Black Beauty School serves as the physical manifestation of the Litm(us) praxis. Following its transformative 2021 East and West Coast Tour, this hands-on workshop returns to the salon space to facilitate a sacred re-connection.
We are here to dissolve the barriers between the keeper of the craft and the carrier of the hair, acknowledging that both are essential to the ritual of reclamation. In this space, we move from the "survival mode" of the hurried appointment to the intentionality of the altar.
We utilize the salon as a laboratory for unlearning the shame attached to Afro hair and re-learning the language of the scalp. Through direct, communal engagement, we bridge the gap between technical expertise and spiritual tending. Black Beauty School is an invitation to witness the "sacred spiral" in real-time, ensuring that when we touch the hair, we are touching the spirit, setting the body free from the vacancy of the dominant culture.
This is a 2 day coursework for salons and cosmetology schools.
Litm(us)
Survival mode has left our spirits tired and our bodies hurried. In the rush to meet a dominant culture that demands our erasure, our hair has been telling the truths we were too overwhelmed to speak.
Litm(us) is a restorative healing modality designed to bring us back into the temple of the self. It is an alchemizing ritual praxis where the Black body is the Black hairstylist; it returns the craft to their hands and the care to the community, honoring the truth that our healing is a collective labor. Through the lens of Afrikan embodiment, we examine our hair as the litmus test of our liberation.
We engage in the slow, intentional work of tending to the sacred spiral, unlearning the frameworks of commodities that have turned our crowns into burdens. This is a journey of "setting the scalp free," transforming the secrecy of Afro hair into a public record of resilience. By re-inhabiting our bodies through the ritual of hair, we close the vacancy left by colonial harm and reclaim the sovereignty of our own slow, rhythmic care.
ABSEE Colorism
This course investigates colorism as an embodied system of power rooted in the foundational politics of the plantation. Drawing on [Black studies, feminist and queer theory, and critical histories of enslavement], the class examines how gradations of skin tone emerged as technologies of racial management used to discipline Black bodies, regulate intimacy, and stratify access to labor, protection, and humanity.
Students will explore how these plantation politics persist in contemporary social, cultural, and institutional formations, shaping perceptions of Black bodies, experiences of mobility and care, and internal hierarchies within Black communities. The course foregrounds the body as both a site and archive of racialized history and ongoing struggle.
The Hi School Green Book
This course serves as a practical, living guide for students navigating college and the transition into adulthood within complex institutional systems. With an emphasis on retention and persistence, the course supports students from non-dominant cultures by addressing key factors that influence continued enrollment, including belonging, academic confidence, institutional navigation, and access to support.
Through applied reflection, skill-building activities, and critical discussion, students develop the tools to understand institutional expectations, build meaningful connections, and advocate for themselves, fostering both a sense of belonging and the capacity to remain engaged and successful throughout their college experience.
T 4 Tea
The gender binary is a drought of the imagination—a rigid, calcified landscape that has long denied the fluid reality of the human soul. To exist within it is to live in a state of spiritual stagnation.
This workshop is a journey toward the healing rain, where we intentionally wash away the toxicities of "man" and "woman" as defined by colonial structures, returning instead to the liminal waters from which the spectrum of all genders first emerged. We recognize that the liminal space is not a place of lack, but the very womb of the gender spectrum.
It is the sacred "between" that birthed our ancestors' most expansive truths. In this course, we hold the social and medical realities of transition as sacred labor, honoring the grit, the grief, and the profound relational shifts that occur when we choose to stop performing and start being.
This course explores the path to healing in the Black community by reuniting body, mind, and ancestral practice. It considers how herbalism and spiritual traditions have sometimes become detached from lived experience, and how the weight of systemic anti-Blackness affects mental health.
Through reconnecting with plants, the earth, and embodied practice, students learn to restore balance, awaken resilience, and reconnect with the deep, generative energy of Black ancestral wisdom.
Spirit in the Dark (originally healing from black church hurt)
There is a profound resonance found in the spaces between what we were taught and what we inherently know. Spirit in the Dark is an invitation to journey into those quiet, shadowed places of the Black spiritual experience—to reclaim the light that exists beyond the veil of institutional trauma.
This workshop functions as a living laboratory for the soul. We will trace the lineage of African and Black spiritualities, not as artifacts of the past, but as breathing technologies of healing and resistance. By decolonizing our internal altars, we begin the sacred labor of unbinding the spirit from "church hurt," re-evaluating the dogmas that have outlived their purpose. Through a blend of restorative praxis and ancestral reclamation, we will architect a spiritual health that is as expansive as the Diaspora itself. Here, we transform the "darkness" from a place of wounding into a sanctuary for the evolution of the self.
Jewelry Making as Ancestral Veneration
The body is the first temple we are given; adornment is how we dress the altar. This session is a deep dive into the aesthetics of liberation, framing the way we curate our physical selves as a radical act of decolonial worship. We view the "Black Body Adorned" as a masterwork of survival and creation—a visual testimony that bridges the gap between the ancestral and the avant-garde. Participants will engage in the ritual of intentional embodiment, exploring how color, cowries, and symbols function as tools for spiritual recalibration. By "altaring" the self, we transform the mundane into the magnificent, turning the act of being seen into a declaration of sovereignty.
