On Being A Black Woman In a Yoga Class
[This is my response to the XOJane article titled "It happened to me: There are no black people in my yoga class & I'm uncomfortable with it"]
Now that you’ve read the title, & before anything else, I’d like you to stop & inspect the image that comes into your mind. What do you see? Do you see thick thighs & ass? What about full, round lips? A broad nose? Do you even see a whole body or just parts? Maybe you’re thinking about the darkness of my skin. Whatever it is, unless you’re someone who has spent a lot of time not only with black people but with the full diaspora of us, your picture is very likely wrong.
I’m thin, quite thin actually, the kind of thin that has led people to ask me for much of my life if I have an eating disorder of some kind. I’ve looked it up, approximately only 5% of the U.S. population is naturally born with my body type. I have never had an explicit exercise routine in my entire life but I have always done active things like dancing & hiking; I walk regularly because it makes sense as a part of my life, so I’m fit (enough…). For the record, no, I have never had an eating disorder. Anyone who has ever sat down with me at a table can attest to the fact that I’m serious about food, competitive even, & always willing to engage in a test of my chops. The lips I do so with aren’t terribly round, or even terribly full, a bit pointy actually. The nose that breathes in the aroma’s is also on the pointier side, though certainly not aquiline, & I have no ass to speak of.
I write all of this because I recently read an article that greatly disturbed me. It was about the experience of a young white woman observing a solitary black woman in a yoga class. In the article the author goes to great lengths to express her sympathy for this woman without actually taking any steps in real life to express her feelings to the woman in question. She sees the woman adopt child’s pose for the majority of the class & assumes this is out of frustration, embarrassment & body shame. The author describes the woman as fairly heavy, which without a photograph is a description I have to take with a a grain of salt considering the cultural ignorance & bias the author shows in so many of her other observations.
The author’s description of her experience deeply triggered me because I’ve been that woman & for reasons the author clearly cannot imagine beyond her own discomfort at encountering her own white privilege & unconscious ideas of white supremacy.When I’ve been that woman in a yoga class it has had nothing to do with my body’s appearance or any comparison of it to those of the white women, & men, I have generally found myself surrounded by in open yoga studio classes. When I’ve found myself in an extended child’s pose it is because I am releasing trauma & stress that the strenuous flows, often presented in such yoga classes to satisfy the cultural proclivities of the predominant attendees (despite the existence of many far less strenuous styles), do not support. It is because I know my body & trust it enough to know when it needs to rest to do its own healing.
I don’t have a dedicated yoga practice & its not because I’m ignorant of it; I’ve been doing yoga casually since I was a child. My parents, ever the teachers, brought home a book about it one day & left it out for my brother & me to discover. We did & taught ourselves how to be fishes, trees, plows, rabbits, cows & all manner of other of things & beings just for the fun of it. We learned how to use our bodies, to know how far they could stretch & for how long. When I go to a yoga studio I’m always a new person there because I don’t have a regular practice by choice; I go when I am called to. As an Aspergerber-esque introvert I am also almost always nervous & feel uncomfortable, & no, often being the only black person in the room does not help. My spirit knows the dangers of such places from experience & this registers in my body, it shows.
I live with post-traumatic slave syndrome alongside post-traumatic stress. I have survived rape & sexual assault, witnessing people I love being crushed by heavy objects then pulling them out from underneath them, guns being pointed in my face, the sudden deaths of loved ones (sometimes literally every other week), escaping my own quite a few times, all of this in addition to the generational trauma I carry written into my body as a product of the American-African experience & the chronic trauma that micro-aggressions produce. Okay, got that? Then add to all of this the never ending messages I receive from not only the media but people all around me assuming & therefore believing that I just must be so ashamed to be black & I hope this gives you a glimpse of all that my body carries besides my soul. I was once so triggered in a yoga class that I had to take myself out of the room to pace the bathroom in circles until my panic attack stopped, so yeah, when I do go to a yoga class, I’m anxious.
The people in the classes often read this & assume it is because I have never encountered yoga before that I appear stressed, uncomfortable. I know this because I see the same expressions on their faces I see in so many rooms when I am the only black person, I see the assumption that all I know about is being black, so rarely that I’m well versed in whatever we’re about to engage (unless of course its about race or black people, then everyone assumes I’m the equivalent of Jared Diamond on the subject). So rarely is the assumption that I belong exactly where I am. They tell me this not only with their words but with their actions, with their bodies, with their eyes. So despite the fact that I was hitting bow pose when I was 6, before I even knew such things as yoga mats existed, I am constantly approached as an outsider to what the author, almost surprisingly accurately, describes as a tradition that has “…been shamelessly co-opted by Western culture as a sport for skinny, rich white women [& men].”
I know this because so many have tried to reassure me before class that its not as hard as it seems, letting me know I’ll find my flow, without first asking me about my relationship to yoga. There are often attempts at educating me about the history or the practice to which I must often respond to shocked faces that I already know; I’ve been doing it, albeit sporadically, for as long as I can remember & my brother is a yoga teacher so all I can honestly convey is, “Thanks, but since you are not the teacher you have nothing to teach me right now. Please leave me alone so I can focus on my asanas. Thanks, no thanks.” The difference of their faces after watching me flow is priceless; then they start to look at me the way they look at each other; then I know I have passed the test I am always taking which asks, “Can you do what I can do? Can you really belong here?”
So when I read this article full of the authors projections onto the body of this woman, the assumptions she made about why she might need to just take a break for a minute or 60, I felt the same pain that has put me in an extended child’s pose; the overwhelm of so many messages, so many memories. Her view is the stripping of who I am, the taking away of my female body, my identity as an introvert & someone with social anxiety, my experiences & what my needs are as a result of them.
When I do go to a yoga class it might actually be for the express purpose of having that time of utter stillness, of the agency of choice to move or not move as my own breath determines. You see my body is uncomfortable and little of it has to do with the asanas. If you are a white person, imagine for a moment all of the day to day stresses of your life- time, work, money, friends, lovers, sickness, family, whatever trauma you carry- all of it. Now imagine that you have all of that to deal with as well as literally almost non-stop messages coming at you- from the t.v. you try to rest in front of the escape for a moment, the screens that now pop up at the bank, or the gas station, from the newspaper you read in the morning, the magazines you like, the movies, the people at your job, the people in your grocery store, unconsciously coming from family & friends- that are telling you that you are a stupid criminal whose offerings to the world can be summed up with sports, music & dancing, that your history consists of having been enslaved & that your future is not so different.
Now add to that a system of beliefs & practices that are designed to maintain your position as property of the social order. Seriously, try to imagine it, without the defenses. I’m not saying you don’t have stress too, I already acknowledged you do, so just let that need to have it be about you go for a moment. Just imagine what that’s like the way you imagine being Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt, openly & without shame. That’s my life. That’s her life. That’s the life of every black person you’ve ever met whether they’re in a place to consciously acknowledge it or not.When I feel the need to stop it is because I am so used to fighting & running away from all those projections & assumptions of the people around me programmed to see me a certain way, from the messages that want me to understand the world the way the author does. And unfortunately the yoga studio is often not a place of respite from this but another place in which I must decide to run or fight, both requiring energy I could use for other things, to make it through the experience without adding more stress to my already straining load.
I have a masochistic streak which leads me to often read the comments sections to controversial articles so I am already imagining responses from people who don’t understand me or my life experience. There is a part of my brain that is in this moment trying to out think them, trying to produce words that cannot be misunderstood, willfully or not, and it is exhausting. This is why the next time I’m called to the yoga mat you might find me in child’s pose for a while too; I just needed to rest for a moment.
