{"id":2820,"date":"2019-09-27T11:57:11","date_gmt":"2019-09-27T19:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/mishamagdalene\/?p=2820"},"modified":"2021-05-18T19:03:27","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T03:03:27","slug":"habits-slips-recurring-problem-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mishamagdalene\/2019\/09\/habits-slips-recurring-problem-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"Habits and Slips: Paganism’s Recurring, Tiresome Problem with Racism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Hello, beautiful creatures. Today, I\u2019d like to talk some more about the problem of racism in Pagan, polytheist, and occult communities.<\/p>\n

Got your attention, did I? Good.<\/p>\n

To be fair, I\u2019m speaking here to the portion of my readership who happen to be white\u2026 which, let\u2019s be honest, is most of you. The people of color reading this are exempted from most of what I\u2019m about to say.<\/p>\n

In case you haven\u2019t seen it, there\u2019s a blog post on Medium which has been making the rounds on Pagan-ish social media, Ashley Nicole Hunter\u2019s \u201c11 Pagan Habits That Need to Die<\/a>.\u201d I found it an interesting explication of a lot of the things about neo-Paganism I find intensely annoying, many of which seem to stem from the persistent problem Pagans have with balancing their values. In short, some Pagans take themselves too seriously, and don\u2019t take their spiritual practices and values seriously enough. It\u2019s why there are so many p-words who are lackadaisical about things like other people\u2019s time and work, the environment, history, or\u2014and I phrase this as delicately as I know how\u2014personal hygiene and grooming.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say it\u2019s a perfect article, mind you. A couple of Hunter\u2019s points are a little weak and detract from her overall message, which I feel is both timely and, sadly, timeless. As ever, I encourage you to read it yourself and make up your own minds about it. I was initially thinking of responding to Hunter\u2019s post point-by-point, but a couple of days after I read it, I saw Sarah Anne Lawless\u2019 post on the Bane Folk Facebook page<\/a> announcing her withdrawal from the Black Flame Montreal occult conference. As before, I encourage you to read her post (available here in a non-FB format<\/a>) for the details. It\u2019s also worth reading Black Flame Montreal\u2019s response, deleted but captured here<\/a>, and their follow-up announcement<\/a>, in which they cancel the conference altogether.<\/p>\n

I read Lawless\u2019 post, and I thought back to my own posts<\/a> about racism and white supremacy in Paganism<\/a>. More specifically, I mulled over the reactions those posts engendered from self-styled \u201cethno-nationalists,\u201d \u201cproud advocates\u201d for ethnicity-based Paganisms and polytheisms, and outright goddamn Nazis. I received abuse, outrage, and vague personal threats, and I know Lawless has been targeted even more overtly, and more viciously. Gee, I wonder why that is? I know part of it is that Lawless is much better known, but might some part of it be that she\u2019s\u2026 you know\u2026 a woman? But I digress.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m here to suggest that Ashley Nicole Hunter\u2019s list of Pagan bad habits, while amusing and largely true, suffers from the glaring omission of our communities\u2019 real, real<\/em> bad habit of racism.<\/p>\n

Sometimes that racism is as overt as shaven-headed, tatted-up buff dudes wearing white supremacist insignias, spouting fascist buzzwords and white-supremacist dog-whistles, sure. Most of the time, though it\u2019s the casual racism of \u201cnice\u201d white folks providing cover for other, not-so-nice white folks. It\u2019s the easy racism of giving white folks the benefit of the doubt because \u201cthey\u2019re our friends,\u201d because \u201cthey\u2019re good people,\u201d because we know they don\u2019t actually mean<\/em> all that fascist ethno-nationalist rhetoric, it\u2019s just a t-shirt or a patch or a tattoo sleeve, why are you so sensitive, ugh, you leftists always take things so seriously, you\u2019re just projecting the negativity in your own hearts\u2026<\/p>\n

Yeah. It\u2019s like that.<\/p>\n

This is on us, white folks. This is our fault. Our communities are anti-black, anti-brown, anti-indigenous, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim\u2014you know, racist<\/em>\u2014and we are doing far too little to break that habit.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d you cry. \u201cHow can you say that? I\u2019m not a racist! I\u2026 but\u2026 I\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

I know, I know. I often feel the same way, but please believe me when I say there\u2019s no time for that kind of squishy white-person handwringing. There never has been. We say things like this as a way of distancing ourselves from the word \u201cracism,\u201d because we know that \u201cbeing a racist\u201d is A Very Bad Thing. The trouble is, we\u2019re patently unwilling to actually do the work it would take to make our communities actively anti-racist, just like we\u2019re unwilling to make our communities anti-fascist, and largely for the same reasons: we\u2019re afraid of offending and upsetting people. We\u2019re afraid of being the bad guys calling people out for their racist, fascist douchebaggery. We\u2019re afraid of how that makes us look.<\/p>\n

And, underneath that, I think we\u2019re afraid of confronting the racism that lives in our own hearts. We\u2019re afraid of discovering that, yes, we really are<\/em> the racists we deny being.<\/p>\n

At the risk of being a consummate downer here, I don\u2019t know what else to tell you, white folks. We can deal with the sickness in our spirits, or we can live in thrall to it. We can acknowledge that we live in a culture which values whiteness above all things, or we can deny it. We can work to dismantle the power structures that privilege us, or we can benefit from them, fingers jammed into our ears the whole time to block out the voices of the oppressed and disenfranchised.<\/p>\n

We can indeed do that. What we cannot do is turn around afterwards and claim to be one of the oppressed. Whatever your flavor of magic, there is no room within it for deception, self-deception least of all.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had a couple of people ask when I\u2019ll stop writing about the problems of whiteness in Paganism, when I\u2019ll just spend my time writing funny things about D&D, sexy things about queer sex magic, and snarky reviews of witchy media. Believe me, I\u2019m just as tired of it as you are, and I\u2019d much<\/em> rather write about those things\u2026 but here we are. Since I\u2019m sure those folks are just concerned for my emotional well-being, and not at all attempting to concern-troll me or shut me up, I\u2019ll give the simplest and truest answer I can:<\/p>\n

When I stop seeing occult conferences self-destruct rather than simply uninvite neo-Nazi presenters.<\/p>\n

When I stop seeing Pagan conventions literally drive away Pagans of color rather than acknowledge the harm the convention\u2019s culture has done.<\/p>\n

When I stop hearing white folks make excuses for each other\u2019s racist bullshit.<\/p>\n

WHEN PAGANS STOP LETTING RACISTS AND FASCISTS HAVE AIR TIME.<\/p>\n

So, hey, let\u2019s do us all a favor and get on that, shall we?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more to say on this subject, of course. There always is. That\u2019s quite enough for the moment, though.<\/p>\n

Until next time, dear ones. \u2665
\n

\"\"
A different sort of habit, but also toxic, cancerous, and disgustingly romanticized. (Image by Free-Photos<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes that racism is overt: shaven-headed, tatted-up dudes spouting white-supremacist dog-whistles. Most of the time, it’s the casual racism of “nice” white folks providing cover for other, not-so-nice white folks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3023,"featured_media":2838,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[630,56,18,586,909,912,915,218,34,173,12,13,122,551],"class_list":["post-2820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anti-racism","tag-antifa","tag-antifascism","tag-antiracism","tag-ashley-nicole-hunter","tag-bane-folk","tag-black-flame-montreal","tag-occult-community","tag-pagan","tag-pagan-community","tag-paganism","tag-polytheism","tag-racism","tag-sarah-anne-lawless"],"yoast_head":"\nHabits and Slips: Paganism's Recurring, Tiresome Problem with Racism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Another day, another blatant example of racism in the p-word community. 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