Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Feb 1, 2026

Danielle N. Boaz, an Africana studies scholar-lawyer who researches persecution of Africana religions, traces how the English term "voodoo" became a racial slur. She outlines its Civil War roots in New Orleans and uses across Reconstruction, Haiti, Cuba, migration debates, and trafficking narratives. She calls for stopping casual use of the word and clarifying distinct sacred practices.

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INSIGHT

How The English Term Emerged

The English term "voodoo" is an anglicized label that detached from its West African roots and reworked by colonizers.
Danielle N. Boaz shows the modern V-O spelling emerged in the U.S. and carries meanings shaped by colonial power dynamics.

INSIGHT

Colonial Labels Flatten Diverse Religions

Colonizers across the Americas coined single terms to label many distinct Africana spiritual practices as illegitimate.
Comparable terms like obia and macumba followed the same path of legal prohibition and demonization.

INSIGHT

Recurring Stereotypes Attached To 'Voodoo'

Accusations tied to 'voodoo' emphasize superstition, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and sexual corruption.
These recurring tropes framed Africana religions as less-than-religion and dangerously other.

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Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic.

In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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