An apparently ethnically Indian American woman with a passion for Social Justice™ has taken to TikTok to call for the “decolonization” of yoga in a self-indulgent, AOC-esque selfie video:
White women are killing yoga purely for their quest for perfection. To a white woman, perfection means a key to happiness, your key to success, and the key to your very existence. You have to have the perfect hair, the perfect clothes, the perfect braids, the perfect nails.
And then you bring this competition for perfection into the yoga room, into your yoga practice.
Did you know that this quest for perfection is rooted in white supremacy? In a culture and society like North America.
If you take a look at what yoga actually teaches, yoga teaches that there is no such thing as perfection…
The decolonizing your yoga practice actually means to embrace the fact that your yoga practice will not look pretty, it will not be a performance.
And when BIPOC teachers call you out* on your quest for perfection in yoga, if you are truly an ally you will listen.
Tiktoker calls on white yoga teachers to decolonize yoga because yoga is now being affected by white supremacy pic.twitter.com/iImSUAwGqv
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 14, 2023
*The term “BIPOC” is an acronym that stands for “black, indigenous, and people of color,” a category that occupies the top position in the oppression Olympic victimhood hierarchy.
Via Hindu American Foundation:
Yoga, from the root word “yuj” in Sanskrit, means to unite. Most Hindu texts discuss yoga as a practice to control the senses and ultimately, the mind. The most famous is the Bhagavad Gita (dating back to 6th-3rd Century BCE), in which Krishna speaks of four types of yoga – bhakti, or devotion; jnana, or knowledge; karma, or action; and dhyana, or concentration (often referred to as raja yoga, though not all sources agree on the term) – as paths to achieve moksha, the ultimate goal according to Hindu understanding.
Apparently the “quest for perfection” is now exclusive to Caucasians, and yoga is a white woman’s vehicle to said perfection?
Make it make sense, please.
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Can you imagine the volume and intensity of personal psychological issues that went in, over years, to the making of this video? Social Justice™ people have a remarkable capacity to turn personal grievances into political ones.
The “decolonize X” talking point has become increasingly common in Social Justice™ lexicon, in which complex social, political, and economic phenomena are reduced to “white man bad.”
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things white people and white people alone are expected to “decolonize”:
- Your bookshelf (burn your books for equity, bigot! We’re the enlightened ones!)
- Your heart
- Your hair
- Higher education
- Language
- The decolonization movement itself (how meta!)
Indeed, it would be easier to compile a list of things white people are not expected to decolonize in their lives. The safe thing would probably be just to decolonize your own body and kill yourself for racial equity.
The unfortunate reality is that this genre of the racialist economy sells with certain demographics — most notably, middle-class white women with guilt complexes and lots of disposable income to unload on alleviating that guilt.
