“Anti-Oppression” and Cultural Appropriation

Jan 17

Originally published April 7 2021 in my Facebook post.

Screenshot Young white person culturally appropriating both locks and bindi, with her eyes closed and looking serene because she thinks that Black and brown cultures exist for her pleasure. She can literally steal anyone’s culture and identity and still present as a “good” person who believes in “social justice”.

Imagine if a non-Indigenous based "anti-oppression" group decided to lead sweat lodges and offered that "as a service" to the social justice crowd. Imagine if the people they chose to conduct those sweat lodges were white. Imagine if they called that "anti-oppression".

What would happen? They'd be destroyed by the social justice crowd, rightly, for cultural appropriation, colonization, settler entitlement, racism, patriarchy, and white entitlement. Right?? That's what should happen.

Except that this is what happens to yoga every single day and no one in the social justice crowd gives a damn or defends my people against the systematic theft of our spiritual and cultural wisdom, or our authority to lead our own practices through our own lineages.

Social justice orgs with "anti-oppression frameworks" select non-Hindu teachers or non-Hindu lineage based orgs to "teach" them yoga for their members. THAT IS COLONIZATION OF HINDU PRACTICES. But do you think anyone in this movement says anything about it? And if I or any of my people bring it up, people look at us as if we're bewildering them. What do we mean they can't just take whatever they want from my people???

Stop being a hypocrite by stopping your theft of my people's cultural practices. They don't belong to you and never will, no matter how much you try to claim them as yours.