences. Might the black trip serve to interrogate normative ways of being?

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-semite and Jew (1948) is a treatise on existentialist psychology in the context of World War II, anti-semitism, and the creation of a ‘racial other’. Sartre establishes two archetypes, or dramatis personae, that exist in relation to the racial other: the Anti-Semite and the Democrat, and examines world-making and personhood, as well as the structural implications of existing as the Anti-Semite and the Democrat. I expand on Sartre’s model in two important ways: 1) establishing two additional archetypes: The Liberator and The Consumer and 2) explicitly connecting the categories (not explicitly stated by Sartre). I contend that this enhanced approach more accurately reflects the ways in which blackness is erased, consumed, and uplifted in the United States. Specifically, I focus on racialized reproduction in the US to demonstrate the value of my model. I begin by presenting Sartre’s original framework followed by a detailed discussion about my modified version and demonstrating how it can advance our understanding of racialized reproduction. The model can be used to analyze and evaluate the impact of policies and practices related to any field. In this paper, the expanded model is used to critique 6 areas of racialized reproduction in the United States: slave breeding, eugenics & forced sterilizations, contraception, abortion access, artificial reproductive technologies, and doulas, midwives and the birthing experience.

Corridos, or Mexican narrative folk ballads, are intrinsic to Mexican and Mexican American culture. Such ballads have been found along the borderland’s region, the shared space between the United States and Mexico for the last two hundred years. Corridos represent not only Mexican and Mexican American values and culture, but also preserve moments in time through the very creation and performance of corridos. Illuminating how they are created within a bi-national, transnational element of life on both sides of the border, these perspectives come together in the form of a corrido. An extensive collection of corridos can be found via the UCLA Strachwitz La Frontera Collection and the Smithsonian’s collection ‘A guide through the Borderlands,’ both focus on highlighting culture along the U.S./Mexico border (borderlands region). The present study therefore focuses on the research question: Where, within these collections do these songs represent the Arizona-Sonora borderlands specifically? Utilizing a Chicana feminist framework, and a textural analysis from a folklore or folkloristics perspective surrounding select songs, the goal of this project is aimed at examining the collection and preservation of corridos. Disclosing the elements of what make the Arizona-Sonoran corrido distinct, while acknowledging the gap in preserving this endemic style within the genre of corridos.