Norse pagan here, really queer, only about half white, and… yes. Please read the above post, and then read it again.
Look, every time I find a vendor with stuff I like or a book that looks interesting, I have to play the “Are they legit or are they a nazi?” game, counting the number of times they use words like ‘ancestors’ and ‘heritage’ because those are both known dog-whistles and important parts of the religion. This game is not fun. And as someone who’s Latine, who works far more with ancestors of color than the white ones (largely because I don’t know much about the white ones, save the general regions they came from), I am frequently literally afraid of interacting with other Heathens in person without a shitload of googling beforehand, checking which runes people adorn themselves with, matching that to the potential dog-whistle count, and still never being sure unless I see them specifically denouncing racism/antisemitism/transphobia/homophobia/etc.
I am a part of this religion, and this is my experience. If I didn’t profoundly love our gods and traditions, I would’ve packed my shit and gone back to generic multi-pantheon polytheism. So if I feel this way, I need y’all to take a moment and think about what it’s like to someone who’s not on the inside, whose experience of us is basically just neonazis and the #notallheathens crowd, people who see our symbols being used by the ones emulating the fascist fucks who literally tried to exterminate people like them, and have not actually stopped trying.
And the neonazi Heathens are us. We don’t get to say they’re not, we don’t get to No True Scotsman them just because we don’t like how they’re doing our religion. They’re still doing it. We can’t point at the worst and most racist parts of Christianity and use them as examples of Christianity’s many flaws (which is a phase most pagan types seem to go through, myself included) and then act shocked and insulted when someone does the exact same thing to us.
Jewish people, Black people, LGBTQIA+ folks, and countless other marginalized groups have every right to be wary. They don’t owe us a fair hearing. They’re just trying to survive in a world where some of us are literally killing them.
Yeah, we have the right to be mad that our sacred symbols are being turned into instruments of hate, and that they’re inspiring fear in people who aren’t familiar with what we’re actually about. I sure as fuck am. But we need to be mad at the nazis, not their targets. And then we need to do something about it. If we do nothing, we’re complicit. Lecturing the people who are being hurt in this circumstance is not helpful, not sharing wisdom, and not creating frith* with people who are part of our larger communities. We create frith by listening, and by seeing to the comfort and security of our communities as best we can… and our communities out here in the Really Real World are bigger than just our co-religionists.
*Frith, for the non-Heathens out there, is generally translated as peace, but the concept encompasses ideas about hospitality, cooperation, obligation, and security. Frith is what holds communities together, and keeps us from getting stabby when we’re all stuck in close proximity to each other. No frith with fascists.
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