Keith Rushing

speaker

315 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Keith Rushing’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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How to Be a Better Human · How to understand your family history (w/ Keith Rushing) · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

The way foods are cooked is something you see on the coast of West Africa and you see in Gullah Geechee culture, but you may have like meat and fish cooked together in a rice dish, for instance, whether that be jambalaya, you know, gumbo.

So you have all these, you see it in the food and then also spirituality.

So again, as you mentioned, Chris, if you could not practice African religions and it was

you are not to speak African languages or suffer punishment, but folks found ways to kind of imbue and infuse African spirituality in ways of

of connecting to the divine in Christianity.

Part of your process of becoming a full member of the church confirmation was a process that lasted a few weeks, something called seeking, where young people at about age 12 would go out and would fast and go out to the woods at night and had a spiritual guide that would

kind of guide them through this process of like meditation and reflection and dreams.

And things are revealed in dreams that are part of their process of becoming a full member of the church.

So that's been likened very much to West African rites of passage.

You know, so in that sense, it's unique.

It's a unique culture among African-American cultures, so.

Yeah, I think and I think that that's one thing that is, you know, kind of maybe different for folks who are Gullah Geechee.

If you go back in time where I think for a lot of African-Americans, there was this whole kind of

negative Tarzan image, this created, fictionalized image of Africa.

So Black people would not want to be called African.

It was something to run from.

But in the Gullah Geechee culture, you see people embracing African culture and also looking, if you go back far enough, people who were actually born in Africa that helped shape the culture, those people were revered.

Often for their their abilities to like their knowledge of plants and abilities to heal, which is something I talk about is, you know, when my grandmother grew up in Hilton Head, she was born in 1917.

There were no doctors.

So you went to root doctors, but there was a whole tradition of passing down like herbal knowledge and knowledge of of healing.

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