YOGA TODAY Through A Yogic Lens... ...continued from page 9
er bodied BIPOC, split the cover with a skinny white woman. What rots beneath the surface of the cultural appropriation debate is untold histories. Beneath these heated protests of magazine covers of skinny white women, are generations of grief and trauma resulting from both the racism in America as well as the colonization of ancestral lands. Inmy life, I have witnessedmarginalized groups teased, bullied, dis - criminated against, and physically harmed for expressions of cultural heritage, while those in the dominant group profit from those same aesthetics. My mother came to the United States on a Fulbright schol - arship in 1969, four years after The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed, which abolished laws prohibiting Asian immigration to theUnitedStates.My family stories consist of howduring the years of Vietnam some anti-war American white male student protestors, pro - testing the University for holding classes, dehumanized her as she tried to go to class: touching my mother’s braids; pulling on her saris; and in a terrible accent saying “What would Gaaaandy do?” meaning “Mahat - ma Gandhi,” as they accosted her with “Americans are dying Bitch.” Did they view all South Asian, South East Asians, as the enemy? Was my mother’s road to becoming an American inconsequen - tial to their fights for “Americans?” A rhetorical question meant for deeper inquiry: Why did they do this? Unlike them, she pushed her way to class in 1969 with her student visa at stake, until one day a Physics professor sexually assaulted her while attending a ses- sion for extra help. Unable to go back, she failed Physics, and had to shift to a less prestigious university so as not to be deported. In her later years, she has written about how during her scientific career, she cried the day she put her saris in a suitcase under the bed, as they had become a spectacle at her office. Every day men would ask her how long it took her to get ready for work. Yet on any given day in a Yoga studio across America or online, a white kirtan artist is chanting poorly pronounced Hindu deity names over blaring sound systems, in a sari, with moortis on the floor near her feet. For those first generation Americans like myself, who stumble into a Yoga cen - ter to reconnect to cultural heritage, Yoga spaces can feel like looking at our lost relics. (This is usually when someone makes the argument that pointing this out is divisive, that “We are all One” before explain- ing some Universalist principles and transcendental philosophy.) In a 2015 article in TheWashington Post , writer Cathy Young writes, “To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation: Their protests ignore history, chill artistic expression and hurt diversity.” Young de- fends cultural appropriation at large, balking at protest against it as “an obvious potential to chill creativity and artistic expression… equal- ly bad for diversity, raising the troubling specter of cultural cleansing.” Her defense begs the question, what about the cultural cleansing mar - ginalized people endure every day within every American institution? Arewe really all “One”?ManyDesis have experienced that themulticul - tural “melting pot” idea is a grand illusion of “diversity” and oneness. In reality, this image of a diverse country has never been about equally blending the world’s flavor into one big soup; it has been about fitting in, assimilating, into a heavily salted soup in which diverse flavors are overpowered, cookeddown, or dissolvedwithinone or two generations. Our truths are diverse. Some people with marginalized identities choose to accept cultural appropriation because fetishization, while irritating, is preferable to bullying. David Min writes in his column milk before cereal , “I’m willing to let authenticity take a backseat— as bad as that sounds—when my entire existence has been predicated on finding a survival strategy to exist in this world…While I’m aware that the West’s underlying assumptions about Asians have hardly continued on page 80
PATHWAYS—Summer 21—53
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker