A while ago, I tried a particular tea brand that was part of a Pagan subscription box I reviewed, Blackthorn Hoodoo Blends. I remember saying the tea was pretty okay but the name – particular the “Hoodoo” part. To recap:

  • Amy Blackthorn, creator of Blackthorn Hoodoo Blends, is not from the pan-African diaspora – meaning she’s not a Black person. At all.
  • Blackthorn does not practice Hoodoo, she is more Celtic/Druidry, if I’m not mistaken. Even if she did practice Hoodoo, it wouldn’t instantly fix anything.

Hoodoo, like Voodoo, is an African diaspora-based spirituality borne from coping with slavery and being forced to abandon their original faiths and identities by vindictive and malicious captors, the slave owners and slave traffickers. Also, like Voodoo, it gets a bad rap, usually borne from racism.

I brought this up to Blackthorn. My interaction with Blackthorn was been none too charming. When mentioning this up with her, she had a very sour, “mind your business and let me make my money” response, which I wrote about. It was titled: Blackthorn Teas: Whose Culture is it Anyways?

Turns out, it caught traction with an online magazine, Dear Darkling magazine. I got an email not too long ago from the editor-in-chief and this is what it said:

I’m the editor-in-chief of Dear Darkling magazine. We were recently contacted by Blackthorn Hoodoo Blends, and asked whether we’d like to sample their tea for review purposes. Knowing only that this brand was popular among the pagan community, we agreed.
However, as our writer was doing research for the piece, she grew increasingly uncomfortable with their usage of the term “Hoodoo.” She reached out to me, and I did my own research, which was when I found your blog post about the company.
Dear Darkling does not support or condone any sort of bigoted or racist behavior, including cultural appropriation. The more we learned about Blackthorn, the more we knew we would not feature their brand in our magazine. Not now, not ever.
I just want to thank you for being public about your experience with Blackthorn. Beyond their clear appropriation, their behavior during your interaction was inexcusable. I’m so sorry you had that experience, but I’m glad you wrote your post about it. It proved to us that Blackthorn was not a company we wanted anything to do with.
Also, I want to thank you for the list of POC tea companies. We aim to support and amplify POC voices whenever possible, and with it being tea season, we’re happy to have some new companies to drool over.

Here are the Black-owned tea stores I referenced:
1. Wystone’s World Teas
2. SoRen Tea

I am very glad to see this kind of response. Blackthorn should be more mindful of her business actions, especially during times like these. If she named her teas pretty much anything, avoiding appropriation, all would be fine and good. No discovery of awful and racist attitude, no poison pen post, none of that. It was Blackthorn’s choice to use such an appropriating name, to react the way she did, everything. Hopefully, more will drop her brand in the future as well. She earned this by herself, no one else.

In other News! I will be teaching a Cartomancy workshop at the Dawtas of the Moon convention in Baltimore, MD on Oct 20. That’s tomorrow! Also, this is technically the first post for October (The Arts! and Ask Black Witch are for Sept). I’ve just been super busy with Dawtas and dentistry (getting extractions suck).