When 'White Girls Being Honest' goes wrong.com
When 'White Girl's Being Honest' goes wrong.com
This was interesting to me for so many reasons because I'm a black woman who is beginning to take Yoga classes to relieve the stress killing my body because of capitalism's contradictions- racism, sexism, whiteness, body consciousness, depression, blah blah. Though the Yoga study in my local gayborhood is of course staffed by majority white liberal males (who are the origin of my problems) I went in with an open mind. My black girlfriend and her Latina roommate convinced me to go and so I did... Now I'm convinced that we need create our own studio because I can't have this in my tranquility space...
Here's a summary of this foolishness...
A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair. Before we made it into our first downward dog, she had crouched down on her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class. FIRST OF ALL WHY ARE YOU ALL IN HER BUSINESS. SHOULDN'T BE PRACTICING YOU'RE BREATHING, POSITIONS? NEWBEES COME IN ALL THE TIME. #STALKER
Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body. I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined. OKAY, SO YOU ARE THE EMBODIMENT OF THE MOST VALUED BEAUTY IDEAL (A THIN WHITE WOMAN), BUT YOU FEEL OBJECTED? WHAT ABOUT THE DEVALUING OF WOMEN WHO DON'T LOOK LIKE YOU AND THE MORE GENERAL HATE DIRECTED TOWARDS 'PLUS-SIZE' WOMEN? #STUPID
I thought about how even though yoga comes from thousands of years of south Asian tradition, it’s been shamelessly co-opted by Western culture as a sport for skinny, rich white women. NO! You think it's an 'Asian' 'tradition' for "skinny, rich white women" like you. #SHALLOW
to be a heavyset black woman entering for the first time a system that by all accounts seems unable to accommodate her body. I CAN'T
I got home from that class and promptly broke down crying. Yoga, a beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments in over six years of practice, suddenly felt deeply suspect. Knowing fully well that one hour of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the deserving target of a racially charged anger is nothing, is largely my own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket, is the tip of the iceberg in American race relations, I was shaken by it all the same. #WHITEGUILT #GETOVERIT #YESITSINYOURHEADBUTWEGOTTADEALWITHITANYWAY
The question is, of course, so much bigger than yoga—it’s a question of enormous systemic failure. But just the same, I want to know—how can we practice yoga in good conscience, when mere mindfulness is not enough? #YES #ITCALLED #SLAVERY #CAPITALISM #NEOCONSERVATISM #WHITENESS
