The Parish Episcopal School in Dallas, Texas hosted their “6th Annual Upper School Conference on Diversity and Inclusion” and in doing so, might’ve taught us a valuable lesson.
The Federalist previously exposed the school’s promotion of racially segregated affinity groups and highlighted some of its conference sessions pertaining to toxic masculinity and LGBT issues. Another session at the school’s conference warrants examination.
For students who might prefer not to be bombarded with leftwing platitudes about gender before lunch, one would hope that respite could be found in a yoga class. Well, it depended on which one you chose. One yoga session, listed at the very bottom of the seminar’s form, was described exactly how you’d expect a yoga class to be described.
Then there was “Deeper Than Poses: Taking Yoga beyond Instagram.” The description read: “Get ready for all your preconceived ideas about yoga to be challenged, and get ready to sweat. Alondra Smith blends story-telling, classic yogi wisdom and high intensity music to lure you into the present moment, and in that moment, challenges all the things you think you know.”
But stretches and sweat weren’t enough for the high school students. No, this yoga session was an act of revolution, a rebellion against a deeply entrenched power structure.
The description read like a jab at the competing white-woman-run yoga session. It went on to explain that Smith was a black woman “practicing and teaching yoga in a city where that space is typically dominated” yes, dominated, “by upper class white women,” continuing to note that Smith brings an “inclusive energy” everywhere she goes.
Setting aside just how laughably contrived it is to inject racial grievance politics into yoga, the description raises a number of questions.
Why would the race of your yoga instructor be particularly important? Should upper-class white women stop practicing yoga for the sake of diversity, equity, and inclusion? Can over or under representations occur naturally, or is every instance of disproportionality the result of an all-powerful white supremacist conspiracy that controls everything, from politics to the yoga-industrial complex? What does it mean to be “inclusive” in a yoga studio, anyways? Why can’t yoga just be yoga?
Such a simple question would require one to engage in even more troubling inquiries. Why can’t football just be football? Why can’t entertainment just be entertainment? Why can’t children just be children? Why can’t a $30,000 education just be concerned with educating, not indoctrinating, students?
The Nature of Leftism
The answer gets at the essential character of leftism. Contrary to the libertarian live-and-let-live attitude that has sullied the right with a pacified individualism and left us so vulnerable to leftism’s long march through the institutions, wokeness, neoliberalism, and the dizzying amalgamation of the two that defines our ruling regime is determined to chase you down.
No, you can’t just watch the game without being reminded how irredeemably racist America is. No, you can’t enjoy a movie without enduring scenes that intend to propagandize rather than entertain. No, you can’t send your children to school, be it public or private, without worrying they’ll be indoctrinated. And before you ask, no, you can’t call any of this out for fear of being canceled. No, no, no.
Everything must exist in relation to wokeness. Nothing can be allowed to exist outside its domain for too long. Neutral activities or institutions, like neutral education, are viewed as threats, archaic pillars that support a systematically sexist, systemically racist, cis-het, patriarchal Christian fascist white supremacist power structure; an ever-changing, fabricated, and conveniently elusive foe that perpetually grants woke warriors justification for their ongoing onslaughts.
So of course, racial identity politics-infused yoga courses will be offered to your kids at an elite, Christian private school. As contrived as it obviously is, it’s also an unsurprising outgrowth of a paranoid system governed by a collective neuroticism, a neuroticism that deems anything outside its grasp as a potential breeding ground for dangerous sanity.
This is the attitude that has granted progressives so much power, and fostered the overwhelming but misguided sense that history, at least the last century of it, bends inevitably towards liberalism, the limits of which have never been established.
Neutral institutions are attacked, or more insidiously, infiltrated or co-opted, as if they were just as dangerous to the goals of wokeness as conservatism is. Drastic? Sure, but irrational? Perhaps not.
After all, leftism is unnatural at its very core. It takes a lot of money, time, and neutrality’s coordinated assassination to get masses of people to deny objective reality and betray their instincts — to believe that men can be women, that babies are burdens instead of blessings, or that enslavement to vice is the pinnacle of human freedom.
If the left wasn’t at war with nature, they wouldn’t need to subject the whole of Western society to mass psychological operations through the education system, Hollywood, big tech information curators, a propagandistic media establishment, a cornucopia of ideologically motivated streaming services, and apparently now, woke yoga sessions. These are the actions of a regime that must control reality so it won’t be crushed by it.
But nature, though it can be repressed, always eventually reasserts itself.
