America is full of hard pills to swallow, and even in a world of microdosing, one can still not elude the trauma of simply existing, minding our own business, while Black. As a Black woman, I keep a tally of times the media gets it right. By right, I mean the times the media shines a spotlight on Black women who, while trying to traverse a white world, are exploited, mentally and physically abused, and taunted to the point that we question our sanity and the very reasons we took the time to strive this hard (only to meet a bludgeoning force that viciously frames our successes as the product of white folks fraudulently being duped as villains who owe it to the disenfranchised to right America's wrongs.)

One of my favorite movies attesting to these facts is Mariama Diallo's movie Master. In it, Regina Hall plays Gail Bishop, the first Black Master at the fictional Ivy League Anacaster College. There are other plot points that echo the traumas of simply existing while Black (including the young student, whose work is constantly riddled with red marks for inconsistency and labeled as "not up to University standards," who eventually takes her own life¹, or the white Africana Studies professor passing for Black who fights for tenure and the label of Master…which, by the close of the movie, she does indeed get) . For me, though, the character of Gail, truly illustrates this struggle. Throughout the film, Gail is the one walking the tightrope, struggling to be good enough each and every day. Gail is the one who must show up Black but show out refined and white. There is a pivotal moment at the celebration of the white woman passing for Black, where Gail, having had enough of the university's white lies going unpunished, unleashes a keeping-it-real moment. I recognize myself in Diallo's words and Hall's voice: "It might not be white hoods and minstrels, but it's there. I was never a Master. I'm a maid. You brought me here to clean up."

Those words, coupled with that scene, still chill my soul. I live in that universe. For all of my academic degrees and Black Girl Know-How, in many situations I am still the maid.

If you read my book Hoodoo Saints and Root Warriors: Stories and Magick for Liberation, you will be flooded with stories detailing the trauma that marginalized BIPOC folks face in our quest to thrive in a white world. One theme that many BIPOC women are recognizing as a common motif among those seeking solace under the umbrella of privilege is gang stalking. (Gang stalking is a form of daily harassment and persecution by a group of people who monitor, control, and intimidate the movements of others using tactics that place victims in the realm of extreme mental distress.² )

One such case is Ella Gorgla, a BIPOC woman who has allegedly been harassed for several years, prompting the New York District Attorney's Office to open an investigation into what Gorgla identifies as gang stalking.³

At the time the incidents began, Gorgla was an executive in the beauty industry. She and twenty-two other women gathered to discuss both discrimination in pay and workplace microaggressions they were facing as executives in the beauty industry. The women in attendance formulated a letter with their agreed-upon demands for change. After consideration of each woman's demands, the letter was drafted and circulated among the women but was never formally presented to the industry's global headquarters.

According to Gorgla, upon the letter's unintended circulation throughout the beauty industry, more black executives were fast-tracked to promotions. Gorgla even began to see cultural sensitivity workshops pop up out of nowhere. A number of the twenty-two women were even offered promotions in different departments. This spike in upward mobility for Black women led Gorgla to believe the letter had been intentionally leaked, with her playing the villain on a crusade against white executives—a troublemaker, and an instigator. Gorgla, the organizer of the event's get-together, alleged that it was at that time that her life's story began to unravel in a series of chilling accounts.

I won't detail every event that Gorgla has had since, but suffice it to say that it's still taking place. Her home has been pelted with used condom packets, urine bottles, muddy sneakers, and also been subject to break-ins and vandalism. In 2023 at a Wichita, Kansas Airport, Gorgla says she was gang-stalked and almost sprayed with a toxic substance in a pepper spray container. Gorgla contacted the NAACP, the New York Human Rights Commission, her councilman, Congress, the Senate, and the New York Police Department, all to no avail. When she contacted law firms, they called her situation a "difficult case."

We can understand the importance of salvation as liberation from the illusion of perseverance in a destructive environment. Gorgla believes her willingness to speak out (both verbally and in written form) makes her an ongoing target of harassment.

Justice Harris's Story
Gorgla's story is one I retold to a client, Justice Harris. She immediately found the parallels to her own experiences, and after a ten-minute cry, I shared with her the trauma of the fictional Gail Bishop and how we are all Gail in some way—and as long as we reconcile with the pain that bonds us we can begin to allow our sisters' liberation to fuel our own.

Justice Harris was (at the time of these events), a middle school guidance counselor, living and working in Mississippi; Miss Justice and I immediately bonded over our shared experience with school-related racism. Justice told me she was hired sight-unseen after applying for a counselor position through a job recruitment site. In college, Justice had read magazine articles about the number of human resource coordinators admitting to shredding resumes with names they deemed too "ethnic." Justice had an idea to juke the stats in her favor. Instead of using her first name on her resume, she swapped it out for her middle name. Justice was known to this Mississippi school district as Hillary Harris. Within a week, the school's secretary sent her an email informing her that the job was hers if she were willing to relocate from Nevada; they just needed to see a scanned copy of her degree uploaded and emailed at her earliest convenience. Once all the paperwork was signed, it took Justice three weeks to plan, pack, and set off with the help of her mother, sister, and brother.

Justice showed up at this school on a Wednesday; it was a predominantly white school, where the only other Black employees were custodians or cafeteria workers. While waiting in the lobby to meet the principal, she was questioned by the school's resource officer as to her presence; when she tried to explain the name swap as a part joke, part icebreaker, the resource officer yelled towards the principal's office. Upon his arrival, the principal scowled and told Justice he didn't see anything funny about a Black woman impersonating a white woman. Justice tried to diffuse the situation with another joke, referencing the character of Hilary Banks from the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, to which both men sucked their teeth in disgust.

After thirty minutes of insulting her intelligence and scrutinizing her physical appearance (for signs of drug abuse), the principal accepted the physical copy of her driver's license, resume, and degree. A sidebar conversation was then had between the principal, secretary, and several teachers who happened to be traveling back and forth past the lobby.

When the principal returned, he walked in with a smirk. He was silent as he beckoned Justice with his index finger to follow him, where he led her into a room large enough to accommodate only a desk, a computer, a wallpaper basket, a microwave, and maybe a dormitory refrigerator…her office. (Her first thought was that including her bookshelf would be pushing it.)

For the first week or so, Justice felt that life was okay. The downtime created between student counseling sessions and enhanced by the staff's silent treatment freed her up to enjoy her hobbies. Instead of just toting around books from her nightstand at home, she could actually put in the work of being a reader—and not just a collector—of BIPOC romance. In Justice's eyes, being left alone was way better than being under a judgmental white gaze from 7:45 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. each day.

After that first week, however, once her co-workers started noticing that she was unbothered by their white narcissism, her peace was disturbed, beginning with overtly racist images and words taped to her office walls.

The first of these happenings caught her off guard, and she stood in the middle of the room with a Thermos of oolong tea, a week's worth of schedule changes, and a copy of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. This was only the first of several WTF moments, which would each be met with the principal and school resource officer smirking, pretending to document her findings (which she thought was odd because all they had to do was walk the less than ten feet down the counselor's corridor to her office and see for themselves the theatrics of an obvious racism.)

Yet for each of these events (from racist words and images with her name, to dead skunks in the air vent, to feces in the waste paper baskets, to a baby doll with a noose around its neck strapped to her chair with shibari rope) there was never follow-through, and on each occasion, in the time it took Justice to report the incident, scroll through before and after pictures of her office with time stamps attached, and convince the officer and principal to stroll to her office with her, the vandalism and racist messages would be undone. As she would turn the key to unlatch the door, she would hear the principal and school resource officer sucking their teeth. She could hear their giggles. When the office door would finally be opened, it would expose a pristine room cleaner than she had left it behind the day before. Papers were always in a neat stack. Their Eyes Were Watching God closed as all the dog-eared pages unfolded. Pencil shavings were trashed, and her AfriKan Liberation Flag remounted in the corner above the intercom system.

It was obvious to Justice that this was not a one-man or one-woman operation; there was collusion—a mob mentality. It was clear to Justice that people were working overtime to run her out of Mississippi…or out of her mind. Every time Justice would report an incident, somewhere between the walk to report it and the walk back, it would be undone, creating a narrative of a neurotic, troublemaking Black woman filing false complaints.

It was a Saturday evening when Justice called me in tears, having gotten my number from her cousin (a regular client of mine). I asked her to meet me on Zoom over tea. I needed her to see me and feel my energy and compassion as I replayed my story on the road to salvation. She informed me of her more than two months' worth of cat and mouse with these people—a psychological manipulation that showed no signs of ending.

I played my singing bowl, and had her remove her shoes and listen while I engaged in a remote tuning fork session. We lit Nag Champa incense, and we mapped out our reconnaissance mission to find and make her enemies pay. The saint we most heavily petitioned was Saint La Madama.

Saint La Madama is the ancestral energy we used for Justice's healing. La Madama represents the enslaved conjure woman. This woman has outlived her work expectancy as a field hand and now works in the Big House. Her proximity to the Master and Mistress of the manor puts her in a hierarchical position as a high-ranking maroon spy-general, always working to liberate as many enslaved people as possible. She knew where the weapons and the poisons were kept. Although she appeared unassuming, she was a warlord in waiting.

Exercise: La Madama Protection Altar
Needs:

• A space either indoors or outdoors.
• An apron, with the ties cut, to serve as the altar covering.
• A statue or a framed picture to be placed on the altar.
• A glass of water to be placed on the altar. (It quenches La Madama's thirst after traveling to ensure our desires are met.)
• A small whisk broom, used to clear negative energy.
• Food from your dinner that has been covered overnight.
• A candle the color of her apron.
• A pen and a few sheets of paper or a journal. (Explain who you need protection from and why, then thank La Madama with words of praise.)
• 2 sticks of myrrh incense/a lucky hand root cleansed with Hoyt's cologne
• ½ cup of olive oil with ½ teaspoon each of dried mullein and hyssop (placed inside a mason jar).
• 18-day oil sitting 8+1= 9
• Envelopes (on which you will write, in oil, the word "Protection")

Instructions:
After dressing your altar space, burn a teaspoon of each of the following dried herbs on a charcoal disk: peppermint, sage, rue, rosemary, and marjoram. Sit with La Madama for 15 – 30 minutes after writing and reading your petition for freedom and liberation 9 times out loud. (The writing should detail every wrong that you are experiencing, as well as detail the outcomes that you desire.)

Justice followed the above prescriptions, and within a month from the date of our conversation, the district faced discrimination lawsuits, and the school itself underwent a colorism makeover. Not only were they having to undergo racial sensitivity workshops, but in a grand move to make over their image, they started hiring BIPOC AA/PI staff servicing all areas of the school site.

It's been two years since Justice and I bonded over Zoom while hatching her redemption. Justice has a new principal, a BIPOC woman of Cherokee descent. First, I got Justice to commit to taking pictures of every act of racism she encountered, and then send those pictures to three different people and have them save those pictures to their phones, computers, etc. She did this for a week. We even got a Nanny Cam placed in the stuffed Ole Miss Mascot that came with her room. The camera revealed three culprits. Justice showed the footage to the principal, who even watched video of himself placing a dead skunk in her vent. When she told the principal and school resource officer that her friends and family not only had possession of this footage but were also ready to leak it all—to not only an attorney and national news outlets but to every social media activist she knew—Justice was able to walk out of that office as an advocate in her healing, triumphant with her team helping her fight the system with the same fire they tried to use to burn her alive.

¹If you or someone you know is in crisis or thinking about suicide, help is available. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which offers free, confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you're outside the US, check with local health services for support in your area.

²StopGangstalking. 2023. "The Dark Art of Gangstalking: Uncovering Their Methods." Stop Gangstalking Awareness Group. October 11, 2023. https://stopgangstalking.org/gangstalking-techniques/

³MSN. n.d. www.msn.com. Accessed July 12, 2024. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/meet-ella-gorgla-est%C3%A9e-lauder-whistleblower-who-claims-she-s-been-targeted-in-viral-tiktok/ar-BB1lFQ0A.