The 101: Where We Did the Professor Work…

Why shouldn't we make fun of cults??? Aren’t these people brainwashed??? What’s wrong with making jokes like “drinking the Kool-Aid”???

As Professor Goodwin reminds us, The People’s Temple was a movement to create an idealistic space where people could exist in community. A tremedous amount of work was done by members of the People’s Temple, which was a majority Black women and children. So, in the massacre at The People’s Temple Agricultural Project was an act of Jim Jones and his fellow leaders (who were mostly white women), forging white supremacy which ending in the death of hundreds of adults and children.

If that isn’t enough, After this heinous crime, no one wanted their bodies. Guyana said they were a US problem. America wanted to leave them in Guyana. The bodies of unclaimed Jonestown victims were shipped in rubberized bags from the Guyanese jungle to an airforce base in Delaware, where they languished for months. America ultimately decided that the Jonestown dead were not human and therefore not America’s problem — rendering these teachers and veterans, workers and revolutionaries, as Christina Sharpe might put it, unmournable.

Why you were INCORRECT! about “drinking the kool-aid”

1. when you joke about Jonestown, you minimize the heroic efforts and the brutal murders of hundreds of victims.

2. “drinking the kool-aid” has implications of brainwashed, stupid, cult-followers who did not have agency. Instead, members of the People’s Agricultural Project should be remembered as revolutionary figures who were brutally murdered by an abusive leader.

3. The Black women of people’s temple went to Guyana because it was made clear that the US had no future for them. They sought out the People’s Temple because of it’s process of a better future of equity and love.

"Arrival at Jonestown"

"Jonestown Settlement in Guyana"

The lesson plan: here’s what we talked about…

1. Cults, what they are, what they are not, and why you should be careful about how you use “cult”. The killjoys reminded us of two things we need to think about when we talk about cults…

   1. When people say “cults” they often mean, “religion we don’t like.”

   2. “Cult” is often shorthand for concerns about coercion and manipulation.

2. The killjoys are here to tell you that brainwashing does not exist, but abuse and manipulation does. And we should take seriously the ways that impacts the choices, or lack thereof, of members of new religious movements.

3. “Cult” does work to minimize and shut down the existence of people who are doing religion in a way that is too different, too beyond the pale, too independent.