Social Justice Warriors have found a new enemy, guilty of cultural appropriation and using white privilege to demean minorities: white girls in yoga pants.
In a post for the Australian publication Daily Life, Indian immigrant Kamna Muddagouni expressed disappointment in the fact that white women are the face of yoga in most Western countries, while most don’t understand the long history of the practice in Hindu societies.
“Yoga, a spiritual practice with Hindu roots, has since been distorted into something more palatable for white audiences — a way to exercise and connect with one’s spirituality,” Muddagouni wrote. “Whether marketed as an exercise class or a way to connect with your spiritual self, the commodification of yoga in a way that is entirely dismissive or ignorant of its roots or connections to an existing religion is appropriation at its worst.”
Muddagouni, who moved from Mumbai to Australia in the 1990s, said the Western appropriation of yoga has classified her as an “other” in her own culture.
The author did not acknowledge the fact that Western cultures embrace fusionism in many areas of art, music, food, spirituality, and exercise.
The mixture of blue-eyed soul, R&B, and pop that goes into making an Adele record, or the combination of Asian and French flavors in Joël Robuchon’s recipes aren’t a bastardization of different origins, they’re the progress of assimilation.
If Muddagouni is so offended by white people fusing some of the best parts of her culture with their own lifestyles, perhaps she’s not meant to handle life in a 21st century Western country.
