Posted on 11/23/2015 4:45:04 AM PST by markomalley
The University of Ottawa in Canada notified Jennifer Scharf that her free weekly yoga classes were to be suspended...for cultural appropriation. Scharf had been offering free beginning yoga classes to students at the university since 2008.
“I’d been in touch to prepare for the new semester’s classes when, out of nowhere, I received an email telling me there were some issues in terms of a formal complaint,” she told The Independent.
The decision to cancel the classes came from the Ottawa Student Federation, a group that describes itself as an "instrument of political action."
According to the Ottawa Sun, staff from the Centre for Students with Disabilities, where the classes were held for students of all abilities, wrote in an email: “While yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students...there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice. Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced”, and which cultures those practices “are being taken from”.
The email also informed Scharf many of those cultures “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy... we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.”
Scharf, trying to salvage her class from extinction, offered to change the name to "mindful stretching" but the school was not interested. Her request was rejected. “I think it’s easy to worry too much about accommodating everyone,” she said. “By saving one person’s feelings, we’re ruined the experience for so many others.”
The Washington Post contacted Scharf who told the paper she was unhappy, but accepted the decision.
“This particular class was intro to beginners yoga because I’m very sensitive to this issue,” she said. “I would never want anyone to think I was making some sort of spiritual claim other than the pure joy of being human that belongs to everyone free of religion.”
Ain’t nuthin fo free. Whites need to pay even if you’re Canadian.
Writing and numbers were taken from other cultures, too.
It is time to stop educating children in mathematics
and reading. This will help them into their new status
as utter SLAVES for Islam and the Ruling Classes.
Seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
So Yoga is really only for white people and is therefore racist against all other races.
Can we deny people the ability to search for the truth on the grounds that searching for the truth is an appropriation of Jewish culture? To avoid discriminating against non-Jews, I think we also need to say that one also cannot not search for the truth as that would be an appropriation of pagan culture.
Man, our kids are really f’ed up. Communists running public education must be shocked how successful their efforts have been.
Yoga originated in India. It’s possible the reference to oppression and colonialism has to do with the British Raj. But you can never really understand what motivates snowflakes other than seeking power through victimization.
Hm, so the yoga instructor is being forced to walk the plank. Interesting.
Yeah, I guess. I’ve mostly associated it with white women because that’s what I’ve mostly seen on TV....But you’re right, it’s just more victimization and forced reprisals.
Exactly - preparing a new generation of concubines and janissaries for the Caliph’s use.
So does this mean that the students have to get rid of their yoga pants? That’s a huge part of their wardrobe these days. What to do?
I wonder if there are any actual Indian people in this protesting group. I’ve known many Indians, and not one of them would have objected to Yoga classes.
-JT
They’ll just call them something else I guess. Maybe Safe-Space Tights....
Who’s running that student union?
Yoga techniques can benefit anyone, and can do so without any references to religion ,age or gender. In this country, yoga has been presented or marketed in a feminization way, appealing mainly to that demographic. I would hope that institutions like the military and veterans hospitals open their minds to the drug free benefits.
I see what you did there.
In most cases, this will be a very, very, very, very good thing.
At some point someone needs to point out that ‘culture’ is a concept and not a lockbox. Cultural assimilation has been an on-going process since there were identifiable ‘cultures!’ Anyone who says the word ‘pajama’ and is not an Urdu speaker is practicing cultural ‘appropriation’ from the British Raj.
At one time, it was education that alerted us to the cultural richness our modern world has made available to us. We could enjoy yoga derived from the Indian subcontinent cultures and potatoes from South America or American cowboy-derived Stetson hats.
Now we have institutions of mislearning pandering to overly-sensitized cultural NAZI behavior. It is the ART of imposing one’s delicate and easily offended FEELINGS to exercise POWER and entitlement on others!
I think that this will inevitably collapse under its own weight of conflicting IDIOCIES and idiosyncrasies as various groups struggle to prove that theirs is the more important victimhood. Indeed, with stories like this, I am of the growing opinion that members of these pressure groups are just trying to out-do one another in their outrage just to enjoy that power-feeling of justification.
Please GOD, let their comeuppance come SOON!
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