Cults: You Are, But What Am I?

Name It!

Hey friends! In this episode, we’re talking all about cults. What makes something a cult and something else, well, not a cult? Does the word "cult" even mean anything, or is it just a label to signify, “I don’t agree with these people”?

Before diving into the TL;DR of Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955–1993 by Sean McCloud, we rewind to 1959, when Malcolm X was introduced to mainstream (White) American audiences for the first time. This happened through the airing of a docu-series called The Hate That Hate Produced. And oh my, did people lose their minds.

What’s that got to do with cults, you ask? Well, the CBS documentary introduced Malcolm X and Black nationalist organizations, like the Nation of Islam and the African Nationalist Movement, to the public as—yep, you guessed it—cults. But not just any cults: “Negro cults.” The Hate That Hate Produced serves as a perfect case study for examining the deeply racialized criteria mainstream news outlets use to define a cult.

Iman loves McCloud’s argument that calling something a “cult” says much more about the person doing the labeling—the cult-caller—than it does about the “cult” itself. A classic “what you say about me says more about you” moment. But Kohar disagrees. Will we ever see eye-to-eye on the topic? Let us know your take by leaving a comment on Spotify or Instagram.

As always, we close with our Half-Baked Thoughts segment, where we share ideas we haven’t fully fleshed out but still stand behind 100%. You’ll just have to listen to the episode to hear those!

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Where we know from:

The Hate that Hate Produced by CBS News (1959): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsYWD2EqavQ

Sean McCloud, Making the American religious fringe: Exotics, subversives, and journalists, 1955-1993. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2004.