Black Women's Magic with Lindsey Stewart

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did Black Women become magical? In episode 138, Ellie and David talk to Lindsey Stewart about her book, The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic. They talk about how the concept of ‘conjure’ shifted from its origin in the West African tradition to how it manifests in African American communities today. They discuss how Yoruba religion traveled to the US with slavery, as well as exploring the impact of historical images like the Mammy and the Voodoo Queen. What are the dangers of rhetoric of Black women being magical? How has Christianity influenced the ignorance that many Americans have around conjure? Is Beyonce magical? And does her album Cowboy Carter invoke the West African concept of Sankofa? In the Substack bonus segment, Ellie and David talk about magic on a larger scale, and parse out the differences between magic, religion and science.

Works Discussed:
Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards and Valerie N. Adams, “I am not (your) superwoman, Black girl magic, or beautiful struggle: Rethinking the resilience of Black women and girls”
Kim R. Harris, “Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ embraces country music, Black history and religious imagery”
Lindsey Stewart, The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:19.4	The podcast where two philosophers talk about philosophy in everyday life.
0:24.9	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:26.2	And I'm David Peña Guzman.
0:28.3	David, the hashtag Black Girl Magic took off around 2013, 2014.
0:34.1	It's actually now since been patented.
0:36.5	I feel like that was kind of the heyday of hashtags, right? And the Black Girl Magic hashtag was originally popularized as a way of emphasizing how black women and girls have responded to the injustices that they face by crafting their own kind of magic, a sort of protection, self-care that is unassailable by an
0:57.2	outside world that often does not appreciate them. Yeah, and I think it's often presented as a way of
1:02.5	honoring the achievements of black women living in a racist culture that seeks to keep them down.
1:09.0	I'm mostly familiar with the hashtag Black Girl Magic
1:12.0	in the context of sports, science and technology, you know, like black women who break into
1:18.8	areas of research from which they have been historically excluded. And I think what you're
1:24.6	talking about is the career achievement aspect of it. But I think often the hashtag is also used in the way that I was describing it as an indication of the sort of care which black women bring to their own relationships to self. And, you know, the hashtag has also been the recipient of some criticisms. There's an article called I'm Not Your Superwoman that's
1:45.4	critiquing the idea of black girl magic as potentially reinforcing the stereotype that black
1:50.7	women are strong. And so they don't need help because they can figure it out all for themselves.
1:55.0	I also think we can mention the fact that there is a racist stereotype of longstanding, not just particularly with
2:02.5	black women, but with black Americans in general of the magical Negro or the black
2:07.7	person who sort of helps white people on their journey of self-discovery shows up a lot in
2:12.8	literature and film. And the trope is racist in part because it instrumentalizes as black
2:17.0	people's existence,
2:18.1	treating them as just a vehicle for a white protagonist self-development, you know, which is very
2:23.1	different from what we were talking about a moment ago with the black girl magic hashtag as
	...

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