It Happened To Me: The Skinny Lady in Front of Me in Yoga Class

Well Happy New Year HairyKat's!

We've been away but we're back and charged up with some great content, contests, and more in 2014.
Our first post of the year meets you with great disdain.

I recently read an article on XO Jane: "It Happened To Me: There Are No Black People In My Yoga Classes And I'm Suddenly Feeling Uncomfortable With It" written by Jen Caron.

The title would suggest that this woman was an advocate for Black People and our need to learn to Downward Dog (sarcasm) but as I read through the article, it became evident that this wasn't the case. As I became more offended I decided it was time to set some things straight!

I've copied and pasted the article for your viewing pleasure (Then read my response from the perspective of the heavy black woman!)

"January is always a funny month in yoga studios: they are inevitably flooded with last year’s repentant exercise sinners who have sworn to turn over a new leaf, a new year, and a new workout regime. A lot of January patrons are atypical to the studio’s regular crowd and, for the most part, stop attending classes before February rolls around.

 

A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair. Before we made it into our first downward dog, she had crouched down on her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class.

 

Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a minute). I’ve seen people freeze or give up in yoga classes many times, and it’s a sad thing, but as a student there’s nothing you can do about it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.

 

 

I was completely unable to focus on my practice, instead feeling hyper-aware of my high-waisted bike shorts, my tastefully tacky sports bra, my well-versedness in these poses that I have been in hundreds of times. My skinny white girl body. Surely this woman was noticing all of these things and judging me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined.

 

I thought about how even though yoga comes from thousands of years of south Asian tradition, it’s been shamelessly co-opted by Western culture as a sport for skinny, rich white women. I thought about my beloved donation-based studio that I’ve visited for years, in which classes are very big and often very crowded and no one will try to put a scented eye pillow on your face during savasana. They preach the gospel of yogic egalitarianism, that their style of vinyasa is approachable for people of all ages, experience levels, socioeconomic statuses, genders, and races; that it is non-judgmental and receptive. As such, the studio is populated largely by students, artists, and broke hipsters; there is a much higher ratio of men to women than at many other studios, and you never see the freshly-highlighted, Evian-toting, Upper-West-Side yoga stereotype.

 

I realized with horror that despite the all-inclusivity preached by the studio, despite the purported blindness to socioeconomic status, despite the sizeable population of regular Asian students, black students were few and far between. And in the large and constantly rotating roster of instructors, I could only ever remember two being black.

 

I thought about how that must feel: to be a heavyset black woman entering for the first time a system that by all accounts seems unable to accommodate her body. What could I do to help her? If I were her, I thought, I would want as little attention to be drawn to my despair as possible—I would not want anyone to look at me or notice me. And so I tried to very deliberately avoid looking in her direction each time I was in downward dog, but I could feel her hostility just the same. Trying to ignore it only made it worse. I thought about what the instructor could or should have done to help her. Would a simple “Are you okay?” whisper have helped, or would it embarrass her? Should I tell her after class how awful I was at yoga for the first few months of my practicing and encourage her to stick with it, or would that come off as massively condescending? If I asked her to articulate her experience to me so I could just listen, would she be at all interested in telling me about it? Perhaps more importantly, what could the system do to make itself more accessible to a broader range of bodies? Is having more racially diverse instructors enough, or would it require a serious restructuring of studio’s ethos?

 

I got home from that class and promptly broke down crying. Yoga, a beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments in over six years of practice, suddenly felt deeply suspect. Knowing fully well that one hour of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the deserving target of a racially charged anger is nothing, is largely my own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket, is the tip of the iceberg in American race relations, I was shaken by it all the same.

 

The question is, of course, so much bigger than yoga—it’s a question of enormous systemic failure. But just the same, I want to know—how can we practice yoga in good conscience, when mere mindfulness is not enough? How do we create a space that is accessible not just to everybody, but to every body? And while I recognize that there is an element of spectatorship to my experience in this instance, it is precisely this feeling of not being able to engage, not knowing how to engage, that mitigates the hope for change."

I could only imagine the perspective of the class from the "heavy black woman's" pov. I imagine it was something like this:

Heavy Black Woman:

"Today I attended my first yoga class as I begin my journey to a happier, healthier me. The class was rather full and I began to feel uncomfortable with myself. I've struggled with my weight for a while and I began to feel every insecurity rush inside of my body, Everyone in the class seemed as if they had been doing yoga for a while. I could tell by their eagerness and readiness to begin the class. I was nervous but decided, this is the first day of the rest of my life.

Being overweight for so long, I found the positions difficult but decided to give it my best shot. As I continued to give it my best effort,  I must've had a look of terror in my eyes as  I found myself in positions my body just wasn't used to. I started to resent myself for not taking control of my health sooner as I felt my muscles tighten and sweat pour from  my forehead, but was calmed by the pride I felt that I was doing something to change, finally. I started to lose focus or oxygen because I'm sure I had stopped breathing. My eyes roamed around the class as I wondered if any of the other super sweaters in the class were as bad as me at doing this when they started doing yoga. I was determined to give it my best and to be consistent.

As I regained my focus back on the next position,  I noticed the woman on the mat in front of me staring at me. I could tell that she was judging me as her eyes stared and moved across every inch of my voluptuous curves I instantly began to love wholeheartedly, as I saw the bones protrude from her skinny, frail body. She refused to look away as did I. She snarled at me. I could tell she was showing off as she moved into the next poses. She taunted me with her eyes as she would change positions and roll them at me. She giggled as I tried to move along with the class. I wasn't going to let her showboating stop me though. She probably thought I was jealous of her body, but quite the contrary. I didn't want to be skinny, just healthy. You could be as skinny as you liked but if you're character lacked integrity, kindness, compassion,  and all that attributes that made up a decent human being, your looks really didn't matter. She made it evident in her giggles that she didn't understand me.

 Her staring made me uncomfortable. I wondered if she stared because she felt sorry for me, or because she thought that because I was heavy, I was incapable of keeping up with the class. At the end of the day I had to focus on myself.  Besides, I never thought of yoga as a competitive sport.

I regained my composure and finished the class. I did it and I was proud of myself. Though, I probably wouldn't return to this studio. I'm going to look for studios that are less crowded and more welcoming."

-Heavy Black Woman



 Here's my issue with Jen's post:

 I've only seen that insecure people belittle others to make them feel better about themselves. I believe this post is the inferiority complex at its finest. I've yet to meet a black woman that envied a "skinny white girl body" as Jen phrased it. Again, this isn't about yoga, its about Jen's slave-age way of thinking. That  this black woman, she never once stopped to welcome, introduce herself to, or tellabout the class, wanted to be her and wanted her body. That because she was black, and heavy, and in yoga, that she lacked identity or self awareness or self-love. Jen automatically assumed that she was better than this woman. While she insinuated that she was being judged or stereotyped, she was the one issuing the judgments and assumptions. The number of assumptions made about a woman she didn't even know was mind boggling. Let's entertain that viewpoint that perhaps this  particular black woman had never done yoga before, her frustrations would be more likely with the tests of her own strengths and abilities, the very reason she attended the class in the first place, perhaps to try a new exercise regime. Not with envy of the figure of the woman in front of her, one of which I'll bet my life savings on, she didn't even notice.

Black, White, or Orange, if you have some pounds to shed, and you're starting a new workout, you're going to feel resentment because you're tired, trying something new, and not yet comfortable with yourself or your workout. 

 

But clearly this post is about more than yoga.  I wonder if Ms. Jen couldn't stop thinking about the woman that was BEHIND HER, might I add, because she was Black. Her reaction seemed to be more of a "why are you here and how do black people know about yoga?" , rather than "I wish more black people would come to this class." Jen assumed that her "exclusive" lifestyle was unattainable and reserved for Whites Only. Who knew Jen's yoga studio was the re-enactment of Jim Crow only with a  moot point of separation because in reality, I think all the things mentioned in Jen's post was only felt by Jen.

 

 How self-centered and narcissistic to think that anyone envied her body and that because this Black woman was supposedly staring at her (even when Jen couldn't see her) that it was because of her body and not because she wanted to be better at yoga. Perhaps she was trying to master her own positions by watching everyone else in the class.  Is that so far fetched or will we forever live in the ages of white people pitying people of color based on the color of their skin alone .  Did Jen feel privileged as a white woman because she was exposed to such luxuries as yoga? Clearly black people don't workout, or do yoga, at least in Jen's imagination.

 

This post is a bit of a comic relief at the expense of Jen's ignorance to her own contributions of everything she seemingly wished was different in regards to race relations. I doubt she went home and cried. Instead she wrote an irresponsible post that is a contradiction in what she states is a systemic failure she wish was changed. The failure is not in the fact that more black people don't do yoga. The failure is that white people (generally speaking) live in such a bubble of believing that black people and people of color in general want to be them. I think its far from the truth. History from entertainment to inventions provide evidence that as people of color create and explore, we then we  are robbed of our talents, while White America profits from it.

 

 Jen's post is the systemic failure. Jen's assumptions were so extreme that I'd like to think this is just a one off case and we are moving into a progressive world of respect and compassion for each other as humans at the bare maximum. Its clear that Jen lacks any understanding of black people, or our  culture. Its like when non-people of color justify that their not racist because they have 2 black friends. But who's counting?

 

Tsk. Tsk. Jen, get over yourself.

 

 

To conclude my irritation here's some pics of Black People doing Yoga: