Namaste Nation

Stock image for “spa” featuring a white couple receiving “Asian hot stone massage” while the woman wears an orchid flower behind her ear

Around 9 pm on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday night, my partner’s phone went off with a local news alert. He gasped, “11Alive is reporting a shooting spree at a spa nearby.” Before he said anything else, I knew the victims were women and that they were, more likely than not, East or Southeast Asian women (Chinese, Korean, and/or Vietnamese)—the demographic that is often found in beauty and wellness “service” labor in the United States.

In the days to come, there will be a lot of important commentary on gender+race violence and how that violence has roots in U.S. American imperialism in Pacific Asia. Here are a few examples I have already seen and heard that I can recommend. These popular media accounts as well as the scholarly reading list I have provided below clarify that it is impossible to separate the overrepresentation of female migrant workers in salons, spas, and other beauty service industries from larger geopolitical and historical events. It is not a coincidence that these low-wage immigrant laborers are often women whose experiences of racialized gender violence cannot be explained in terms of the black-or-white discourse that is common in the U.S. context.

Because I work at a different, but related intersection—that of majority white wellness industries and Orientalism—I want to highlight how and why the location of and the language used to describe this crime matters. Massage spas, also sometimes called salons or parlors, like the ones where these crimes took place, are part of a broader industrial complex that capitalizes on the racist belief that Asian people, and Asian women in particular, possess magical, spiritual, and sexual healing abilities. These attitudes belong to an entrenched Orientalist infrastructure in the United States that connects yoga, meditation, and massage to tourism, pleasure, and escape, signaled by the exotic tropical flower in the photo above.

Advertisement for a Tibetan “sound bath” massage service

This logic and its fetishizing tendencies also extend to sonic cultures, which is why the healing powers of Tibetan “sound baths” (above) feature prominently in yoga and meditation as well as in massage settings. And as my students reminded me this week, we can also see this process play out in food cultures, where “healthy” or “natural” foods are today sourced from East or South Asia and are overrepresented through so-called “superfoods,” like acai bowls and coconut flour, but also turmeric and “chai tea” lattes.

These sorts of aggregates, which link bodily health and wellness to “self-care,” but also to conspicuous food habits, are easy to map if one pays attention. Have you ever noticed how Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s are in wealthy and majority white areas? The same areas where you’ll find a Starbucks and a yoga studio? Well, there is a flip side to this phenomenon. Let me explain.

I grew up in a suburb of Houston, in Clear Lake, to be precise, and I can tell you that the Asian grocery store my family frequented on Highway 3 was next to a beauty salon. Even in College Station, Texas and where I live today in Athens, GA, the stores where Asian immigrants go to buy their groceries are often next door to a beauty salon and/or an ethnic food restaurant. These geographies matter because this is how and where immigrant populations build community, safety, and wealth. These spaces are almost always at the borders of otherwise wealthy and majority white neighborhoods, where rent is cheap(er) and so prices are low(er), but also, where there is safety in numbers. 

In thinking about geographies, I couldn’t help but notice that though I have seen many, many nail/massage spas next door to an Asian grocery store or in an Asian strip mall, I have never once seen a yoga studio. As I process the events of last week, I think I understand why. While massage spas and beauty salons rely on the undervalued and often dehumanized bodily labor of Asian people—which is also why a mani/pedi at one of these places is “cheaper” than a white-owned/operated salon—yoga studios rely on the absence of Asian bodies to succeed. Whereas in salon or care spaces the person providing the service is meant to be invisible, nameless, faceless even as the pictures above suggest, in yoga studios, you are meant to mirror, if not identify with the person leading class. Put another way, white yoga studios, while part of a larger Orientalist wellness industrial complex that includes massage, nail care, and other forms of self-care like acupuncture, must erase and replace Asian bodies with white ones in order to charge the exorbitant rates that they do.

While this case highlights the relationship between white manhood and the wellness industry, white womanhood, which legitimizes and is legitimized by white manhood, is part of this story, too. As I have noted before, white womanhood, steeped as it is in the performance of purity, relies on what Sara Ahmed calls an Orientalist “supply point” to achieve sexual appeal. This “supply point” takes many forms, from actual bodily labor (e.g., domestic labor) to minstrel-like Orientalist performances, like these:

Selena Gomez performing “Come and Get It” at the 2013 MTV Music Awards

Indeed, the racialized mechanisms by which white womanhood is maintained are well-documented over at least the last century in the U.S. context. Today, these mechanisms are called “cultural appropriation.” After the events of last week I believe it is quite clear that language like “cultural appropriation” is reductive and insufficient. The processes of racialization that led to the events of March 16th cannot simply be traced to individuals (like Gomez above), but rather must be contextualized within a much larger white supremacist infrastructure that minimizes harm in order to maximize profit.

Following this recognition, the problems with the language used to describe the events of last week become clearer. First of all, the suggestion that spas are sites of sex work or that these women were sex workers so somehow deserved what happened to them reveals how massage services or other intimate body care services are coded in white society. Spas, salons, or parlors (distinct from gyms or studios), as commercial spaces where adults receive intimate care, are steeped in white cultures of gendered shame around the body. In such spaces, care is sexualized and gender+race hierarchies are reinscribed. Once one understands how much self-loathing and rage white men as well as white/white-aspiring women experience in a society that teaches them that they are weak if they require such care, it becomes clear how and why those who provide these services are simultaneously sexualized and villainized.

Second, the emphasis that law enforcement has placed on the statement provided by the perpetrator to explain his reasons reveals that the language of the state is not only insufficient, but also aligns with that of white violence writ large. As some have already noted, relying on prosecutorial rhetoric like “motive” or “intent” reinforces an individualized understanding of racism, suggesting that “hate” is a personal or emotional problem, rather than a symptom of a culture and a system. Additionally, focusing exclusively on the language (in this case the denial) of racial intent makes it possible to suggest that what someone, in this case a murderer, says, is all that matters to understand why a crime was committed. To rely exclusively on the perpetrator’s logic, often provided in some sort of written manifesto, is not unique in cases like this one which is why the utility of “hate crime” or “hate speech” legislation is so limited today. More importantly, to suggest that an empirically measurable “motive” is what really matters in a crime like this is a classic case of structural gaslighting. As I have examined in previous posts, this is exactly how white supremacy endures through white speech and finds purchase in legal recourse.

Special thanks to Aleeza Rasheed, Katherine Lee, Hyun Kyong Chang, Shzr Ee Tan, Shreena Gandhi, Radha Lath, and Travis A. Jackson for bringing these ideas into focus for me.

If you are able, please consider donating to this fund to help support the victims’ families.

Further reading:
Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S. Korea Relations
Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War 
Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War
National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage
The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work
The Making of Asian America: A History

“Oh, my, God, Becky, look at her butt!
It is so big!
She looks like one of those rap guys’ girlfriends.
But, ya know, who understands those rap guys?
They only talk to her, because she looks like a total prostitute, ‘kay?
I mean, her butt, is just so big!
I can’t believe it’s just so round, it’s like out there!
I mean gross, look!
She’s just so, black!”

In the opening of Sir Mixalot’s 1992 hit, “Baby Got Back,” we hear a woman talking to her friend. The voice we hear is, ostensibly, that of a white woman or at least a woman we are meant to hear as white. Though she remains unnamed, we understand quickly that she is talking to her friend about a black woman’s sexual appeal in demeaning and condescending language. She seems personally offended at the idea that a curvy woman would attract men, and she implies that only certain kinds of men—“those rap guys”—generally find such women attractive. After complaining about how “big her butt” is for almost 15 seconds, she finally exclaims, “she’s just so……black!” 

The person to whom all these observations are directed is a woman named Becky. “Becky” has become a shorthand for the white woman no one trusts, the one who is not only ignorant, but whose ignorance is coddled and shielded in white America. Becky refers to the kind of woman(hood) white supremacist patriarchy was built to protect. 

We know all this about her for one reason—throughout her friend’s racist tirade, Becky remains silent. Even without the benefit of the music video, we are to understand that Becky is listening in quiet agreement. Hers is the name we remember BECAUSE of her silence, not in spite of it.

Many of my readers based in North America have heard about this kind of white womanhood, a genotype many scholars and writers have helpfully catalogued and documented. While Becky might be a white woman whose entitled behavior you encounter socially, at the grocery store or at the gym, in professional settings, she appears as a phenotype I have come to know as Secretary Sarah. Secretary Sarah is the boss’s assistant, an otherwise nondescript woman who defines herself by her daughterhood, wifehood, or motherhood, if not all three, and never can seem to pronounce your name correctly. This is the white woman silently seated, quite literally at times, at the right hand of white male authority, while insisting she has no power. Her lack of self-awareness and anything resembling a moral compass means she will defend her boss even and especially while he casually inflicts violence on black/brown, queer, and disabled folks right in front of her. When brought to account, she will cry “I’m a victim, too” and/or will equate her silence with her Christian values while exhibiting an utter lack of conviction. To be sure, she will openly betray you and comply with behavior that brutalizes you, under the logic that she was only doing her job (see also, Aunt Lydia). And then, once it’s all over, she will expect you to comfort her. Indeed, both Becky and Sarah, and more recently Karen, are contemporary examples of what Hannah Arendt once characterized as the “banality of evil.” Despite their propensity to histrionics and white tears, these women will remain silent when bearing witness to inhumanity and injustice, and when brought to account, will be the first to claim victimhood—that they are oppressed, too. 

Yoga Becky
There are two examples I’d like to examine in this piece, focusing on how Beckydom operates in intimate spaces among women and produces varying regimes of silence. I refer to the womanhood that requires and even valorizes acts of silencing as Yoga Becky, which captures the faux-wokeness and neoliberal rhetoric of “self-care” that encourages the bypassing of difficult relational experiences.

Yoga Becky 1, we will call her Erika, was an instructor at a studio I frequented and often led her classes through a choreographed sequence to Nicki Minaj’s queer-feminist reboot of “Baby Got Back”—”Anaconda.” She relished in teaching this flow, especially to a large group of suburban, Trump-supporting Beckies who were mostly unfamiliar with Nicki Minaj. She got to play the role of the transgressive, hip, edgy white woman who not only listened to “urban” music, but also knew how to move her body to it. I operated as the unofficial DJ in most classes and the version of the song she would ask me to play was the “clean” version. This version not only cuts to silence where the curse words occur, but also ends right before Nicki goes on a long break in which she speaks about sex and pleasure unabashedly.

One day, in a rare occurrence at this otherwise predominantly white studio there was a black woman, a friend, present in the room when Erika asked me to play “Anaconda.” As she led the class through the flow, and as she usually did anytime she asked me to play a track that could be broadly categorized as “rap/hip-hop,” she encouraged the other Beckies to and this is a direct quote, “get ghetto with it.” At that moment, as often occurs in public spaces when white folks say ignorant, violent sh*t, but we can’t or won’t risk speaking up, my friend and I locked eyes and shared a silent moment of mutual understanding. Unfortunately, Erika noticed.

After class Erika was angry and confronted us about that moment, asking “why did you two look at each other like that?” 

Neither one of us trusted her or her emotional hygiene enough to tell her the truth. So we did what whiteness demands of such moments—we comforted her and silenced ourselves, reassuring her that it was nothing, until we almost believed that it was nothing ourselves. Almost.

The Politics of Silence
In conversations with black and brown women over the years, I have learned that many find it difficult to maintain meaningful relationships with white women past a certain point in adulthood because of the dynamic I described above; because, in majority white spaces, silence is the civility that racism demands. Computing the cost of telling the truth against the likelihood of defensiveness, denial, victim-complexes, stone-walling, and tears (if not outright physical violence), is a calculus we have to master because the alternative is simply unsustainable. Or as a friend recently put it, in moments where white women are brought to account, there is no such thing as white guilt, there is only white absolution, and to stand in the way of such moves to innocence is rarely worth the trouble.

If you want to be friends with white women who have not come to terms with their whiteness and the kinds of emotional and relational dysfunction it engenders, then this means being friends with women who cannot or will not understand that their experiences of womanhood might differ from their melanated sisters’ experiences. These interactions usually amount to a barrage of false equivalencies, a poor understanding of what Kimberlé Crenshaw meant by “intersectionality,” and yet another round of what scholars like Elizabeth Martinez have described as “oppression olympics.” And so, as I have learned, when it comes to working with, living with, and surviving whiteness, you will have to stay silent about a whole lot of things a whole lot of the time. This dynamic is and can of course be true of interactions with white men or those who were socialized as male, I do not deny this, but in my experience, between women in what are often positioned as deeply vulnerable spaces operated for and by women, the politics of silence masquerading as civility takes on a different meaning.

Silence as “Self-Care“
Wellness spaces in the U.S., like all public spaces, are undeniably gendered and raced, and this is often by design. What is today known as “yoga” must be seen as an extension of another orientalist phenomenon in the U.S.—modern dance. As I explored in my last post, yoga and modern dance emerge from a shared cultural milieu in the early twentieth century and track closely with white feminist movements. In this context, the politics of silence, or why my friend and I felt we could not risk telling Erika that she was fetishizing black music/bodies, is but one example of how fitness spaces, which highlight aestheticized bodily practices, both circumscribe and reinscribe racial hierarchies in the U.S. context.

In my research I have come to believe that white yoga industries and related cultures have led many to a misunderstanding of what the phrase “self-care” means. In the hands of whiteness, “self-care” has been elevated to an ideology of virtue, which positions the self in opposition to both the other and the collective. This attitude only allows white folks to further absolve themselves of any responsibility for justice. Furthermore, it would appear that white women who identify with the rhetoric of self-care seem to think that emotional bypassing is somehow equivalent to non-violence (and it doesn’t hurt/help that there’s a Sanskrit word they can throw around). It only follows, then, that silence as a form of non-violence works to reproduce and center white feelings, and in turn encourages many to experience anything resembling accountability as the opposite of what self-care is meant to accomplish.

Rather than learning how to identify the way power shapes our everyday lives—which was, after all the context in which Audre Lorde spoke of caring for the self as “an act of political warfare”—self-care cultures appear to be peddling avoidant narcissism as a path to enlightenment. In turn, any experience which challenges a sense of self-righteousness is experienced as an attack, or a threat, and an opportunity to claim victimhood. Such logic is made visible through phrases like “positive vibes only” or “mindfulness,” or “control what you can,” essentially prohibiting meaningful or difficult conversations about anything, really, because of a mistaken belief that “negative feelings” are simply a matter of individual challenges, rather than power imbalances, dysfunction, or abuse. Moreover, in yoga spaces, which are more and more intertwined with broader white liberal political affinities, conversations about white saviorism and white absolution, which are but two sides of the same coin, go unexamined and unchallenged.

Yoga Becky 2, we will call her Brittany, offers a useful example to understand how this different, but related pattern of silence and violence is repackaged as “self-care.” Brittany is a prime example of a new strain of white, but “ethnic” womanhood in the U.S., which seeks to establish a connection with its European roots. Some of my readers may be familiar with this latest attempt to rehabilitate white womanhood by claiming that their ancestors were pagans and witches. In conversations, Brittany has consistently expressed a desire to reclaim her ethnicity (e.g., Italian, Irish, German) in order to reconnect with her roots. This logic reveals a few things. Most obviously, it lays bare how whiteness can and often does retreat to ethnicity in order to bypass accountability and self-awareness in the U.S. context. This is also known as #notallwhite, which allows most, if not all white liberals in the contemporary moment to smugly believe they’d behave differently than what I describe here. (Hint, if you think I’m not talking about you, consider that feeling as evidence that I am actually very much talking about you).

When I pressed Brittany to explain why she felt this attitude was anything but a repackaging of white supremacy, she responded that she felt that “oppressors, like colonizers, experience oppression, too.” She went on to explain her reasoning to me, which was that colonialism hurt colonizers because “they lost their connection to their roots and their cultural practices, too.” When I challenged the deployment of the “too-ness” in this case, pointing out how inaccurate and frankly dangerous it was to compare settlers who migrated to the US and now benefit from whiteness to those who have experienced the violence of colonialism, Brittany reacted defensively. She deflected my questions, clarifying to me that her intentions were good and reassuring me that she was “working hard on dismantling white supremacy and racism.” However, because I had brought this topic into the intimate space of our friendship (as opposed to the public/professional space she occupies as a K-12 educator), she expressed that she could no longer have a relationship with me. In other words, when her Beckyhood was challenged on a relational level, she shut down the conversation and the relationship.

For those who have been following my writing since I started examining how yoga industries bring constructions of white womanhood into view, the version of violent silencing that Brittany demonstrated is almost identical to the episode which culminated in my expulsion from a commercial yoga studio. To recall Sara Ahmed’s work (again), by naming the problem, I became the problem. While in the interaction with Erika, my (and my friend’s) silence was required in order for us to safely exist in a white public space, in the case with Brittany, silence operated as a chance for a white woman to weaponize her whiteness (see also Central Park Karen). The irony here is that for quite some time now, anti-racism and so-called diversity/inclusion efforts have tried to draw attention to how whiteness is a system, but in cases like Brittany’s, this message seems to have been received as “I can do anti-racism while harming and then avoiding POC.” In institutional spaces, this attitude usually amounts to the black/brown woman feeling like she is a “bad fit” and leaving the organization after being hired for “diversity and inclusion.” In relationships, it means mistreatment, alienation, and social ostracism.

In other words, silence and exclusion is produced and reproduced by those in proximity to power, and, by what scholars like Matthew Hughey have theorized as “white victimization discourse.” Put another way, identifying as a victim is integral to how white folks operate in social and institutional contexts (see e.g., the case of Becky with the Bad Grades).

If you’re reading this, and you’ve been in a relationship where you have tried to hold someone accountable for their actions and their response is to deflect or say “well, I have problems, too” rather than acknowledge your point of view, then you know what I am talking about. This too-ness, which researchers in psychology also know in its extreme forms by the acronym D.A.R.V.O. (Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender), that self-care spaces, like yoga, seem to produce and perpetuate makes sense if one has been paying attention to how yoga and its broader market appeal is predicated on the idea that unlike, say, Cross-fit, yoga is for everyone. In such spaces, the goal or success of yoga, as one instructor, Carla, constantly reminded me, is “to yoke the body to the mind.” While this definition is not inaccurate, to Carla and many others like her who were trained in the U.S., yoga and self-care are fundamentally individual experiences, which transcend bodily identities. By this logic, the notion of care that such spaces promote exists in a postracial, postgender, post-everything apolitical utopia.

The rhetoric of “self-care” and its narcissistic tendencies must also be understood as a symptom of that which has plagued so-called women’s issues as a whole. For example, BIWoC who have followed the #MeToo movement and the way it has since become co-opted by white liberal feminism know this pattern all too well. Despite its claims to solidarity and community, prevailing attitudes teach white women that it is acceptable to center and value their pain above all others. What is less visible, however, is how that “too” ends up producing comparative rhetoric and false equivalencies in the process.

In many ways, U.S. yoga cultures and the white women who run and patronize them offer a large and uncomfortable window through which we can view the machinations of citizenship, and the devaluing of community care and relational ethics in the contemporary moment. For women like Yoga Becky, that citizenship is structured within and around the confines and challenges of white supremacist patriarchy, which has, for generations operated in binaries of us/them, and cultivated other ways to engage in deeply toxic behavior and call it “feminism.” Perhaps this is why such women now operate as culture vultures (see the recent furor over Alison Roman). If white womanhood is predicated on claims to innocence, then by definition it can only exist in opposition to other kinds of womanhood. I am hardly the first to come to this conclusion, but what remains to be seen is when and if white women, and those who seek to identify with them, can move past virtue-signalling and disengage with identificatory processes with power in order to do the uncomfortable hard work that accountability requires.

A special thanks to Kirsten Pai Buick, Travis A. Jackson, Bernadette Gailliard-Mayabi, Lalita du Perron, Jenn LaRue, Julia Logan, and Emily A. Johnson.

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In December 2018, many months before Marianne Williamson entered our public and political consciousness, actress and lifestyle influencer Gwyneth Paltrow made headlines after she seemed to suggest that she was responsible for popularizing yoga as a wellness activity in the United States. “Forgive me if this comes out wrong,” Paltrow demurred, “but I went to do a yoga class in L.A. recently and the 22-year-old girl behind the counter was like, ‘Have you ever done yoga before?’ And literally I turned to my friend, and I was like, ‘You have this job because I’ve done yoga before.’”

Paltrow’s self-aggrandizing response isn’t completely wrong; for more than a decade, she has built a personal brand by urging other white women to eat, exercise, and live exactly as she does. She’s among a group of white well-to-do women (like Williamson) who have made self-help and “wellness,” arguably the newest euphemism for “skinny,” into a highly individualistic and often unethical billion dollar industry of aspiration. A minute or two spent browsing Goop.com offers a window into Paltrow’s vision of health: One can purchase a wide variety of luxury lifestyle products including a $15,000 gold dildo (now marked down to $11,500) and an $80 crystal-infused water bottle. One of the most popular items on the site is a dietary supplement dubbed “High School Genes”; priced at $90 for a 30-day supply, it’s billed as a “comprehensive nutritional regimen designed to provide intense support for normal glucose and energy metabolism, as well as cellular health.”   

Goop also offers advice columns on sexual health, in many cases suggesting diets or enhancements that are not only prohibitively expensive, but also run directly counter to medical advice (google “jade vaginal egg” for a prime example). Goop’s ridiculous and often irresponsible recommendations have earned Paltrow consistent criticism for years, but she has stood firm, insisting that her exorbitantly priced products are simply an opportunity for consumers to exercise “autonomy over their health.” Paltrow’s ongoing success typifies the North American belief in health as a personal, individualistic enterprise—a consumer experience that can be bought, sold, and of course promoted on Instagram. It’s a symptom of the same phenomenon that in recent decades has fueled everything from anti-vaccine propaganda to essential-oil proselytizers to, yes, yoga and mindfulness devotees. This attitude toward health is deeply narcissistic, of course, and it is also dangerous.

Necropower and Health

In my research on wellness trends, I have discovered that Paltrow and Williamson are far from the first celebrities to introduce the United States to the individualistic, cost-prohibitive, and beauty-centered idea of health that yoga industries typify. As soon as celebrity product endorsements and cheap print media existed, so did a steady stream of wealthy white women—celebrities—whose bodies and therefore whose health or fitness routines inspired the masses, or at least those who could afford it. One of the earliest celebrities to endorse yoga-for-health, for example, was Norma Jean Mortenson, better known as Marilyn Monroe, who is said to have credited yoga-inspired exercise routines for her much-admired physique.

The earliest examples of aspirationally fit women’s bodies emerged well before Monroe, though, in the early 20th century, where the influence of film culture and modern dance elevated dancing (read: sexual) female bodies from the entertainment realms of vaudeville and burlesque. No longer base and bawdy, dance in colonial-cosmopolitan spaces like New York, London, and Paris was now art performed by well-bred white women like Ruth St. Denis and Louise Brooks—and in many cases it was an art built upon racist and Orientalist themes, often involving dancers who appeared in black- or brownface.

Ruth St. Denis performing in brownface  in Yogi (1911) and Nautch (1908) debuted in Vienna. Courtesy New York Public Library

These dancers were also among the first to introduce consumer forms of exercise to the U.S., notably in Los Angeles. This is the circuit that brought us Jane Fonda in the 1970s-80s, Suzanne Somers in the 1990s, and today, Gwyneth Paltrow. Indeed, in the U.S. context, wealthy white woman wellness extends from Hollywood and is precisely how what was otherwise known as “New Age” became a commodified and now politicized identification known as “the yoga vote” in the United States. 

In other words, there is a long, complicated history behind the sexualized construction of white, normative femininity and “healthy” bodies, which stretches from early dancer-actress-icons like Joan Crawford through the housewives looking to “relax” in the postwar era, to the insta-yogis we see today.

Taken as a whole, this history reveals how normalized the belief is that some people are healthy and therefore beautiful, and that their manner of living is the ideal to which all can and should aspire. Black feminist scholars, like Shatema Threadcraft, using Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower and biopolitics as a point of departure, have interrogated this notion, describing this phenomenon as “necropolitics”— how certain bodies are understood as less deserving of health than others. Necropower, like biopower, is built upon colonial racism (and supported by its economic injustices). Necropower explains why we as a society readily accept and support the notion that some bodies deserve access to health and wellness while others (fat, disabled, minority/migrant etc.) do not. 

After Eat, Pray, Love

Recent wellness fads—the YOLO/Instagram versions in particular—aren’t necessarily the result of celebrity exercise regimens or the media-fed desire for a “hot” body. In many ways, the 2006 bestselling self-help novel/travel diary by Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love, popularized a way of living that has since come to shape notions of beauty, health, and practices of womanhood in the U.S. context. Joining a larger body of work set in the global South in the post-9/11 era, the memoir particularly valorized yoga, but also alternative forms of medicine and “self-care” as a means by which white women could “find themselves” as well as claim their sexuality outside of the confines of marriage. Feminist scholars like Shefali Chandra have noted the capitalist and Orientalist logics at the heart of such engagements; “Skillfully navigating between twentieth-century imperial history, the rise of the War on Terror, and a barely contained obsession with Hindu female sexuality, each of these texts is driven by the conviction that India, and Indian women, will heal the mind and body of the white woman. India enables the American woman to cure herself” (Chandra 2014, 488). EPL was the book that launched the yoga-as-exercise craze—aided and abetted by consumer athleisure brands like Lululemon—repackaging an old Orientalist tale of white folks traveling to formerly colonized places to rejuvenate, feel sexy, and learn tolerance, but always on their terms, of course.

Since the advent of Instagram celebrity/influencer culture, this is the “take-what-I-want-and-call-it-#blessed” logic of leisure-wellness that underscores the steady onslaught of  Instagram posts under the tags #selfcare, and which for all intents and purposes has demonstrated that black or brownface no longer requires face paint, just the vapid excuse of “good intentions” backed by all the monetary advantages of whiteness. In many ways, this is how health and wellness for white women operates as an extension of white supremacist and necropolitical thought, today often occluded by the reductive logics of “cultural appropriation.” These are the social logics which brought us preternaturally fit Madonna during her Ray of Light phase and today positions women like Williamson as heir apparent to the Eurocentric racial power dynamics that encourage white women to embrace self-indulgent consumer-driven ignorance and call it “enlightenment.”

To be sure, claims to “New Age culture” as something that can be bought or sold, taken on or off at will exposes the nefarious logics of American imperialism and its deathly, necropolitical impulses. And when aligned with so-called women’s issues, like access to healthcare, claims to feminism tend to excuse impact and instead center intentions. This mechanism, by which white women are taught to see themselves as perfect victims in turn feeds the self-centered rhetoric of “my best interest at any cost.” This is what many postcolonial feminists refer to as imperial feminism—a recognition that white women’s liberation has always come at the expense of black, indigenous, and women of color. Put another way, the mechanisms by which “white women wellness” operates in 2019 is just the latest iteration of imperialist thought by which white women capitalize on their racial privilege to get their own needs met and in the process uphold the very white supremacist patriarchy that plagues our society at large.

And if you have been following the conversation on wellness trends and its target demographics, the data is unequivocal: economically privileged women in the U.S., white women, turn to performative spiritual+wellness trends, like yoga, to participate in the production of an elitist womanhood through Orientalist escapism and virtue-signaling, most notably in contemporary settings like social media.

But there’s a darker, less apparent outcome for this trend: Keeping in mind underreporting rates among populations that lack access to adequate healthcare and especially mental healthcare, recent studies have suggested a link between affluence and anxiety disorders. In other words, yoga and its attendant, if racist aesthetic practices have arguably become a wellness activity wealthy white women turn to in order to cope with mental health challenges. This new finding is puzzling—indeed, it is hard to separate cause from result at the moment, that is, are more wealthy white women experiencing mental health issues because of the pressure to conform to unattainable body image standards? Or are we simply hearing more about mental health epidemics in this demographic because our society is more attuned to wealthy white woman wellness needs? The answer is likely “both.”

Instagram and its influencers clearly capitalize on the aspirational aspects of the fad by selling the idea that participation in yoga is not only going to improve mental health, but also, paradoxically, offer followers+consumers a sense of individuality. For example, a common phrase among white women who participate in commercial yoga industries is that it has helped them “find themselves” and “accept” their bodies. However, this is the same fitness culture that has borne witness to unprecedented rates of eating disorders, including a new diagnosis known as orthorexia nervosa—an obsession with eating healthy or “clean.” Despite the supposed logic of self-love and acceptance, yoga cultures appear to be engendering new and dangerous forms of conceit and controlling tendencies.

To this point, studies on yoga often note the incongruous logic that seems to underpin white women’s attachment to fitness trends like yoga—a logic that reveals that the “love and acceptance” attitudes are quite superficial and even destructive. Indeed, in yoga studios, one can observe white women’s claims are not about acceptance, but rather a desire for a “safe space”—a euphemism for homosociality—a recognition that women feel less safe when men are present and that white folks feels safer around other whites. Many white women describe feeling safer around other white women, but can’t quite reconcile how their sense of safety relies on exclusionary and often structural forms of inequity.

A case study from my research offers a useful example: In response to learning that her suburban, $100/month yoga studio had come under fire for harassing and then banning non-white members, one upper-middle class woman, a human-resources director named Alissa, defended the studio by asserting that she is “just a white woman trying to fight mental illness through yoga. [The studio] helped me a lot. It’s a good place, even if it has done things some people find bad [discriminatory].” Alissa knew that she was supporting a business which was openly and perhaps actionably biased, but she did not care as long as her personal wellness needs were being met. Attitudes like this among the majority white cis-female demographic who participate in health and wellness industries are not rare, despite their troubling insistence on ignoring their own complicity in systems of injustice and marginalization. Indeed, white women’s well-being, including social and economic mobility, can and will be achieved at all costs and in many cases will willingly cosign bigotry and differential treatment.

We know that discrimination produces cascading effects across communities, and Alissa’s example clearly demonstrates how structural or institutional racism works. Though she might be only one person, her willingness to excuse illegal forms of bias so easily offers unsettling insight into her work in human resources. HR departments oversee civil-rights and workplace- equity matters; how effectively can she address these matters in light of her comments? 

In this regard, the research on institutional racism tells a larger story about how white women’s social and economic mobility is predicated on the disenfranchisement and continued oppression of historically marginalized populations. This research demonstrates how the so-called “velvet ghetto” or majority-women industries, like human resources,  education, nursing, and more recently fitness industries like yoga, but also Cross-Fit, which are all also majority-white, actually underscore broader race+class economic trends in the U.S. Across these industries, there is a constant—women performing their bodily capital, in both raced and ableist forms (read: white-sexy-athletic), in order to preserve their own position and power in a white supremacist patriarchal order. In many ways, this is not a new story, even as the research on white women’s involvement in white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and today, its modern-day auxiliaries such as the Daughters of the Confederacy or the Junior League garner renewed attention.

Differential access to healthcare, including wellness care in the United States, and the necropower it lays bare, thus exposes what Kimberle Crenshaw once aptly diagnosed as “the false tension between feminist and antiracist movements”—a mechanism scholars like Chenjerai Kumanyika characterize as a willful ignorance; a kind of blindspot not born of a lack of knowledge, but outright denial in the face of evidence and truth. Indeed, attitudes like “my health at any cost” must be understood within a longer history of white supremacy, economic injustice, and what today qualifies as a public health epidemic, which leaves communities of color, like Flint, Michigan, without clean drinking water and bears witness to higher rates childhood diabetes in minority+low-income areas—areas which lack access to both safe recreational spaces and parks and/or grocery stores. It is not a coincidence that yoga studios tend to exist in upper-middle class and majority white areas, next to some sort of “clean eating” juice/coffee bar. What today might appear to be an ambient form of exclusion otherwise marketed by Paltrow as a wellness must-have, is intimately tethered to a larger story of public health and racial injustice, up to and including the kinds of medical experiments conducted on people of color in the early twentieth century, as well as the ableist logics of abortion access that values cis-white women’s bodies above all. As historians like Harriet Washington and Thomas Leonard have both demonstrated in their work, health care, even in its progressive forms, remains inextricably intertwined with nineteenth century racial science, the rhetoric of eugenics, and social Darwinism, which in the U.S. context remains obsessed with maintaining white women’s “purity” at all costs.

So, at the very least, Alissa’s comments capture the limits of one person’s understanding of how systemic racism might affect access to health and wellness for historically marginalized populations. But at the very most, attitudes like “my health at any cost” are logical extensions of a white supremacist capitalist order which equates wealth with access and access with health. It is not only individual access to health and wellness that is essential, no matter how we often we are sold the neoliberal idea that “it’s your workout.” Individual health outcomes are inseparable from community health support, and so we must begin to see what is good for everyone and available to everyone as a must for a healthy society.

In the end, the cult of white women’s wellness must be understood as both a cause and a result of white supremacist necropower. Though its genesis makes sense in a place like the U.S. which has so often and willingly ignored women’s rights to bodily autonomy, such trends still place BIWOC, queer, trans and disabled folks at far greater risk. Recent research on differential treatment in emergency medicine between white and black populations corroborates what I have observed in my decades of ethnographic work in health and fitness spaces—access to healthcare remains shaped by forms of bias that privilege the health of those who look, walk, and talk like those offering care. We must stop capitulating to a deeply unjust and capitalist industry that privileges the health and right to bodily autonomy for some over others. A fair and sustainable society and therefore its approach to health and wellness cannot and must not be reduced to a you win, I lose, zero sum game.

*Thanks as always to Travis A. Jackson for his keen editorial eye. And a special thank you to Rasika Ajotikar, Shenila Khoja-Moolji, and Brooke Delony whose brilliance brought this topic into focus for me.

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 The Simpsons Dr. Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
Photo source: Fox

On a rainy morning a few weeks ago, I waited for an Uber to take me to the airport. The driver pulled up, a black Nissan with a Hillary 2016 sticker on the bumper, and walked over to help me load my suitcase in the trunk. As soon as he saw me, he put his hands together at his chest, bowed, and said “namastaaaaay,” dragging the last syllable to mimic what I can only assume was supposed to be an Indian accent. He then broke into laughter at his cleverness as he took my bag from me. Irritated as I was by the whole exchange, I had a plane to catch, so I didn’t do or say anything. Instead, I just sat there for the entirety of the thirty-minute ride, quietly fuming, wondering to myself, when did namaste become a slur!?

Slur (noun) a: an insulting or disparaging remark, innuendo; aspersion
b: a shaming or degrading phrase; stain, stigma

The word namaste is suddenly everywhere in the United States. Indeed, namaste has managed the all-too-common feat of becoming a derogatory reference to South Asia and/or the Middle East, while remaining in the hands of white producers and consumers of yoga or  “alternative” wellness culture.

Namaste.com was recently launched as the domain for a luxury cannabis company, based out of Ontario, Canada

Considering the predilection of hegemonic whiteness to co-opt the languages and customs of previously colonized places or people, while erasing the people themselves, it’s not uncommon to see namaste, but now also om and shakra, all over casual-wear clothing in the United States, in the form of puns like this these:

Photo sources: Yelo Yoga,  braveangelshop.com,  etsy.com

I’d been tracking this trend for a few years when CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota, who began her career with Fox News, provided me with a case-in-point for how Sanskrit has become synonymous with racial stereotyping towards India and Indians in the United States. Last June, in an interview with the 2017 Spelling Bee winner, 11-year-old Ananya Vinay, Camerota joked, “we’re not sure if that word is actually in Sanskrit, which is probably what you’re used to using.” The fact that Camerota had previously spoken about her yoga and meditation regimen only reaffirmed my suspicions as to how she assumed that this Indian-American child, born and raised in Fresno, California knew Sanskrit.

The sarcasm and mocking tone in Camerota’s commentary is not unique, nor it is new. It is inextricably linked to the kinds of humor made famous by the Simpsons character Apu as well as the sorts of destructive stereotypes such caricatures recycle. What is often missing in the conversation about mockery, however, is the acknowledgment that the “it’s just a joke” defense is a form of emotional abuse known as gaslighting, which serves to minimize harm while deflecting, if not outright denying, accountability and responsibility.

The ubiquity of mocking Sanskrit puns and Indian accents, even in the face of growing awareness that this behavior is profoundly racist and harmful, signals just how normalized abusive behavior is in our society. In the case of yoga cultures, Lululemon, the eponymous “athleisure” brand in North America arguably championed this trend with Sanskrit in the early 2000s and now offers an impressive array of merchandise that relies on puns, like their Namastay Put Thong II or their Namastay Focused Pant.

I’ve been studying the bizarre pop culture life of Sanskrit in the United States and I have noticed that while we recognize a few very well-known words as slurs or hate speech, we don’t really have particularly adept understanding of how sound, including accents, musical themes, and associated body languages are normalized as racial performance and abuse. I suspect a lot of this has to do with the way there’s only one word, the infamous and singular n-word, that most everyone will agree without question qualifies as a slur. And yet, there are many words, accents, sounds, gestures and even non-verbal associated images that are used to dehumanize people of color. Indeed, the idea that brown bodies and therefore their languages and cultures are merely commodities or “souvenirs” to be bought and sold by white tourists is not an unfamiliar concept in the United States. 

As I’ve examined in previous posts, the work of linguistic anthropologists like Jane Hill, and her theory of mock Spanish and white public space offers some avenues for understanding how white homogeneity and hegemony breeds supremacist ideology, which extends past speech to behavior, sonic identifiers, and imagery. To meaningfully address the way language along with associated visuals and sounds impact minorities, we must expand our understanding of what qualifies as “hate speech” up to and including what we are willing to understand as a slur.

For those who have been following the controversy around renaming the Washington R*dskins, my suggestion probably makes a lot of sense. To be sure, within the longer history of systemic racism and white supremacy in the United States, extending from the context of imperialism, slavery, and colonialism, it is simply a truism to state that logos, images, and styles of dress, accompany associated words or sounds. A prime example in the case of Native American representation here is the Tomahawk “chop” theme, along with its associated “chopping” hand gesture, which fans reenact at Atlanta Braves baseball games. Sounds, images, and bodily gestures, especially those performed in/as a group, all accrue stereotyping force and work together to uphold racist thought and white supremacy in the United States.

The Legacy of Minstrelsy
Much of what we understand as popular culture in 2018 extends from the legacy of minstrelsy in the United States. Though the practice of minstrelsy emerges from nineteenth-century entertainment cultures, it endures through the tendency to caricature people of color through derogatory and reductive stereotypes. This tendency, which often shapes rhetoric around multiculturalism by managing and tokenizing cultural “difference” through stereotypes, in turn, reproduces the white racial frame in destructive and toxic ways. To this point, in his book, Karl Hagstrom Miller deconstructs how minstrelsy installed white supremacy as American culture. In his analysis, he elaborates that “whites claimed an almost ethnographic authority in their portrayals,” which, advanced the notion that “genuine [non-white] culture emerged from white bodies” and their representative practices. Put another way, non-white culture is only legible as culture when it is performed through white bodies. In her work, black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins refers to this mechanism as “a controlling image,” whose function is to normalize white supremacy and paternalism and to “make racism, sexism, and poverty appear to be natural, normal, and an inevitable part of everyday life.” Collins’ analysis allows us to think critically about the codependent construction of gender and race, and helps us see the aberrance and “grotesquerie” that signify non-white bodies in popular culture, especially in cartoons and animation.

In the case of U.S. yoga cultures, the co-option and commodification of words like namaste belong within a different, though related history of white supremacy and paternalism, stemming from British imperialism and colonialism in South Asia. The circulation of namaste, for example, emerges from the colonial encounter and the way certain words came to symbolize what the British considered worth noting as representative of Indian culture. In written records, namaste is used by the British to note a “Brahmin Hindu gesture.” In archival documents from the 1800s, British travelers and colonial authorities describe namaste as a “bowing posture,” accompanied with “hands pressed together.” Under the British Raj, namaste and its associated gesture emerge as a symbol of that which made Indians culturally different. More importantly, in colonial accounts, namaste appears as a symptom of the authentic, that is, impoverished Hindu, a religious distinction the Oxford English Dictionary uses to trace the etymology of the word. The OED notes the prominence of the word namaste in how the British understood and studied Hindu social behaviors (in contradistinction to Muslim, for example).

But we live in the United States, where knowledge of the slavery, theft, and genocide the British perpetrated in South Asia doesn’t usually merit much critical thought (though it should). Indeed, in the United States, the standard narrative about South Asia relies on Orientalist stereotypes of destitute children living in underdeveloped villages. For those old enough to remember, these were the stereotypes about Africa and Asia beamed into U.S. living rooms through evangelical Christian savior television ads in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, however, these same images of impoverished Indian children are interpolated with white folks (overwhelmingly, white women) engaging in yoga tourism. 

A direct quote from a yoga tourism site: “Volunteers with a passion for yoga and travel will find this fantastic program to be one of the most rewarding experiences of their lives. Set in wondrous India, the homeland of yoga and a spiritual and cultural nirvana, volunteers will see the amazing sights of India and learn more about yoga while helping others in one of the most poverty-stricken countries in the world.”

In other words, namaste, as it circulates today, within global news media, its stock images, and associated pop culture trends like yoga tourism, functions as a controlling image. And so, as my Uber driver clearly demonstrated to me, it is easily weaponized as a slur. In this light, the interdependence of white paternalism and popular culture in the U.S. explodes the notion that namaste, as it appears in our daily lives today, is somehow innocuous, much less inclusive.

Recommended resources: Seeing White podcast

A special thanks to Travis Jackson and Lata Murti.

If you share this article, please consider making a donation:
Venmo @Rumya-Putcha or PayPal paypal.me/rumyaputcha

Photo source: Bravo.com

A year ago, well before he had all of us Googling “immigration asylum,” President Trump signed into effect Executive Order 13769, titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” This controversial order, which is still being challenged in the court system, went on to be known more colloquially as the “Muslim travel ban,” focusing as it did on restricting travel from majority-Muslim countries. In the weeks that followed the initial announcement of this travel ban, I watched with horror as family and friends, many of whom were South Asian-American U.S. passport holders, like myself, counseled each other on social media and on email list-serves on how to avoid being profiled as they (re)entered the U.S.

Fellow Brown travelers offered each other tips like these:

“Make sure to only wear Western clothes.”

“For women, be careful about getting henna on your hands if you’re flying back to the States after a wedding. It might draw extra scrutiny to you and more questions about where you’re traveling from.”

These well-meaning pieces of advice instilled in me a quiet, but gnawing fear of going anywhere where I might be posed that dreaded question, “but where are you FROM?” In the weeks that followed the announcement of the ban, I became hyper-aware of how I looked and sounded when I passed through customs and immigration, making sure not to speak to my family or friends in any language besides English while I was within earshot, especially when I was in an airport.

In light of this new heightened awareness, I, perhaps naively, opened up to a fellow member at my yoga studio, a White woman and a self-described “liberal,” after she had made a pun, “Namastay Together,” out of the word “Namaste.” In our conversation, I confided in her how unsettled it left me feeling to constantly see and hear namaste reduced to a clever way to signal so-called inclusive politics, especially at a time when people who looked like me felt less and less comfortable speaking in our mother tongues in public.

Photo Source: 24 Hour Fitness

As I described in my previous post, this interaction culminated in my expulsion from a commercial and corporate studio I had belonged to for three years. 

In the time since that egregious episode, I’ve tried to take mental stock of my experiences with self-described liberal White women more generally. I recalled a yoga studio I belonged to in the Midwest, owned and operated by a liberal White woman, which was decorated with pictures of malnourished Indian women begging in Mumbai. I can remember, with disgust, another, a fitness instructor in Texas who bragged to me, that though she had never been to India she often fantasized that she was “communing with Indian street children” while she practised yoga and meditation. I still wince at the memory of a former college roommate, who in a jilted drunken rage, screamed at our Pakistani cab driver when he refused her advances, “my husband could buy you and your whole country!” And most recently, I overheard a Canadian liberal, a supposed ally and fellow academic, mocking the idea racists exist or are even a problem in a conversation she never intended for me to hear. When she realized I had caught her voicing these disturbing sentiments, she rationalized her transgression; defending her betrayal as a “private conversation.”

And I have scrolled through millions upon millions of posts on Instagram with the tag #namaste, which overwhelmingly feature solitary, thin, able-bodied White women, demonstrating physical feats in otherwise empty, private spaces. More often than not, these posts are accompanied by self-aggrandizing, humble-bragging, spiritual-bypassing, “life advice.”

Photo source: Instagram.com

Taken as a whole, I’ve begun to wonder if this is why White women, especially those who consider themselves liberals, love yoga and the word “namaste” so much—it performs a sense of virtue-signaling which recenters Whiteness, all while providing a deflecting shield against scrutiny under the logic of “private spirituality.” It’s all the bragging rights of social justice without any of the humility or self-awareness.

These various experiences, particularly the encounters with my colleague and my former roommate, point to what Greg Howard has diagnosed as the redefining of racism, a mechanism by which White people can claim they are free of prejudice by performing progressive, multicultural politics in public, while continuing to harbor and even voice deeply disturbing prejudices and resentments in private. I would argue that this is the current state of affairs in most institutional settings in the United States. Whites, even and especially liberal White allies, who feel they need to present as anti-racist in public, even as they continue to condescend to Brown and Black folks (this is also known as dysfunctional rescuing), thus reaffirming their internalized belief of their own White superiority. In my experience, these individuals will do and say paternalistic, and yes, deeply racist things, all while insisting they are not racist. The social and psychological mechanism by which people deny reality and responsibility is known as gas-lighting—a form of manipulation and abuse. Based on Howard’s analysis, I would argue that gaslighting is now a crucial component of maintaining White supremacy, particularly for White liberals, because today, “racism [has] became a referendum on the rot of the individual soul. Calling people racist [is] no longer a matter of evaluating their opinions; it [is] an accusation of being irrevocably warped at the very core.”  

As I began to understand how yoga spirituality was reproducing forms of racism and breeding newer, more virulent strains of White supremacy, not to mention fragility, I reached out to the corporate office of the studio from which I had been dismissed. While the corporate representative, a kind young woman named Christine, apologized profusely to me for what had happened at my local studio and acknowledged that she was personally uncomfortable with the way the company was “selling India,” she admitted that White women (like her) were ideal consumers of yoga because such women desperately needed to believe that they are the “good kind” of White people; the colorblind, well-travelled kind.

To this point—in 2016, the Indian government, under the leadership of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party, introduced a new “yoga visa” category specifically for sixty-day yoga teacher training programs that cater to Western (White) women. These are the White liberals (captured so brilliantly in Get Out) who proudly inform you that they voted for Obama (twice!) and exclaim without even a hint of self-awareness: “There’s no way I can be racist. I have visited the Taj Mahal and I do yoga.”  

Photo Source: This tourism website, which caters to “nomads”

A closer look at the numbers corroborates this point and reveals some startling statistics. According to recent industry data as well as research conducted by the National Institutes of Health, 36.7 million U.S. adults practice yoga. 73% are women and a whopping 90% identify as White. Mattel released a blonde “Yoga Teacher Barbie” in 2012—a testament to the ways White women identify with and are identified by yoga in the United States. American Girl sells a yoga gear set, too. But, it’s not just that yoga is an incredibly homogenous and aspirational White female culture, it’s also an astoundingly upper-class culture. As of 2017, over 40% of yoga practitioners earned over $75,000 a year, and 25% over $100,000 annually. In other words, yoga studios are the new country clubs. Only, instead of “Whites only” signs at the door, you might see something like this:

Photo Source: Upaya Yoga Teacher Training

What “Cultural Appropriation” Misses
Too often the conversation about cultural flows across color lines devolves into a useless debate about appropriation versus appreciation, a reductive rhetoric that misses the point when people of color are not only replaced, but also rendered invisible. There is no dearth of guides and how-tos in cyberspace that define cultural appropriation with a negative connotation—as the “selecting of certain aspects of a culture, ignoring their original significance, for the purpose of belittling it as a trend.” Appreciation, on the other hand, is positioned as the superior choice, since it involves “honoring and respecting another culture and its practices, as a way to gain knowledge and understanding.”

What these definitions miss entirely is that “culture” is not something material that exists separate from actual human beings. Quite the opposite, the social mechanism by which a culture becomes appropriated relies on a simple truth—that Whiteness, and White womanhood in particular, need constant care and feeding to survive. 

The rabid commercialization of words like “namaste” provides a perfect case-in-point for how this system operates. A quick Google search of “namaste,” for example, pulls up a host of bizarre, but rampant mistranslations as well as a range of gendered lifestyle products, from jewelry and t-shirts that read “Namastay in Bed” to a Canadian television show called “Namaste Yoga,” featuring mostly White and light-skinned women doing yoga in beautiful locations in the woods or on a beach at sunset. 

Photo Source: Namaste Yoga

In other words, the current (mis)use of namaste is not only a shining example of how White women (and those who seek to be identified with this group) tend to adopt a racialized otherness to perform a hip, cosmopolitan identity, especially through fashion that is sold as informal or lounge-wear (i.e., clothes you wear in private), but is also a uniquely North American brand of consumer-driven racism, something Ta-Nehisi Coates has diagnosed as a symptom of White hegemony and homogeniety:

“When you’re white in this country, you’re taught that everything belongs to you. You think you have a right to everything. … You’re conditioned this way. It’s not because your hair is a texture or your skin is light. It’s the fact that the laws and the culture tell you this. You have a right to go where you want to go, do what you want to do, be however—and people just got to accommodate themselves to you.”

Ultimately, the colonization of yoga by White women is a shining example of what Coates identifies as an abiding principle of U.S. forms of White supremacy. To a large extent, this dynamic remains shielded from otherwise obvious critiques by the specious logic that yoga is spiritual, private, and therefore, beyond reproach. To this defense, I would argue that privacy and the right to privacy are also racialized and White supremacist concepts in the United States. But more importantly, what emerges from this analysis is that White women often need yoga to cultivate what Womanists like Hazel Carby identified long ago as the racialized “cult of true womanhood”—a sense of self that is built in contrast to non-White women through the qualities of piety, purity, and spirituality. Carby describes a relationship between White women and non-White women that endures through and by yoga, observing that, “ideologies of White womanhood [were] are the sites of racial and class struggle which enable[d] white women to negotiate their subordinate role in relation to patriarchy.”

In other words, the propensity of White women (and not just Iggy Azalea or Khloe Kardashian) to flock to a consumer behavior to perform their social and cultural capital is hardly a new phenomenon. Many Whites and/or liberals are only now, in 2018, starting to talk about either Whiteness or White womanhood in productive ways. Some White male yoga practitioners, like this one, or this one, who refuse to use “namaste,” seem to understand why the behavior I am identifying here is a problem, without the need to abandon yoga all together—an outlook I wholeheartedly support. The problem with Whiteness and/or White womanhood doesn’t need to be a problem with yoga. Put another way: Dear White women (and the White men who “defend” them), your womanhood needs to find and express itself in a less destructive way. Your sense of self has come at the cost of non-White women for far, far too long.

Resources:
https://confrontwhitewomanhood.com

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“To name the problem is to become the problem” -Sara Ahmed

It was a Wednesday afternoon and I arrived for yoga class, like I had on any other Wednesday for the past three years. I slipped off my shoes, dropping my car keys onto the soles of my weathered flip-flops so I wouldn’t misplace them. I hugged an instructor I knew well, congratulating her on her son’s graduation from college, and exchanged a few affectionate cheek-kisses before I gathered up my mat and headed towards class. As I made my way down that narrow, cheerful, teal green hallway I knew and loved so well, the owner of the studio stepped in front of me, blocking my path.

A White woman, a fellow member of the studio, had told him that I had “attacked her.” Stunned by the accusation of violence, I explained that it was only a chat, nothing else. It ended with us hugging, after all. But to answer his question, yes, I had spoken with her. We saw each other almost every day and I thought it was safe to share how I grew up with the word Namaste. She had used the word in a pun—Namastay Together—and so I opened up about how it felt to see a meaningful, even reverent word in India reduced to a common, commercialized joke.

I recounted to him that, looking back on the conversation, I could tell she was uncomfortable with my point of view. She responded defensively to my admission about how her pun left me feeling, retorting that she “didn’t have to explain herself” to me. I agreed, she absolutely didn’t, but we did share space that called itself a “community” so I thought it was worth trying to get to know each other better. I shared with her an analogy that might resonate. I compared what I felt was a misuse of words like Namaste to the way many Mexican-Americans feel when Cinco de Mayo is turned into a pun, Cinco de Drinko, something those who study language and racism in the United States have described as “Mock Spanish.”

In response, she peppered me with a series of questions.

“What if her husband was Indian?”

“What if she had lived in India for 10 years”

It turned out her questions were only hypothetical—she was neither married to an Indian nor had she ever been to India. Sensing she was still feeling defensive, I tried to bring the conversation to an amicable close. I thanked her for talking with me and in response, she hugged me. Before we said goodbye I told her earnestly that I hoped it was the start of more conversations for years to come. She agreed. We parted on good terms.

I related all this to the owner that day, explaining to him that it was an awkward conversation, most conversations about cultural difference are, but no one had been attacked. But, it didn’t matter to him why I had spoken with her about the way Namaste was or wasn’t being used, such conversations were unwelcome at his studio, he said. He informed me that he wouldn’t tolerate me “causing problems” and suggested I find a different studio where my cultural background could be accommodated. Shocked and hurt at the way the conversation was escalating, I tried to explain myself, in the end pleading with him to understand that his studio functioned as a stage on which issues of race and  representation were playing out on a daily basis.

In response to my explanation he simply stated: “There’s no such thing as racism in your case. You’re not Black.”

This was a heartbreaking and conversation-ending moment. Not only did he not understand how his misrecognition of racism affected me, but in that moment, I did not know how to help him see otherwise. If he thought racism only affected Black people, how was I going to change his mind, especially when he was telling me I was no longer welcome there?

Though the entire experience feels like a blur today, almost a year later, I can clearly remember that as I was standing there, trapped in this dead-end conversation, the woman who had reported me walked past us. I will never forget the look in her eyes. I couldn’t place the emotion I saw on her face in that heightened moment, but I can identify it now—it was fear. As she passed us I reached my arms out to her, pleading with her to please step into the conversation and explain that I had never attacked her. I had only tried to tell her about my point of view, as someone who knew the language in a way she might not. But she averted her eyes, clutching her yoga mat to her chest, pressing herself against the wall to slink by us, pretending not to see or hear what she had done.

I don’t remember how I got there, I walked, I suppose, but at some point after the conversation ended, I retreated to the bathroom to collect myself. As I braced my arms against the sink, shaking from the encounter, two instructors, both White women, followed me in. But rather than comfort me, I was instead met with disapproval and disdain.

“Why had I tried to talk about race at a yoga studio?”

“How could I have betrayed them this way?”

“Did I know how hard I had just made their days?”

“Why hadn’t I had more Grace?”

This last accusation, in particular, has haunted me. It was a cruel way to shame me, by asking me why I hadn’t been more Graceful in the face of such unkindness.

For months that moment has left me wondering—what is Grace in the face of indignity and injustice?

Is it abdication?

Is it apathy?

Or it is action?

That day I learned an important lesson about Grace, something many other people of color know in this country: that the sorts of kindness and poise we are expected to muster when we are excluded and silenced is a direct result of the ways in which White behavior (cisgender, heterosexual, Judeo-Christian) is constantly protected and re-centered in our daily interactions. And before anyone suggests this is just because I live in Texas, let me reassure you, I have had similar, though not as dramatic, experiences in yoga studios in Boston as well as Chicago. In other words, White public and institutional spaces, especially upper-middle class ones like yoga studios, unequivocally participate in the coddling of Whiteness.

But in reflecting on her weaponizing of Grace, I have also realized that, in posing that question to me, this woman revealed a deep, abiding conviction that I was operating in her world, within her value system and her beliefs. It was a one-way street—a striking example of how colonial attitudes, rooted in the hegemony and vernacular of White Supremacy endure. In that moment she made my argument for me—that the yoga studio, even in the wake of blatant discrimination, unapologetically operated in alignment with exclusionary White Judeo-Christian identity politics (translation: not only American Christians). It is telling that she chose to invoke Grace in that moment to shame me, since in doing so she willingly exposed the glaring hypocrisy of her identity as a Christian, much less a self-professed “yogi.”

In the end, I’ve learned that American yoga studios are fraught spaces, which are rarely safe for people of color. For a host of reasons, which I will be exploring in my research, there are simply too many who occupy such spaces who lack the vocabulary or the humility to understand how their behavior and their language might be destructive. This is uncharted territory for a Brown woman, a so-called model minority like me. I am learning at the age of 36 what my Black sisters learn by the age of 10—that Whiteness is often abusive, especially when its entitlement is challenged. 

In the months since this episode, though, I’ve thought about what I could have said or done to help myself, if not that collection of White people, understand. To articulate what racism and anti-racism mean outside of the Black-and-White binary. I’ve come to understand that many Indian-Americans, myself included, struggle to speak about this distinction effectively, especially in public spaces that are positioned as celebratory multicultural havens, like yoga studios. There is often a timidity around speaking out, a cycle of gas-lighting, derailing, and oppression olympics, even amongst ourselves, that succeeds at silencing us. Sometimes there is guilt about class identifications and a lack of recognition that you can both oppress and be oppressed, but even otherwise, there is very little awareness about the difference between ethnicity and race.  In my case, I am Indian (ethnicity), but am usually just lumped in with other Brown (race) parts of the world, like the Middle East, which is why there’s not a second-thought given to selling merchandise like this in yoga spaces.

Photo Credit: Simara Askew
(n.b. G*psy is a racial slur for the Roma people of Central and Eastern Europe)

If I had a chance to go back in time, though, to pose some thoughtful hypotheticals of my own, here’s what I would say:

If you are the owner of an establishment or yoga studio selling such clothing, or a person using such words, and a Roma person says something to you about how the word “G*psy” makes them feel, what will you do? Will you feel defensive? If you do, I want to request that you think about why you feel entitled to words like G*psy, or in my case, Namaste. What do these words accomplish for you? What if was a different, better known racially charged word, say, against African-Americans, in the United States? Would you still feel defensive and entitled to use the word as you please? And if the answer is no, please ask yourself why. 

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