Embedded Files
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
AR 24:29 - "Undoing Whiteness" using yoga
In this issue:
JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES - new bestselling author "views her religion as a cult"
YOGA - learn how meditation magic is applied to "undoing whiteness"
Apologia Report 24:29 (1,437)
July 20, 2019
JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES
Recent ex-member testimony becoming a publishing phenomenon. Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life, by Amber Scorah [1] -- fascinating for its description of clandestine JW operations in Taipei and Shanghai as well as the author's moving struggle and eventual loss of faith, ending with her poignant description of choking grief over the death of an infant son.
Scorah is a third-generation Jehovah's Witness and an essayist/editor for Scholastic. She first appeared on our radar in 2013 <www.bit.ly/2XH5NkZ> as the focus of a documentary describing her exit from the Watchtower. Library Journal's Prepub Alert (Dec 17 '18) mentions a related source in adding that the book is "Based on a Believer article that had a record number of hits and letters for the magazine; the New York Times story of her son's death received 2.2. million views in its first four days."
A "starred review" from Publishers Weekly (Apr 8 '19) notes that "Scorah provides a rare glimpse into the insular world of the Jehovah's Witnesses, and her accounts of expat life and leaving her faith should give this candid memoir wide appeal."
BookPage (Jun '19) adds that "By Scorah's account, her Jehovah's Witnesses church kept its members preoccupied studying, preaching and submitting records of their activities; discouraged them from going to college and cultivating friendships outside their congregation; and advised them to take subsistence jobs rather than pursuing careers that might refocus their interests. Why bother with careers, after all, when Armageddon is just around the corner?" Scorah eventually meets someone online "who views her religion as a cult" and then "finds her faith slipping under [her friend's] barrage of skepticism. ... The last pages of her story are heartbreaking, but unlike many apostates who look back wistfully at the beliefs they've left behind, Scorah has no doubt that she has delivered herself from a kind of evil."
A separate review in the New York Times (Jul 1 '19) written by C. E. Morgan, Ministry Program Creative Writing Fellow <www.bit.ly/30Hu3Ai> at Harvard Divinity School, emphasizes this with its title: "When Leaving a Religion Is Like Abandoning a Cult." Included is a concise secular summary of JW distinctives. Morgan emphasizes the experience in which "Scorah makes exceedingly clear, she did survive a cult." <www.nyti.ms/2Jq34ne>
Yet, Scorah's message is bleak. The first piece noted above that she wrote for the Times laments: "I am not saying there is no God, but I am saying [in reference to her child's death] no God would do this to someone. ...
"This is the one comfort that unbelief gives you, that this life will end and the pain you carry along with it. ...
"And so I ask the questions of life: What force grew this little child? ... Why are the things he saw on this planet so beautiful? ... Where did love like this come from?
"I will never know who my child would have been, but I know his love. If there is a God, this is what he gave me." <www.nyti.ms/2JvtWAS>
For a National Public Radio (Jun 24 '19) interview segment with Scorah, see <www.n.pr/2XPZ8Qm>
---
YOGA
"Seattle yoga teacher's 'Undoing Whiteness' class" by Marcus Harrison Green, staff reporter (Seattle Times, Jun 10 '19) -- Laura Humpf was expecting push back. "The Seattle yoga instructor had endured [related criticism] before, four years ago, after putting out word about a class for people of color only, at her studio. ...
"This spring, Humpf publicized an 'Undoing Whiteness' yoga class at Rainier Beach Yoga, geared toward white people wishing to 'unpack the harmful ways white supremacy is embedded' in their 'body, mind and heart.' Along with providing a contemplative space, the class would dissect the 'pathology of whiteness' - an obliviousness to the batch of privileges society grants white skin - and how it operates in daily life. ...
"Humpf, 39, sees her class as going beyond yoga's elegant poses. It seeks, she says, to arrive at yoga's literal meaning: union. White supremacy thwarts achieving that union within the individual and with others, says Humpf."
Green reviews the "outrage hurricane" that Humph triggered in 2015 with her people-of-color-based yoga session that ''respectfully asked white friends, allies and partners not to attend,' without expressly barring entry to anyone. ...
"The evening workshops feature Humpf and co-facilitator RW Alves sounding off words such as 'oppression' and 'liberation' to about a dozen students. The paired participants then physically interpret them, posing to form human sculptures. The exercise is one of many intended to highlight how both body and mind can absorb 'the conditioning of whiteness.'
"Workshop activities also include each person listing how 'white privilege' shows up in their lives, including rarely being fearful of police. ...
"With the American yoga community overwhelmingly white - 80%, according to a Yoga Journal Magazine study - Humpf's mentor, the Rev. angel Kyodo williams, encouraged her to target white practitioners for racial relearning. (Sounds like profiling - RP)
"'White-bodied people need to understand that just because you aren't a former KKK member doesn't mean you aren't upholding white supremacy when you aren't learning to do it,' says williams, a Zen priest and founder of Center for Transformative Change in Berkeley, California, who frequently writes on racial justice.
"Separate spaces to examine how white supremacy impacts society, such as Humpf's class, are necessary because everyone's awareness level of the pathology is different, says williams, who is black. ...
"Equity consultant Cecelia Hayes, who orchestrates racial-justice training and counts Seattle Public Schools and Unitarian Universalist Association as clients, also encounters people reflexively opposed to the practice, until they're provided context.
"'There are an awful lot of black activists tired of educating white people about racism. Every time a person of color is asked to do unpaid emotional labor there is a psychological and physical cost,' says Hayes about people of color 'serving as walking Googles' for white people on racial issues." (Once again, patience is the one social skill that seems increasingly rare in the 21st century. - RP)
"That's energy people of color can better expend toward coping with the everyday racism they experience, and then joining white people, who have properly educated themselves on racial issues, to demolish it. ...
"With nearly 75% of white people having no nonwhite friends according to a Public Religion Research Institute study, she says racial-equity education must largely happen intra-racially.
"Hayes says racial-affinity groups allow white people to work on their racial knowledge gaps without causing unintended harm to people of color in a mixed space where an innocuously intended, but ultimately insensitive, remark could promptly incinerate unifying efforts. ...
"The issues are acute in the yoga community, according to Crystal Jones, a certified yoga instructor who also provided racial- and gender-justice-centered consultations to companies such as Disney and REI but became disenchanted with the yoga industry's dismissal of race whenever it surfaced as a topic."
Just in case readers are still not clear, regarding the bias behind this writing, Green ends with this remark about Humpf: "Her class is open to anyone wanting to face reality."
An "editor's note" has been appended to the online version of this piece. It reads: "The comment thread on this story has been closed due to the sensitive nature of this topic." <www.bit.ly/2SeXd73>
Writing for the GetReligion blog (Jun 17 '19), Julia Duin says the 'Undoing Whiteness' yoga class is "tone deaf on what yoga is all about" calling it "nothing more than a press release" for Humpf. "Nearly the entire [Times] piece has large unattributed swatches of opinion leading one commentator to ask if this is the Onion they were reading instead of the Times." <www.bit.ly/2XDl0OW>
Of course, there are others who have responded to the idea of undoing whiteness. Gad Saad, a Lebanese-Canadian evolutionary behavioural scientist <www.bit.ly/2O6NEs6> at the John Molson School of Business (Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec) finds the idea abhorrent: <www.bit.ly/2JYNcqS>
-------
SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life, by Amber Scorah (Viking, 2019, hardcover, 288 pages) <www.amzn.to/2Jx97F7>
------
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse