The big discussion these days within the witch and spiritual communities is decolonizing your practice.
This means acknowledging and/or removing the things that rightfully belong to other cultures and closed practices. Know better, do better.
I'm only going to touch on this briefly because there are others who go into great detail about decolonizing, one is Juliet Diaz. I highly recommend her work.
I'm just going to rant a little about the gatekeeping (mostly) yt people are doing to other yt people.
Social media has become gatekeeping central. Witches are gatekeeping everything, telling other people no you can't do that, it's a closed practice, or that's cultural appropriation...
They are getting a lot of information wrong.
Not to mention they're just pissing each other off and causing more negativity.
Don't tell other witches how to witch.
Especially Gen X witches. You start telling an X'er what to do and the first reaction is going to be "F you, biotch!"
These "baby" witch Millenials and Gen Z witches who get on TikTok and start screaming cultural appropriation, closed practice, and push to #cancel everything just don't get it.
Older witches came up the hard way, hiding in the shadows, devouring whatever books we could get our hands on, and staying solitary for most of our lives because we didn't know anyone else who was a witch and the internet wasn't a thing so there was no way to easily connect with others.
So did we get some info wrong? Of course, we did.
Are we open to change? Maybe, just don't scream at us that we have to do it now or we're a dirty colonizing appropriator.
These newbies hear something and then they run with it not getting the entire story.
Or they just repeat what they heard on someone else's TikTok without doing any actual research.
And it all turns into a bunch of gatekeeping word salad that is just making people so angry they tune out.
I would say 90% of all the drama and gatekeeping is yt people screaming about cultural appropriation- about cultures they don't belong to and really have no f'ing clue what they are talking about.
They are drowning out actual indigenous voices and the voices of people who belong to these cultures.
This is a huge problem. Because the information being shared gets less accurate each time someone repeats it. Like the old game of telephone.
So instead of people making their own Gatekeeping Tik Tok about cultural appropriation and closed practices, how about everyone share videos from the people of these cultures so we can hear what they have to say.
If you are a true ally, then raise the indigenous voices, raise up the voices of people of color, share voices from these cultures, and let them tell us what is right and what is wrong.
Let them tell us what needs to be done. Let them tell us what they want, what they need.
Let these people be their own gatekeepers so the proper information can be shared.
Let's get the correct information out there.
For More About Decolonizing Your Witchcraft, please check out these articles.
https://mashable.com/article/witchtok-problematic-witch-cultural-appropriation
https://aldianews.com/en/culture/heritage-and-history/decolonizing-witchcraft
This one is great because it includes many further reading resources
https://www.flyingthehedge.com/2020/06/decolonizing-witchcraft.html
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