White People Practicing Yoga Are Xenophobes, Michigan State Professor Claims

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White people are ruining sacred things at an alarming rate, according to Michigan State professor Shreena Gandhi, who recently penned the essay “Yoga and the Roots of Cultural Appropriation.”

Gandhi, a professor of religious studies at MSU, claims that Americans who practice yoga are contributing to white supremacy and colonialism.

’m unsure that the staff over at Michigan State are in a position to be pointing fingers right now, but that’s a topic for another day.

She writes:

Yoga was often used as a tool to show the British that Indians were not backwards or primitive, but that their religion was scientific, healthy, and rational. This was a position they were coerced into…Beyond its utility, yoga became popular, in part, because it reinforced European and Euro-American ideas of India…Yoga became — and remains — a practice which allows western practitioners to experience the idea of another culture while focusing on the self.

…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.