Reviews for Yo Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes, and Children's Rhymes from Urban Black America

The average rating for Yo Mama!: New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes, and Children's Rhymes from Urban Black America based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-17 00:00:00 Michael Huyser The lore and language of black schoolchildren--collected in the 1970s but only published much later. Children's attempted or parodied understandings of sex, welfare, school, heroism, and more. The rhymes and tales will evoke a bittersweet nostalgia for those who remember them from childhood (I found this by looking for the half-remembered rhyme "Donna died/How'd she die?/Oh she died like this"). But Zeleza also offers some theories on the roles played by the crueler or harder-edged aspects of black childhood culture.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-09-29 00:00:00 Daniel Garza This is a very academic book so it can be rather dry and dense at times especially if you have to ask what is epistemology 20 times before looking it up in the dictionary. On the plus side it is packed with interesting information about African American Folk Healing past and present. There is extensive use of reference material such as the Works Progress Adminstration's Federal Writers' Project which gathered black oral history starting in 1936. The author also provided personal interviews she conducted with modern day black American healers. This is not a how to book nor a guide to any of the different healing methods. A lot of pages are spent in discussion of how black history has impacted black health and healing methods even today and reasons for distrust in the community of institutional medicine. There is no favoritism shown towards one religious group over the other and so the reader will learn about perspectives of black evangelical healers to hoodoo practioners. Personally I found the direct quotes from healers of the past and present gave life to this book. I could have lived without the heavy academic style but my interest lies more in knowing what the healing methods are and the focus of Stephanie Mitchem is to provide a black perspective in academia.