Stop Talking and Listen to BIPOC
I had a moment of being triggered this morning reading a white-centered response to the article "White Women Co-Opted Pandemic Yoga. Now South Asian instructors are taking it back" featuring several colleagues and friends who I admire.
In the response, the person claimed that the article demonized skinny white women and implied that because she has Native American ancestry, she doesn't have privilege and couldn't be appropriating yoga. Here's my response:
1. Privilege is not subjective but an objective reality. EVERYONE has privilege. Privilege is also relative because of intersectionality, the overlapping system of discriminations based on various identity privileges (essentially, we are all multifaceted beings comprised of multiple identities and we must acknowledge our own personal sources of privilege and oppression). This person has white-passing privilege in the same way that I have brown-passing privilege. In a society that discriminates and has for millennia on the basis of skin color, we both have privilege over someone who has black skin. Instead of pretending to not have privilege, can this person and others use their relative power to help others who suffer from having even less privilege?
2. Native American "Indians" are not the same as South Asian Indians. Do not confuse us. Yoga comes from South Asian cultures, sage smudging comes from North American indigenous cultures. We each have our own traditions and indigenous forms of medicine and wisdom. It is not cultural appropriation to practice your own ancestral traditions. It is cultural appropriation to practice other people's ancestral knowledge without giving credit to and while harming the source culture (e.g., exploitation, exclusion, and erasure of South Asians and BIPOC from the practice of yoga).
3. The response had the same tone as the "All Lives Matter" response to the "Black Lives Matter" (BLM) movement. BLM exists not because white lives do not matter, but because black lives have been devalued throughout history. Similarly, the article was not saying that white people should not practice or teach yoga, but that South Asian practitioners have been excluded and erased from the practice of yoga since it came to the West.
The need now is to include South Asians and other non-normative folx (e.g., BIPOC, LGBTQ+, fat, disabled, neurodivergent, etc.) and diversify the practice. The problem with both this person's response and All Lives Matter is that by centering white people, they are focusing attention on the group of people that have historically benefited financially, socially, politically, emotionally, and spiritually from society's and yoga's unwritten laws instead of the groups of people that have been actively harmed by those laws. The response was selfish and a form of gaslighting because it implied, "Pay attention to me, me, me" instead of "Pay attention to this group of people who have been rendered voiceless by your refusal and the refusal of others with more relative power to listen." The problem is that me and my needs are not yoga. Yoga is union. It develops from the relationship with God, the divine, or whichever higher power you believe in and your soul, spirit, or higher self, and the understanding that the same higher power that exists within you exists within all. Throwing other people under the bus to advance your own career or avoid doing your own introspection and inner work is to not understand the heart of yoga (if the term "spiritual bypassing" or the entire yoga industry comes to mind, then you've realized how systemic this problem is). As people so often misquote the Buddha as saying, "Don't be an asshole." When BIPOC and other non-normative folx talk about their negative experiences in a yoga class or in the world, don't dismiss them because you've had different life experiences. Listen.
The South Asian yoga teachers mentioned in the article - Tejal Patel, Melissa Shah, and Divya Balakrishnan - are remarkable people because they use their influence and their platforms not just to help themselves, but to actively uplift and center other South Asians and marginalized folx. They have realized Nelson Mandela's words, “To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” By fighting for the freedom of all, they are truly living their yoga.
Are you?
References & Further Reading:
Sakshi Venkatraman, White Women Co-Opted Pandemic Yoga. Now, South Asian Instructors Are Taking it Back, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/white-women-co-opted-pandemic-yoga-now-south-asian-instructors-n1263952