Book Review: BLUU Notes, edited by Takiyah Nur Amin and Mykal Slack

I’m not trying to convert you, but I am going to a Unitarian Universalist church and researching its history, so you’re going to hear a bit about it.

In this post, we’re talking about BLUU Notes: An Anthology of Love, Justice, and Liberation, edited by Takiyah Nur Amin and Mykal Slack. I loved it. 5 stars.

BLUU

BLUU stands for Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism, an organization that is kind of like the Genesis group in that it is a group that gives support to Black members of a predominantly white religion. However, it is also very much not like the Genesis group because it does community organizing and advocacy work for racial justice independent of the larger organization and calls publicly and unapologetically for expanded Black power in Unitarian Universalism and the world at large.

(If you are a Black person interested in BLUU but not Unitarian Universalism more broadly, it looks like BLUU welcomes all justice-minded Black people.)

Highlights

This book contains BLUU’s Seven Principles of Black Lives and poetry, music, and prose by Black UUs. The book is intended to be a resource for worship, meditation, and reflection, and its contents are worth coming back to over and over. Doing this is easy to do because the book is short and physically small, so it can be fit into a purse or a large pocket.

As I reviewed the book while writing this review, I came across the short essay “Sankofa—Go Back and Get It,” by Jan Carpenter Tucker. Sankofa, the author tells us, is a Twi term that mean “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” Rereading this book felt like going back for something I’d forgotten. Of course I know about justice and support Black thriving; still, this book centered and rejuvenated me.

This book radiates with the spirit of joy and justice. 5 stars.