The controversy over Be Scofield’s post on perceived racism in the mainstream, chiefly white, yoga world seems to me to reflect a clash of at least three American cultures. All three are made up of decent people trying their best to survive, thrive and help this suffering world. Be straddles these cultures. In his post he talks in the voice of one of them to his friends in another of them, and is getting very angry responses from some of those friends, partly perhaps because of the influence of a third culture that is rising today and that a lot of us are trying to learn from. These three I am calling white liberal culture, the critical writings of the oppressed, and nonviolent speech and action.

1. White liberal culture

The first is the white liberal culture that is the heartland of American yoga today. This culture thrives among people who are mostly well educated, in wealthy or middle class families (though some are living simply by choice), and liberal in opinions especially on religious and social issues, who have been drawn to an originally Asian spiritual and physical practice for good reasons. It’s no easy thing to be in a typical middle class job or lifestyle, especially these days: everyone seems to be doing more than one person’s job, needing a high degree of focus, long hours, serious people skills, constant juggling if one has children, a curtailed personal life, exhaustion, stress, and fear that it can all unravel with one job loss, car accident or illness. The stay-at-home spouses and the retired are also stressed, not least by their awareness that everyone envies them while the entire voluntary sector depends on their leadership and the world is in terrible trouble: poverty, war, pollution, global warming. This is a frenetic culture more conspicuous for rising rates of depression and prescription drug use than for its joy and happiness.

Yoga can be an absolute boon to people in this harried state, not just calming the body and nerves, but also awakening experiences that might have seemed beyond reach: inner peace, a stilling of the self, more space for awareness of others and this beautiful world, compassion, an opening of the heart, even joy. That some people who are on this journey find great value in going to places where very poor and different people live, and experience a sense of oneness and connection with them, is no surprise: it may be absolutely extraordinary and life-changing for them.

2. Critical Writings of the Oppressed

The second culture is located among the potpourri of American minorities, which are not one culture but many. For all their differences they do share some qualities, chief among which is a deep experiential understanding of privilege. Those who lack privilege and power in any given situation are always more aware of its advantages than those who have it. They have a keener knowledge of the insensitivities and rationalizations of the privileged than the privileged themselves do. In a traditional patriarchal society the wife knows much about her husband that he would be shocked to hear her say (she doesn’t say it to him, but only to other wives), while the white servant knows much about the wife that she never says to her, while the Black slave knows most of all. As Amanda Udis-Kessler laid out in a beautiful post last week, this is a complex matter because many people are privileged in some ways while lacking privilege in others.

Over the last century or more, voices have arisen from the unprivileged in America that have said loudly what could never be said in public before. Whether in angry or philosophical or tone, in sermons or speeches, poetry, songs, rap, novels, analytical essays or major academic tomes, Sojourner Truths of every oppressed group have spoken up. It’s not too much to call this a single culture today, because in certain college programs and web-connected activist circles everybody gets informed by the writings and attitudes of these truthtellers. There is now a tradition of unvarnished speech, where the nasty nature of privilege is laid out in language that would burn the ears of the master or mistress of the house if they ever got into an anti-racist or queer workshop in a radical seminary such as, oh I don’t know, the Starr King seminary attended by Be Scofield. I don’t mean that this speech is filled with animus or bitterness, though some of the writers naturally are; it often has a more objective tone to it, a “this-is-how-it-is” laying out of the evidence in a comprehensive and scholarly analytical fashion that is hard to gainsay. The people schooled in this culture find nothing untoward in Be’s tone; they appreciate his clarity and acuity of analysis and see how much he has tried to avoid arrogance and animus. As he wrote in a comment: “The feminist tradition has written about and called out racism within the movement for a while now. My article is well within this tradition. Read “Ain’t I a Woman” by bell hooks.”

Often the thing that burns people schooled in these experiences of the unprivileged and in this culture of truthful speech about it is not so much the overt racism of the good ol’ boys, which has the merit of being visible. Instead what infuriates or saddens or simply looks ridiculous is the invisible racism of privileged and frequently self-congratulatory liberals. To voice that analysis is to disrupt these liberals’ sense of themselves as good people trying their best. As a straight, white, middle class, English-American male, I have long ago learned not to be surprised at the depths of my own unconsciousness about my privilege. This is why Be has mentioned several times how striking it is to him that a high profile, white, liberal, self-described antiracist could be surprised that a wealthy white liberal woman on one of her tours would use a racially insensitive word. He is making the point that no white liberal schooled in anti-racism could possibly be surprised by this. It’s a real clash of cultures.

An aside about pigs, grunts, and redemption

I was raised in a Christian and interfaith movement that arose out of American evangelical revivalism, which taught that we are all sinners. When someone did something embarrassingly sinful, a common response was, “What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?” This was not said in an accusatory tone, so much as a forgiving one: we are all sinners, join the club, fess up, ask God for grace and strength to change. Alcoholics Anonymous grew out of this movement, and if you know AA you can hear in it the same kind of blunt truth telling that is linked to a belief that acceptance of unpleasant but unsurprising fact is a major step on the road to redemption. Be’s post reflects a similar expectation or at least hope that his truthtelling will be received more with humble gratitude than being seen as unconscionable mudslinging. He hopes this in part because he takes pains to say that he is a sinner too — only not using that term, which most of us ex-Christians now despise.

3. Nonviolent Speech and Action

The third culture is that of nonviolent communication and action. This isn’t quite a single culture. Some parts of it are in the tradition of Gandhi and King, because focused on achieving great social and political changes: today’s necessary equivalents of Indian independence, African American civil rights and the other causes that MLK took up, including opposition to the Vietnam War and support for the poor. Other parts of this culture, like most of the people that I know who are attracted to Nonviolent Communications, are not focused on structural and systemic oppressions or violence. Miki Kashtan, the founder of BayNVC, is one of the exceptions, as her posts here show.

Generally speaking, middle class people in our era (and every era?) have been more aware of and frightened by conflict and by the fear of becoming poor themselves, than they have been energized by the poverty and oppression of others. This isn’t an accusation so much as an observation, and an unsurprising one. We embrace politics and ideas as a result of our experiences, and the emotions that arise for us in them. Many middle class people who are attracted to conflict resolution, mediation, nonviolence and careful speech are in fact conflict-averse. This may sound obvious but it isn’t. Gandhi and King were not at all driven by an aversion to conflict. They led their people in great conflicts.

Before voices, leaders and movements arise from the oppressed to throw off their oppression the conflict is there, but largely invisible to the oppressors. It is suppressed. The slaveholder can imagine all is well and the slaves happy. What was remarkable about Gandhi and MLK and their like is that they brought the conflict out into the open, boldly made it visible, but did so in a nonviolent manner. They told truth but with compassion and expectation that their oppressors were human and capable of moral suasion. They believed they could be helped towards moral suasion by massive, shocking, nonviolent, noncooperation and speech that would starkly reveal their oppressive policies, ideas and actions in all their bald ugliness. No escape.

That kind of nonviolence is also taught at Starr King and similar seminaries, and in various activist circles, though it is a hard teaching and not as evident in oppositional movements as many of us long for it to be. It has also not yet found a clear relationship to the other teachings of nonviolence that are common today, at least in nonviolent culture as practiced by most of the white, liberal, middle class people attracted to it. What is attractive is learning how to speak without accusation or judgmentalism. We learn to use “I” statements, and to take responsibility for our own actions, so that for example instead of saying “your nasty words made me angry and react harshly” we learn to say “when you said those things I felt angry, and I reacted harshly from my anger.” Instead of laying out other people’s transgressions in public, we try to learn instead how to be empathic towards them. Some people schooled in this culture would consider Be’s post to be unconscionably aggressive. Ironically, feeling that he has violated the norms of nonviolent culture seems to lead some of them to accuse him angrily of doing so!

Many people schooled in nonviolent communication or attracted to it can’t stand the left-wing press and radio: they are so full of aggressive accusatory speech, which bolsters the feelings of the speaker and their choir, but only hardens the hearts of the other side and of all the people in between. No wonder, they think, that the left has failed to make ground. As Miki Kashtan eloquently explained on her conference call on Sunday (to which you were all invited), social change activists have been taught the skills of advocacy, but not those of listening. So when they — whether Right or Left, Israeli or Palestinian, and name-your-favorite-opponents-here — feel they are not being heard, what do they do? They shout louder. But as they shout and advocate, things that create connection are lost: these things include the willingness to listen, to listen so well you can express back to your opponents what they say in words they accept as accurate, and they also include things of the heart, like one’s deep longings and fears, and things often hidden, such as vulnerabilities and doubts. People schooled in this kind of speech no doubt find Be’s language to be unacceptable.

Conclusion

There is no doubt, if you read the comments to Be’s post, that connection has been at least temporarily lost between him and some of his friends, or people he respects and would like to be colleagues with, in the yoga movement. I hope that all of us can breathe deeply and help us think through the value of these three different cultures I have attempted to sketch here. They each have value. They are each on a journey. They are trying to integrate with each other, to learn from each other.

At breakfast last week with Miki Kashtan and Nichola Torbett, I experienced something of the fusion we are seeking: Miki minced no words in saying what she thought was wrong about some ways I had acted, and I minced none in half-defending myself, but our connection was not lost: we parted better friends even than before. We knew how sweet that had been. To be first connected, and then able to tell each other the truth as we see it, and not lose the connection: that is an ideal. Then we are being fully real with each other and maintaining trust, and are able to learn from each other. There are few better things people can give each other than that. This is what I aspire to see in the fusion of the traditions of critical writing and analysis on the one hand with empathic connection on the other. As we struggle to learn how to do that, we find that we are making mistakes, perhaps losing connection when we thought we wouldn’t, or failing to say our critical thoughts even when we are connected. This is not an easy road. For a single blog to try to merge both these traditions successfully, well, you can see how hard that is. I hope that taking this wider perspective about cultures that are clashing and trying in come cases to merge, will help to take the spotlight off the particular individuals involved.


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