Kimber Simpkins
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

Manu,

“Colonialism has an impact on how the world is structured today in terms of both who is valued and where their efforts are considered credible.”

This means that those with white skin are considered more credible in the front of a courtroom, a classroom, and a yoga studio. Those of us who are white unconsciously accept this valuing and credibility and don’t acknowledge that that’s part of what allows us to get jobs and make money, including as a yoga teacher. Here’s where it gets even worse: Functionally that means that someone who looks like me in many situations is going to be considered a more credible expert on yoga than someone who is of Indian ancestry and who grew up in the yoga tradition and has even more yoga training than I do. Just look at the lack of racial diversity at the Yoga Journal Conference and at events like Bhakti Fest. The lack of racial diversity at these events is not a matter of lack of qualified South Asian yoga teachers and bhakti performers.

But it seems to me that it doesn’t matter how many logical connections I make or how much context I provide. It seems like you entered this conversation without a real interest in discussion, having already made your mind up, and ignoring the requests made in the article to not leave angry white fragility comments but rather to sit with the discomfort and listen. Instead you entered the conversation either not having read the article in its entirety or deciding that you because you are a entitled white man who is used to being deferred to, you have the right to vent your anger and frustration anywhere you please, even when specifically told not to.

You also seem to be confusing the terms “responsibility” and “guilt”, which are not in fact synonyms. Someone who feels guilty might take responsibility for something, or they may not. The two do not go hand in hand. I don’t feel guilty that the environment is going to hell in a handbasket, but I do take responsibility for minimizing my impact on it and encourage others to do the same.

In the same vein, I don’t feel guilty about racism, slavery, colonization, and oppression in the US and elsewhere. But I do feel responsible for minimizing my potentially negative impact on people of color due to historical structures and context and I encourage others to do the same.

By the way, who are the “Others” you’re talking about? If you surround yourself only with people who believe that white people are all good with black and South Asian people and high fives all around, yay team, then you don’t have enough Black friends, Latino friends, Asian American friends, or you’re not friends with anyone who is different enough from you or who trusts you enough to tell you what they really think. It might be because they sense you would have exactly the same sort of white male fragility meltdown that you’re having here with me. Self-defensiveness, condescension, demands, and outright false claims without any backing in reality whatsoever, all hallmark behaviors of a white man whose superiority feels undermined.

Again, if you need evidence, there are tomes, scholars, books, entire courses, majors, and fields of study which include looking at how white people have benefited from colonialism. If you were genuinely curious, you would have looked them up already. The truth is, it wouldn’t matter to you if I’d written my PhD dissertation on the topic, you still wouldn’t believe me. Your mind is already made up because the truth is too uncomfortable for you to examine.

Here, read this book: Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. Or Warmth of Other Suns by Isabelle Wilkerson. Or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History.

By continuing to vent, you’re only demonstrating thoroughly for everybody still reading how ignorant you are of the actual topic and how unwilling you are to educate yourself on it. I’m also willing to believe that you are a good intelligent person. Why don’t you show it by reading a book on the topic instead of insisting you know all the answers already?

And if you think “no one cares”… may I suggest that if you can overcome your prejudice and cultivate meaningful relationships with the South Asian folks who experience harm from how yoga is treated in the US, you will find that they and the white, Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian allies they are in community with care a great deal.

If by “no one cares” you meant “straight white cisgender men who have never examined their own privilege don’t care” then you may be right, but that would be their own loss.

    Kimber Simpkins

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