Black people are under spells.
Recently, there has been a viral video on TikTok circulating in the Black community with a lady coming into a hair salon with what seemed to be “chicken blood” in her hair. Many people on the internet said the lady appeared to be drained or “low energy.” The salon owner, who was also the person holding the phone and recording the video, instructed her worker to clean the lady’s hair out.
The video cuts to a clip of the worker doing exactly that, and then it jumps to the lady with the “chicken blood” in her hair walking out smiling, lively, and with a new hair do. Yet, you might be asking why any of this matters.
It’s what happened the next day.
The next day, the worker who cleaned the “chicken blood” out of the woman’s hair had her baby pass away. This sparked the whole world to flock to this situation. However, I think that it got muddled because there were so many different perspectives. Yet, from an outside perspective, none of them made sense. Even if I don’t understand why the lady had chicken blood in her hair, or how the worker’s baby died, I don’t think the two are related, and people thinking otherwise come up with two reasons why this happened.
The main thing linking why it happened is that the lady is a witch who practices spells. Comments are divided, though, with people saying it’s Santería, or the conceptual idea to destiny-swap, so lets deep-dive into both of those a little more.
Santería, for the first example, is being misrepresented in this conversation online. It is, to my research, a complex Afro-Caribbean religion with roots in Yoruba spiritual traditions and the history of enslaved Africans in Cuba. Though animal sacrifice can be part of CERTAIN rituals, it’s still a highly structured process that’s sacred and performed within a “ceremony” most times. Never once did I find any of this being linked to chicken blood being put into people’s hair in a salon. Yet, social media has reduced the entire practice to “witchcraft” or curses, which not only takes away from the tragic death of the worker’s baby but also to anyone practicing Santería.
Then there is the concept of destiny swapping. Which is the idea that someone or a human can spiritually redirect another person’s blessings, fortune, or life path with another person. But none of this is new, and this belief appears mostly across West African spiritual traditions and folk practices throughout the diaspora. On TikTok, though, it seems to mutate into speculation–that it simply is stealing success, beauty, love, or opportunity through ritual means.
All of that isn’t the case, and I just urge fellow Black people to try and research other practices of religion before demeaning them or also demeaning the death of another individual–a baby–and that we all learn from this topic and move forward.
