Yoga and White Privilege

Earlier this year, I decided my theme and intention for the year would be to create/dwell in a feeling of lightness. I wanted to do that, in part, because I knew I would taking on some heavy stuff as I continue to explore white privilege and white supremacy in my work and life. As soon as you try to locate your place in these systems as a white person,  it can feel paralyzing and overwhelming. I thought that it would be good to take them on, while simultaneously maintaining some sense of lightness in how to move forward.

And already it turns out, I need that!

I’m diving deeper into how my practices of yoga and meditation connect to white supremacy. With a group of friends, I’m working through the Me and White Supremacy Workbook. It’s a set of reflection prompts, some videos and background reading that are especially targeted to white women who think they are allies in the fight for racial justice (but who too often prove disappointing or unreliable to our sisters of color). I’m also participating in this 10-day summit Honor Don’t Appropriate, which is a series of video conversations with women of color, led by Susanna Barkataki, about the deeper challenges of practicing yoga with integrity in the context of global economic and racial inequality.

I had already done some thinking and reflecting about how my yoga practice might benefit from and reinforce white supremacy, but these resources are taking me deeper into that reflection.

In other work I do, we often use this reading by Peggy McIntosh to explore white privilege. I wanted to use the model she sets out to reflect on my experience of yoga is connected to whiteness and benefits from the systems of oppression we have in place.

Here’s what I came up with (so far):

• I can afford to take classes (significant because of the huge wage gap between white people and people of color, which is profound in the city where I live).
• Because I am not part of a community that is targeted by white supremacy, I have time and energy for self care (I don't spend all my free time coping with the impact of racism). 
• I can get a visa to go to India and study when I want (American white privilege – it is much harder for an Indian teacher to be able to come here).
• I can find classes I want to take in my own neighborhood, or a nearby neighborhood.
• I feel safe and welcome in the neighborhoods where I find yoga classes. 
• I can be pretty sure that when I go to class, there will be many people who share my class & race identity.
• Classes are widely available in the language that is most comfortable for me.  
• I usually don’t have to worry about finding a teacher who will not discriminate against me for my race, and who is likely to have cultural competence in my racial identity. 
• I can be pretty sure that my body type & appearance – thinner, athletic – will be the norm in the classes I take. 
• Other people are likely to see my experience as a yoga practitioner/teacher as something interesting and “groovy” about me. 
• When I talk about yoga, I don’t have to worry about people around me thinking this is a sign that I haven’t fully assimilated to the US, or that I am holding onto some cultural practices that are not welcome here (unlike how an immigrant/South Asian yoga teacher might be perceived). 
• I can separate the aspects of yoga I value from the larger set of cultural practices it is embedded in, and no one holds me accountable for that. E.g. I am not expected to defend the caste system (or necessarily even know about it). 
• Because I’m white, and I practice yoga among mostly other white people, there are few people who can or will hold me accountable when I get it wrong. My connection to my lineage and training is by choice, but it is not enforced by a larger community. I don’t  have familial elders or ancestors whose guidance also binds me to accountability.  

Yoga practice in the US, in many ways, reflects the larger pattern of colonialism. Most of the places colonized by the British, local cultural practices became a subject of harassment, ridicule and violence against local people. Typically, these practices were outlawed as British rulers tried to inculcate a very twisted and very white interpretation of civilization. Colonized people couldn’t practice their cultural and religious traditions without fear of punishment and reprisal. Colonialism was also connected to evangelizing Christianity. There are many stories of colonized people performing Christianity in public, while privately trying to maintain the cultural and religious practices Christianity aimed to eradicate.

We white people have benefited from a tradition and pattern – our ancestors just a few generations back went to other (non-white) places, devastated local economies and cultures, and took what they wanted and incorporated it into white consumer culture. Yoga and meditation are practices that were deeply intertwined with other aspects of society – economy, family relationships, worldview. But we have adopted what we like about them here, without necessarily bringing the reverence or respect for context that these practices demand.

It’s really discomfiting to acknowledge all of this and it’s hard to know what to do with it. Of course we can all have our story about why our particular practice isn’t problematic. I have mine. There are ways that Iyengar yoga might upend some of this history, most powerfully in the fact that the Iyengar family exerts profound and singular control over our network of teachers and students.

But that’s like saying I’m not a racist, when in fact we all live in a racist system and we can’t help but intentionally or accidentally reinforce its harmful dynamics.

I want to learn more about how to navigate the line between honoring and appropriating. I want to figure out how to be part of a larger network of yoga teachers that allies white teachers with teachers of color. It seems likely that means building a network that extends beyond my own tradition, where the overwhelming majority of American teachers are white. I don’t exactly know how to tackle these puzzles. But I’m just getting started, and trying to stay in the lightheartedness and not let the overwhelm paralyze me.

If you are working through these same questions, let’s be in dialogue. Our world needs more connection.

With love, gratitude and solidarity forever.