Marcelitte Failla

“Assembling an Africana Religious Orientation: The Black Witch, Digital Media, and Imagining a Black World of Being.”

While studies of the online activity of witches have occurred since the mid-90s, they have mainly focused on European-derived beliefs. In the last decade, however, we see an increased social media presence of North American Black womxn and femmes identifying as witches. On TikTok, for example, videos with Black witch hashtags, such as #blitch, #blackwitchesoftiktok, and #blackwitch, total over 32 million views. This article follows Kevin Quashie’s concepts of Black worldmaking to argue that the Black witch—one tapped into innate divine power—effectively creates spaces where Blackness is totality. I argue that by employing digital media, the Black witch is both encouraging other Black womxn and femmes to tap into their ontological power and is cultivating Black spaces based on an Africana religious orientation—or an approach to notions of the self and spiritual practice that emerge out of shared West and West-Central African religious principles. Because online religious spaces serve as microcosms for more general shifts in religious belief and practice, Black worldmaking by Black witches translates to broader offline notions of this Africana religious orientation.