Believe in My Crystals: Fanon, Hegel, and White Feminism’s Spiritual Escapes

“I want someone who: believe in my bs like white girls believe in new age spirituality.”

Been a bit ansty and fuck-it last week and decided to add the above to my tinder... and I had to ask grok to defend me, ofc lol...! 

Read through Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), this line cuts deeper than just humor or self-deprecation. Fanon dissects the internalized colonialism that pushes the colonized subject to seek affirmation through proximity to whiteness. For the black man in Fanon’s text, the pursuit of the white woman becomes more than attraction—it becomes a symbolic conquest: “By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man.”

The "BS" here is not only a joke about gullibility but an admission of desiring uncritical validation, mirrored in stereotypes of white women embracing New Age spirituality. In both cases, belief functions as a way to bypass rigorous scrutiny—providing ego reinforcement for the colonized subject while granting the white woman a shallow sense of depth. This is where Fanon warns: such validation is alienating, not liberating, since it ties self-worth to white approval.

But the dialectic extends further. Through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the master-slave relation reframes the white woman’s credulity as a yearning for the “slave’s” connection to nature and authenticity. Her gravitation toward New Age practices—astrology, crystals, chakra alignments, or appropriated indigenous rituals—signals a desire to escape alienation under modern patriarchal-imperial structures. Yet this “return to nature” often becomes fetishistic: exoticizing the black body as raw vitality, or simulating authenticity through spiritual appropriation without risk or transformation. In this cycle, both sides objectify: the colonized subject looks to white femininity for validation, while white femininity looks to the colonized (or appropriated “Other”) for borrowed authenticity. Neither achieves liberation.

Here, “white feminism” enters as a reactionary force within the imperial core. Critics like bell hooks and Nancy Fraser have shown how it prioritizes individual empowerment and personal fulfillment—wellness, self-care, or spiritual exploration—over systemic struggle against capitalism and empire. Practices like New Age spirituality, disproportionately popular among affluent white women since the 1970s, embody this tendency. They offer soothing rituals to manage the psychic blowback of imperial contradictions—economic precarity, climate anxiety, alienation—without addressing the global exploitation producing them.

This is the dialectic in full: on one side, the colonized subject’s pursuit of recognition through whiteness, masking alienation with borrowed validation; on the other, white feminism’s flight into spirituality, masking complicity with rituals of escape. The humor of the quote crystallizes this mutual illusion: the desire for someone to “believe in my bs” like that is not just self-effacing but diagnostic. It exposes belief itself—whether in personal fantasies or crystal healing—as a symptom of colonial and imperial structures that substitute credulous comfort for authentic transformation.

The contradiction remains unresolved, deferred rather than abolished. Fanon’s warning rings out: the mask cannot liberate, nor can escapism absolve. What both parties grasp at is recognition—but without dismantling the system that withholds it, their belief will always be BS