Assembling an Africana Religious Orientation

Abstract

The Black witch and her multiple presences are quickly expanding across the internet. For example, the Hoodwitch’s Instagram account, curated by Bri Luna, boasts 473 thousand followers. Her website features tools for modern witches, including crystals, cleansing herbs, and information about the Vodou deities, the loa. Jessica, owner of BehatiLife Apothecary, has 100 thousand Instagram followers and identifies as an intuitive witch “with a gift for empowering people to break into the biggest shifts of positive change in their lives.” TikTok videos with Blackwitch hashtags, such as #blitch, #blackwitchesoftiktok, and #blackwitch total over 32 million views. While studies of the cyber activities of witches have occurred since the mid-1990s, they have primarily focused on Neopagan and Wiccan practices. The last decade, however, has seen an increased presence of North American Black womxn and femmes identifying as witches who are approaching their craft through an Africana religious orientation. Whereas Neopagan studies are helpful for understanding how witchcraft operates in digital space, they cannot account for the African originated practices and beliefs that shape both Black witch ritual activity and notions of self. This article addresses this gap by attending to two facets of the Black witch’s online presence: her concepts of ontological power and her Black worldmaking endeavors. In Black Aliveness or a Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie opens with the following request to the reader. “Imagine a Black world... a world where blackness exists in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness...where every human question and possibility is of people who are black.” Worldmaking, as Quashie describes it here, creating spaces where Blackness can just be, is a co-creative activity for Black witches, enabled and enhanced by digital media. I argue that the Black witch—whom I identify as someone with innate abilities to harness divine energies such as the ability to see or hear spirits —effectively fosters personal agency through a repetitive online discourse encouraging other Black womxn and femmes to tap into their ontological power. As the Black witch recognizes this power, a power independent of whiteness, she cultivates multi-religious Africana-orientated Black spaces that further affirm her power. Because online religious spaces serve as microcosms for more general shifts in religious belief and practice, the Black worldmaking currently produced by Black witches translates to broader offline notions of what I call an Africana religious orientation. My research consisted of digital online media inquiry and ethnographic semi-structured interviews with leading Black womxn and femmes over video chat and in-person. I reviewed podcasts, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, Facebook group engagement, and TikTok videos and attended copious