In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, the yogi with nearly half a million followers explores why we’re so much more likely to debate the merits of cotton versus polyblend leggings rather than talk about “the big-ass racist elephant in the room.”
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Stanley has been nurturing this self-awareness in the nearly 10 years since she has been breaking barriers in the yoga world, tackling topics like fat-shaming, her queer Black identity and unattainable beauty standards. In Yoke - which means yoga in Sanskrit - she uses her own life as a a metaphor to further explore the coming together of mind and body, light and the dark, good and the bad - both on and off the mat.
He wondered how a Black man is supposed to find “zen” or “calm” in such an environment. How was he supposed to chill within a predominantly White environment where most of his teachers and fellow students are White women, whom society has taught to fear Black men. How was he supposed to find inner calm in a room where he’s treated like a threat to his fellow students?
The book explores the existence of white supremacy and cultural appropriation in American yoga. "I would venture to say that everything in our collective society is rooted in white supremacy. I am sure there are many people who would disagree with that, and honestly I don't care because I believe that and I know it's the case," she says.
"I think that we see it show up in a lot of different ways. In the same way it's everywhere else and it has polluted everything else, it's polluted yoga. It's very much a part of how yoga has spread in America. The popularity of yoga really came down to wealthy white people wanting to learn and explore in a very specific way, and that's why yoga has been so white for so long in America."
"I think that when you bring up cultural appropriation in yoga, everyone's butthole clenches because everybody's like, 'Oh s---, I think I might be guilty of this,' or, 'I could be apart of this and that doesn't feel good.' And that's the yoga. That's the hard thing. That's the thing that we're being asked to accept. It doesn't mean you have to sit in space of shame about it; it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that you're a person and you're allowed to be that way."
White people have repeatedly acted like dicks throughout history and they’ve attempted to colonize literally every single continent on the planet. Maybe my performance of the magical yoga negro gave clearance for you to ignore this truth even more than you would have otherwise. But that’s not actually how it works. Ignoring doesn’t make nasty shit go away. It just makes it smell worse when you finally decide to take out the trash.
