The Whitewashing of “#WhitePeopleDoingYoga”

[wenis]

[MotherJones]

Our agreement for the installation included my assemblage of yoga ephemera that I'd collected in the form of magazines, books, posters, and album covers. Together they told the story of how the $16 billion yoga industry in this country had rebranded a South Asian discipline to sell yoga as a line of products—how yoga became Yoga™. It's no coincidence that you rarely see a South Asian person on the cover ofYoga Journal magazine. Yoga has been put in an ironic position: Colonized and commodified, a tradition rooted in detachment and equanimity has been hijacked by a grasping possessiveness. I titled my work #WhitePeopleDoingYoga.

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But once my proposal made the rounds among curators, educators, and PR folks, cracks started to show in the museum's support for the installation. The show's lead curators and education staffers I'd met—all but one of whom were white—didn't feel completely comfortable with the title. They wanted something innocuous like #PeopleDoingYoga, without the word "white," because the term "white people" could be "offensive" to museumgoers, donors, and staff. During our initial meetings at the museum, they told me to "turn down the volume" of my critique. They also insisted I remove a section of the installation—a Hindu-inspired shrine featuring photographs of a white couple as South Asian gurus. "This might be offensive to Indian people," staffers said—white authorities telling me what Indian people might find offensive. They gave me an ultimatum: Either I take down the shrine, or they don't include my installation. Museum leaders were diluting my installation, going well beyond the standard curatorial role.

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One of the museum's staff members, who was white, came to my defense in that boardroom. He exposed the museum's hypocrisy by holding up its own branded tote bag that bore only the word "Asian" on it, and as I remember it he said, "I'm a white man walking around San Francisco with this bag that just says 'Asian' on it, without 'museum,' and it's completely 'out of context.' Why is our bag okay but Chiraag's is not?" The marketing chief's response: "Well, that's our brand, so it's okay."

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There's just so much going on in this story that it's a must read. The merch situation is way deeper and crazier than my snippet, his fight with another museum, the history and founder of the Asian Art Museum. It just keeps going and going.

a Must Read

 

[Masoyama]

People not even changing the title now.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-whitewashing-of-whitepeopledoingyoga.147856/

 

[wenis]

Lol my bad.

 

[Volimar]

Duplicate thread. https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-whitewashing-of-whitepeopledoingyoga.147856/