How Netflix’s ‘Sabrina’ fails its intersectional feminist promise

This post contains spoilers for Season 1 of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina desperately wants you to know how woke it is.

From Sabrina founding the WICCA (Women’s Intersectional Cultural and Creative Association) club to help her black best friend Ros, to protecting her gender nonconforming friend Susie from bullies, she’s painted as a model of the white feminist ally.

And here’s where things immediately get iffy about the show’s supposed wokeness. 

Intersectional witchcraft sounds like the ideal narrative primed for salient and relevant social commentary in the year of our dark lord 2018. But the show falls woefully short of that promise. 

In practice, there’s little more to it than moralizing soapbox Moments of Intersectional Feminism. And Sabrina‘s ideas of intersectionality make it feel like not only the exact problem with white feminism, but like a bad after-school special that only makes you want to do more drugs.

The shame of this twofold.

For one, witch narratives are natural metaphors for stories about those who are marginalized and othered, and we need more of those right now (and always). But like so many other recent pop culture attempts to use that metaphor, it forgets a huge chunk of the history of real-life marginalized people who were actually persecuted for witchcraft. Namely, people of color.

Now, to be clear: We are not condemning CAOS for its above average attention to diverse representation. The attempt is commendable, especially when it comes to representing non-binary folks. But it also goes to show what a sorry state we’re in that many are heralding the series as a feminist manifesto — even while not agreeing entirely on what it’s even saying about feminism. 

What disappoints most about CAOS is that witchcraft is a perfect backdrop for an intersectional feminist lens

It’s not hard to see why. In Sabrina, intersectional feminism is an aesthetic rather than an ideal.

What disappoints most about CAOS is that witchcraft is a perfect backdrop for an intersectional feminist lens, with a history that combines issues of sexism, racism, ethnocentricism, and cultural appropriation.

Yet when CAOS, like so much of our pop culture, considers the persecution of witches, the victims that come to mind first are white women. In the process, we erase the centuries of victims who were slaves and other people of color whose foreign religions or simple failure to be white was cast as witchcraft or voodoo.

Many forget that in Salem alone, historians trace back a great source of the panic to racism against Tituba, an enslaved woman (her ethnic identity is debated, but popularly stated as West Indian) accused of teaching witchcraft and cursing the other girls. The racism behind the mass hysteria is constantly overshadowed by the narrative of white female victims, though.

CAOS is guilty of this in spades – like in how it represents the Thirteen, the white women who were hung and now out for revenge after being abandoned by their coven during witch trials.

To be fair, it’s true that most of the victims killed were white women, many because they didn’t fit the strict social codes for what women should be like in a puritanical society. But not all of them came from that mold.

For example, there was a significant amount of men who died too (upwards of six of the twenty who died in total), for the crime of refusing to participate in the trials and supporting the women accused.

I mean, talk about true male allies who deserve a bit more recognition, am I right? Where’s our male ally laying down his life to stand up for women, Sabrina?

CAOS, a show declaring itself intersectional from the mountaintops, forgoes this more complex tapestry of marginalization and allyship. Instead, it opts to resurrect the same old specters of white women victims, before then making Sabrina the white woman savior to boot.

It opts to resurrect the same old specters of white women victims, before then making Sabrina the white woman savior to boot

Even the Salem killings pales in comparison to the centuries of oppression before and after that targeted people of color.

The persecution of witchcraft in the Americas is stewed in racist stereotypes about Native Americans and slaves from both Africa and the Caribbean. Accusations of voodoo and witchcraft were used as ways to further dehumanize these people of color, and gave colonists more moral reasoning to torture and murder them with impunity.

Even now, the racist persecution of these traditions in the name of Catholicism remains in full effect. As recently as 2002, the Catholic church tried to outlaw the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, a practice of Yoruban origins brought over through the Atlantic slave trade. 

The religion survived the unimaginable trials of centuries of slavery, and is now the strongest surviving practices of those Yoruban traditions. Yet in 2015, there were reports of mounting violence from Evangelical Christians against its practitioners, who stigmatize Candomblé as a devil-worshipping form of witchcraft.

But that’s just one of the many examples of how, to this day, racism and ethnocentricism play a huge role into the story of who the true victims of anti-witchcraft persecution are.

Image: Diyah Pera/Netflix

CAOS didn’t need to go into any of those specifics, of course. But at the very least, a show with an incredibly talented and diverse cast that pays constant lip service to feminist buzzwords could’ve done a better job of acknowleding racism to tell a truly powerful story about witches in 2018.

Instead, CAOS sidelines most character arcs who aren’t straight or white, and even edges into iffy racist stereotypes itself, like the Wise Old Black Magical Character that is Ros’ grandmother. And again, the slap in the face is the missed opportunity. Certainly, Ros’ magical storyline could’ve easily been pivoted to explore the lesser known othering embedded into witchcraft.

An attempt at social relevance that perpetuates the myth of a white person being the only one powerful enough to save everyone else.

Sabrina’s character also unknowingly plays into a recent trend of real-world cultural appropriation when it comes to witchcraft. Those who practice Hoodoo, for example, are experiencing an influx of “New Age” white woman witchcraft claiming traditions passed down by slaves in the South.

The characters of Ambrose and Prudence only heighten the sense of lost potential, too. 

By far the two most interesting characters (please never subject me to more Harvey ever again), their identities as specifically black witches goes completely unaddressed. Obviously, their characters don’t need to be defined by their race. But ignoring it as part of their experience feels equally awkward. 

As it is, the talented actors behind those characters feel otherwise marginalized to the role of fulfilling a quota, rather than actually representing diversity in the story.

Ultimately, CAOS’ intersectional feminism is an attempt at social relevance that perpetuates the myth of a white person being the only one powerful enough to save everyone else.

At best, it winds up being an little more than the story of how Sabrina’s hair went platinum blonde. At worst, it’s about how Sabrina, and the series itself, saves the day by refusing to address the complicated truth of who was a victim in the persecution of witchcraft. Because instead, she opts to literally burn that history alive with the patriarchal fires of hell.

And, uh, yeah. That is just #NotMyIntersectionalWitchcraft.