Earlier: TEEN VOGUE: ”Black Power Naps Is Addressing Systemic Racism in Sleep”
From the New York Times:
The Nap Bishop Is Spreading the Good Word: Rest
Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, sees rest as a revolutionary way to push back on America’s obsession with productivity at all costs.
Tricia Hersey, a.k.a. the Nap Bishop, has been experimenting with the idea of rest as liberation for nearly a decade.
By Melonyce McAfee
Oct. 13, 2022ATLANTA — Tricia Hersey was bone tired.
Between studying theology in a competitive seminary program at Emory University, working on campus, doing an internship and raising a young son, she couldn’t catch a moment’s rest.
… Reading on the sofa at home, she’d frequently find the book falling to her chest as she allowed herself a few minutes to rest.
Hersey would wake up feeling renewed.
… This proved pivotal: She felt better, her mind cleared, her grades improved. Even if rest came at the expense of time she’d typically devote to study or work, Hersey was determined to commit to it — and in the process, to push back on what she, a Black woman, saw as a legacy of forced labor and exhaustion that her ancestors had endured.
“I was exhausted physically, mentally, spiritually, and I just didn’t see any other way except to take a radical leap and say: ‘I don’t care, let the chips fall where they may,’” she said during an interview. “If I fail out of school, that’s fine if I don’t finish that grade — because I’m going to bed.”
The epiphany happened nearly a decade ago, and in the intervening years she has turned her personal transformation into a movement.
Hersey, now 48, began inviting people to nap collectively while she offered soothing sermons about the sheer power of sleep and dreaming. She shared the notion that “rest is resistance” with a growing and enthusiastic group of followers, both in person and online, who were also weary of the grind.
Thus the Nap Ministry was born, and Hersey anointed herself its Nap Bishop. … The endeavor has exploded since the start of the pandemic, when her online platform began growing by tens of thousands of followers a day. Hersey gives talks across the country and offers coaching services to people looking to stave off burnout. …
The Nap Ministry is not a religious movement, she said, but a spiritual antidote to the very earthly problems that are plaguing communities: exhaustion, chronic diseases and mental health crises, issues she sees as arising from systems of capitalism and white supremacism.
Indeed, the concept of getting sufficient rest for good health is not new, and it’s well known that Black people are operating under a dangerous sleep deficit in America. In a 2020 survey of behavioral habits, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 44 percent of Black adults reported having short sleep duration (defined as less than 7 hours per night) compared with 31 percent of white adults. Lack of rest is correlated with conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure — diseases that disproportionately affect Black people. …
A legacy of exhaustion
Hersey’s point of view was inspired in part by studying “Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies” while working in an archive library at Emory. In reading these stories about the brutal origins of American capitalism, she realized that working to exhaustion was part of her inheritance — passed down through ancestors distant and recent.
