Just when you thought things couldn’t get more politically correct….
The Ottawa Sun has a story that will leave you flabbergasted. Because of “cultural appropriation”, student leaders have pulled the mat out from University of Ottawa students. The teachings of the free on-campus yoga class could be seen as a form of “cultural appropriation” and hence, offensive.
The instructor, Jennifer Scharf, had been offering free weekly yoga instruction to students since 2008. She was shocked when told in September the program would be suspended, and saddened when she learned of the reasoning.
Staff at the Centre for Students with Disabilities believe that “while yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students … there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice,” according to an email from the center. “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 center official argues since 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 practicing yoga.”
Scharf said the concept does not apply in this case, arguing the complaint that killed the program came instead from a “social justice warrior” with “fainting heart ideologies” in search of a cause celebre. “People are just looking for a reason to be offended by anything they can find,” said Scharf. There’s a real divide between reasonable people and those people just looking to jump on a bandwagon. And unfortunately, it ends up with good people getting punished for doing good things.”
Student federation president Romeo Ahimakin denied the decision resulted from a complaint. He said the student federation put the yoga session on hiatus while they consult with students “to make it better, more accessible and more inclusive to certain groups of people that feel left out in yoga-like spaces. … We are trying to have those sessions done in a way in which students are aware of where the spiritual and cultural aspects come from, so that these sessions are done in a respectful manner.”
Scharf offered a solution, suggesting she change the name from yoga to “mindful stretching,” since that would reflect the content of the program and would “literally change nothing about the course. I’m not pretending to be some enlightened yogi master, and the point (of the program) isn’t to educate people on the finer points of the ancient yogi scripture,” she told the Sun.
Student leaders, apparently having nothing better to do, debated rebranding the program, but stumbled over how the French translation for “mindful stretching” would appear on a promotional poster, and eventually decided to suspend the program.
Read the whole debacle here.
DCG