Lefties really need to understand the difference between appropriation and appreciation or at the very least realize the value in staying fit and healthy… even if it is Yoga.
If you’re white and practice yoga, you might be a racist! At least according to a new article titled “Yoga and the Roots of Cultural Appropriation,”
According to its co-author, Religious Studies Professor Shreena Gandhi, you’re at least contributing to “white supremacy”, saying: “yoga practice in the United States is intimately linked to some of the larger forces of white supremacy” and is “tied up with colonialism.”
“Yoga contributes to our economic system, but never forget this system is one built upon exploitation and commodification of labor, often the labor of black people and people of the global south,” says the article.
The global south… because apparently being racist automatically makes you Southern and being Souther automatically makes you a racist, I guess…
“Yoga, like so many other colonized systems of practice and knowledge, did not appear in the American spiritual landscape by coincidence; rather, its popularity was a direct consequence of a larger system of cultural appropriation that capitalism engenders and reifies,” they continued. “While the (mis)appropriation of yoga may not be a life-threatening racism, it is a part of systemic racism nonetheless, and it is important to ask, what are the impetuses for this cultural ‘grabbing’?”
“This complex socio-political reality of the U.S. is key to understanding how the cultural void of white society is intimately mixed with white supremacy, capitalism, and globalization; and it is within these oppressive structures that cultural appropriation and the yoga industrial complex flourishes,” say Gandhi and Wolff.
“Few white people make the connection between their attraction to yoga and the cultural loss their ancestors and relatives experienced when they bought into white dominant culture in order to access resources. Many Europeans did not fully grasp what they were giving up and what they were investing in, yet many did, and most who arrived on these shores chose to stay here rather than return to their home country. Few white people make the connection between their love of yoga and their desire and ability to access traditions from historically oppressed communities of color,” they add.
(H/T The College Fix)
