“Where were you on 9/11?” The question is embedded in the national consciousness.
But more importantly, as I found out when I came to the United States as a 13-year-old, the question served as the moral justification that allowed classmates to joke about how I might single-handedly blow up our middle school. Terrorist. The word was tossed around with such ease.
I live in an America where my brown body is a stain, a mark of “other.”
During my time at UNC, I have noticed that yoga is a popular pastime among white Chapel Hill residents and students. Yoga is historically and presently a spiritual and meditative practice, whose origins lay in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Yet the Western variant of this centuries-old religious tradition has been whitewashed into physical mastery of various contortions for their own sake.
The West has ravenously exotified, fetishized and butchered yoga. Like a pig ready to be picked, it has been hacked apart into a $27 billion industry. Aside from $100 Lululemon yoga pants, attempts have even been made to patent yoga positions and postures.
I am painfully aware that my Indian grandmother would stick out like a sore thumb at one of the many yoga studios dotting Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
We have a tendency to historicize and narrate colonialism as a neatly packaged and historically discernible era that ceased on Aug. 15, 1947, when India won independence. But colonization never truly stopped.
As someone from the Indian diaspora, I have seen that the project of Western imperialism that renders cultural practices free for the taking is connected to a logic that renders Muslim lives disposable. America conceals me when it’s convenient but makes me hypervisible when deemed threatening.
How is it that South Asian culture is valued where brown bodies are not? America’s empire mindset is woven into public policy, policing, the military and everyday interactions — drone strikes in Pakistan, “The War on Terror,” Sikh temple attacks and racial profiling.
