Last year I went to a Pagan Pride Day event where a friend of mine and a future friend were facilitating a discussion on social issues in the Pagan community. One of the subjects that was dwelled on by the participants was the suggestion that white Pagans need to improve our record on race issues. The discussion basically went downhill right from the start, with the majority-white audience consistently falling back on the idea that if we just stop acknowledging race it'll go away, so we need to "be the movement" as it were and stop talking about race.
At the same time, Pagans--especially Eclectic Pagans, but also Pagans practicing religions heavily inspired by the ancestral cultures of people of color--often have the mentality that all spiritual knowledge and art is necessarily fair game for us, with many Pagans identifying as being inspired at least in partly by Native American spiritualities.
I was thinking about this as the events in Ferguson unfolded, beginning with the murder of unarmed black teen Michael Brown, the unwillingness of any law enforcement body to arrest and charge Darren Wilson for his crime, and the extreme breaches of human rights associated with the police response to protests of the murder. I was thinking about it because I noticed that literally none of the organizations and groups I at the time followed that were run by white people and focused on African spiritual or magickal wisdom said anything about Ferguson.
I looked. I waited. I saw post after post of white people talking about Vodoun and Hoodoo and Santería, and not one bothered to even mention the horrendous racist abuses taking place.
I want you to think about this whenever you scoff at peoples' accusations of cultural appropriation. People practicing religious and magickal systems developed and maintained, either in Africa or by black people in the Americas, with traditions often steeped in an understanding of a history of slavery and intense racism, and they all went about their business, preferring instead to chatter on about what new kits they're selling to a predominantly white fanbase instead.
Because when people get angry about cultural appropriation, this is the sort of thing that really encapsulates the problem.
White people--including white Pagans--are great at saying things like "race doesn't matter, so we should be ignoring race entirely." This provides a convenient excuse for white Pagans to take inspiration from Native religions, or from Hoodoo, or from Vodoun, or from Asian religions, all under the assumption that because race is a social construction race does not matter.
The simple fact of the matter, though, is that when we ignore race, it's more accurate to say we are ignoring racism.
Because it just doesn't matter whether or not you as an individual are tolerant of all ethnicities, whether or not you as an individual would shoot an unarmed black man or you as an individual would take a Native child away from their family to place in a white household. These are things that continue to happen today. You can't ignore this away. You have to take action.
And if you aren't willing to take action, then you have absolutely no rightful business even beginning to demand access to those peoples' spiritual knowledge and belief, let alone profit from them.
