Five Ways to Know Your Spirituality Might Be Born Out of White Supremacy Culture

There is a kind of spirituality that feels clean and bright on the surface, like a candle that never burns down. But beneath it lives something older. A shadow that smells like control. A lineage that asks you to be small. A spell cast long before you were born.

If your spiritual path has ever felt like it was draining the wildness out of you, silencing the body, erasing your fire, you are not imagining it. Some of what we call spirituality was built to tame you. Some of it was shaped by white supremacy culture; in fact, a lot of it is, AND it's really bad for your soul, even if you're white. Your soul knows the difference, your body knows the difference. You can feel it in your bones.

Here are five signs you are waking up.

1. Your spirituality demands purity and calls it enlightenment.

If your path insists that you stay calm, peaceful, forgiving, patient, and always composed, that is not spirituality. That is purification. And purification is a ritual of erasure.

A true witch knows that the sacred is not always clean. It is raw. It is emotional. It is alive. A path that refuses your anger, your grief, your desire, your rage, and your joy is not guiding you toward divinity. It is guiding you away from yourself.

2. You were taught that goodness means emotional neutrality.

If you have been conditioned to believe that being spiritual means never being triggered, never naming harm, never breaking the surface of someone else’s comfort, you have not found spirituality. You have found emotional suppression.

White supremacy culture teaches silence and calls it peace. It teaches numbness and calls it mastery. But instinctively, we know that truth moves through feeling. Emotion is oracle. Neutrality is not wisdom. Neutrality is disappearing - particularly for women.

3. You were taught that suffering is a personal failure instead of a wound carried by the collective.

If every pain in your life has been framed as your mindset, your vibration, your manifestation, you have been handed a spiritual mirror that reflects blame, not truth. If your pain has been framed as a lesson or as punishment, you are in a gaslighting abusive relationship with your faith.

Some pain does not come from your thoughts. Some pain comes from systems that were built long before you could speak. Some pain is ancestral. Some pain is political. A path that denies reality is not spiritual. It is delusion wearing a crown.

4. Your spiritual lineage only elevates teachers who look the same.

If every mentor, guru, or model of awakening you follow is white, thin, gentle, wealthy, Western, and perfectly curated, that is not coincidence. That is colonization hidden inside a halo.

White supremacy culture erases the witches, the brujas, the rootworkers, the Indigenous keepers, the Black mystics, the Brown prophets, the queer and the poor who carried their traditions through fire. Real spirituality is not uniform. It is many-voiced, many-bodied, and ancient. If there aren't people who look very different than you in positions of thought leadership in your spiritual world, you are practicing monochromatic racism, cosplaying spirituality.

5. You were taught that spirituality should feel comfortable and if it doesn’t, you are doing it wrong.

If discomfort feels like failure to you, if conflict feels shameful, if rage feels unholy, you have been trained into spiritual obedience, not spiritual growth.

When the discomfort becomes initiation, the ego cracks open. The truth rises from the bones. The systems that harm us get revealed in the light. Real spirituality expands you. It confronts what must be confronted. It roots you deeper into community, not deeper into silence.

A spirituality that never asks you to feel the fire is not a path. It is a spell. And you do not have to live inside it anymore.