On the internet, you will find a lot of articles about how to become an astrologer. However, you will have trouble finding that many articles about how to protect yourself from white wellness spaces as an astrologer of color. This article is my attempt to remedy that in a small way.

This article is for you if you are a person of color who does spirituality stuff and has to find your way around an industry that tries to fuck with you.

Fetishization

First of all, there’s a lot of older white women in spiritual spaces who will fetishize you. This is going to be a dynamic that you find yourself in even though you swore that you would not enable dynamics like this when you started out. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because other people fetishizing you isn’t your fault and isn’t under your control. It’s not about you being gay or whatever else you might be. A lot of older white women will approach you when you are around and try to touch you or tell you intimate details about their private lives. Not all of them do this but a lot of them sure do.

I’m talking about people who you have never met before telling you about their medical history, their children’s sexual history, their sexual history, and all of the random thoughts that keep them up at night. These white women will act really nice! They will not ask you what your name is or anything about you. It will be hard to get them to stop talking.

The reason why white women fetishize you is because white people tend to associate all people of color with some level of sexual deviancy since heteronormativity is based in whiteness so they like to direct the emotions that they find deviant to people they think are deviant. On top of that, there’s actually this very long history of Chinese doctors in Chinatowns offering medicines for sexual diseases at a time when no one else did. All of that created this population of white women who go into wellness or spiritual spaces and get emotionally naked right off the bat.

If or when this happens to you, don’t worry. You’re not doing anything to invite this behavior. You’re not selling out your culture or appealing to whiteness or whatever. A lot of people are just like this because of their own history of puritanism and stuff. If they’re touching you, you can tell them to stop.

If or when this happens to you, decide whether you want to call it out or if you want to quickly end the interaction and move on. Calling icky behavior can feel good but it can also deepen the interaction or relationship.

Usually, and I find this interesting too, is that these white women who want to dump everything on you will only interact with you if they can isolate you in a predominantly white space. They usually get too shy and go away if you talk to another person of color in front of them. So you want to make sure that you can always do that if you are in spiritual spaces.

Anger

White wellness culture is a commodity that is invested in spiritual bypassing. A lot of white people will come to these spiritual spaces solely to pursue their own individual, personal healing even if their healing is detrimental, exploitative, or extractive to historically oppressed people. I mean, that’s not really healing but you know what I mean.

Those people who are hyperfocused on their own self improvement tend to get really angry at you if you do anything to disrupt their hypocrisy and selfishness.

This is the mentality: these people go to wellness spaces because they want to feel better about themselves as fast as possible. Despite being rich, they see themselves as people who are already suffering far too much to take any more inconvenience on. If someone is suffering, they don’t want to know about it. They might have paid a whole rent to go to some weekend retreat once. They are entitled to something positive!

Do you think that this type of person will react well if you point out that we need healing because of the unjust woundings inflicted upon us due to colonialism? When you name and shame the wellness industry’s methods of extraction? When you suggest that they will feel truly alive when they give in addition to taking?

No, they’re not going to take that well. They’re going to see you as disruptive to their internal peace process which is really just about numbing out. They’re going to see themselves as someone who is morally virtuous enough to desire healing so the bad vibes that you seem to give off will set them off. They will tell you that you are being violent or triggering.

My advice to you if you are starting a spirituality practice: Talk about politics not just once but a lot. Do it unceasingly and without stopping.

If you stop talking about politics for even just a week or two, this type of person will appear out of nowhere and then act mad when they realize that you’re not their personal servant who exists solely to enable their limited worldview. To keep that person from interacting with you at all, you have to keep being loud about politics all the time. When you unceasingly describe the world as accurately and precisely as you can, those who strive to protect their delusions will simply fall away like dead leaves.

Be clear, be precise, and never shut up just because some bullshit weirdo told you to! This is an act of self care.

Puritanism

This is my last point. I want to point out now that the roots of white supremacy are religious and that colonial religions inflict collective suffering by teaching us that we must earn our right to live by being good enough. That type of perfectionism around morality has had a very big and detrimental impact on how we see harm, oppression, and community.

What I am trying to say is that white people or people who grew up in the church will associate spirituality and spiritual spaces with that kind of colonial morality that makes you prove that you deserve to live all the time. That’s why white wellness spaces are so full of these people who constantly signal virtue and perform goodness. That’s actually how a lot of Christians act.

As a person of color with a spiritual practice, you will be scrutinized. Everything that you do or say and everyone that you associate with will be competitively scrutinized.

Colonial spirituality is perfectionistic. That doesn’t mean that religious people are perfect. That means that people are very focused on ruthlessly rooting out flaws.

You’re always going to run into white people who think that they understand your spirituality more than your people, that their documents are more historically accurate than your analysis. You’re always going to run into white people who think that they are more ancestrally tuned into a certain lineage than you or more authentic on account of seeing the actual practitioners of a lineage commercializing or “selling out” in their eyes.

In wellness spaces, white people will scrutinize you for flaws and they will eagerly assert that they are better than you whenever they think that they have caught you making one.

My advice: Just relax. Remember that moral perfectionism is colonial. You don’t need to prove that you’re good enough to, like, have a spirit and ancestors that you honor. You don’t have to carry white guilt for those who try to displace that shit onto you due to their Biblical mindset. You have a different way of approaching spirit, one that’s informed by humor and food and survival rather than social control. You can just be yourself.

And for the white people who are in your comments and inbox pointing out random things that they think are wrong with you? Fuck them! Those people are reacting to you the way they are because they fetishize you and expect you to perform a certain type of virtue due to what their relationship to religion looks like. They’re refusing to engage in a participatory spirituality and, instead, see their parasocial relationship with you as a product.

You don’t know those people. They’re just like the older white women who trauma dump on you. You can either curse them out or walk away. If you choose to curse them out, beware of deepening the interaction or relationship.