Guelph University Hosted a Racially Segregated Yoga Class. Then Things Got Weirder
Salem Debs self-identifies as “a Black Ethiopian anti-racism educator, an anti-oppression coach, a social justice advocate, a student in dismantling anti-Black racism, an accomplice in dismantling anti-Indigenous racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, and a believer in LGBTQ2S+ & disability rights through an intersectional lens.” Her anti-racism, she says, is “rooted in the understanding that we must acknowledge and identify the insidiousness of white supremacy before we can dismantle colonial belief systems.”
Now, when I think of white supremacy, what comes to mind is apartheid, segregation, separate-but-equal, and laws against miscegenation. Racists generally hate mixing with other races. (Indeed, that’s kind of their main deal.) So one might naturally think that progressive anti-racism would also be—y’know—anti-segregation. But apparently, that’s not always the case.
On November 1, Debs taught a yoga class “exclusive to Black-identifying students,” at Guelph University in southwestern Ontario. This wasn’t a rogue event. In fact, it was co-organized by the Cultural Diversity team at the school’s Student Experience office, which promoted the racially segregated yoga class on social media. Debs herself explained that the event was a “sacred” means to protect black people from “the white gaze.” And universtiy officials would later describe the class as “a safe, healing space” for black people (though without specifying why, exactly, black students at their university would feel themselves at risk of violence in a racially integrated campus yoga studio).
This isn’t an isolated phenomenon: Woke segregation is becoming a thing in Canadian academia. The law school at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, for instance, is now running a racially restricted writing class. Trent University has a segregated student lounge. McMaster University has black-only graduation ceremonies. And various Ontario school boards now have black-only mentoring and tutoring programs. But Guelph’s segregated yoga class is, to my knowledge, the only example of woke racial segregation being justified on the basis of “sacred” practices and student “safety.” The idea of justifying racial segregation in this way strikes me as extremely weird—at least insofar as such justifications are being offered by anyone other than white supremacists. All segregationists feel “unsafe” when in mixed racial company. That’s what makes them racist.
What’s weirder still is the fact that Guelph University, like pretty much any Canadian university you could name, makes a big deal about “Indigeneity and Decolonization.” But Debs created a space from which Indigenous people were literally barred from entry—no doubt the only such space on campus. Other people whom Debs barred from her “sacred” segregated yoga program were Asians, Hispanics, Arabs…literally everyone without her preferred skin colour.
Then there’s the equally weird subplot by which a self-described Ethiopoan Canadian is pronouncing upon the sacredness (and event entry requirements) of yoga, a practice that originated in India. Not so long ago, at least one Canadian university shut down a yoga program because it was deemed an act of cultural appropriation in regard to Indian culture. Now the woke dogma on this has apparently turned 180 degrees: Not only is Debs, a non-Indian, allowed to teach a yoga class and brand it as “sacred,” she’s also free to exclude Indians themselves—all with the university’s enthusiastic encouragement.
Things got weirder when I tweeted about Guelph’s race-controlled yoga class on November 2. I can get snarky sometimes on Twitter—but this tweet was rather straightforward: I simply noted, factually, that Guelph and Debs were “segregating yoga classes by skin colour” under the justification of “anti-racism.” And, as one might expect, most people reacted…well, in the way that you’d hope they’d react when informed that racial segregation now has a fashionable, administration-approved constituency at a publicly funded Canadian university. Which is to say, they weren’t impressed. And they said so.
Debs then got upset, claiming that her anti-segregationist critics must be “right-wing trolls,” and that the “white yoga industry” should enter the fray on her behalf. She also publicly demanded that the school do something to protect her—which is when the university put out its aforementioned statement defending racial segregation in the name of “safety.” Several faculty members also chimed in, including a queer-theory prof at the university named Adam Davies, who demanded that “reparations” be made to Debs. A local self-identified expert in “Somatic Health Equity” and “Embodied Social Justice” accused Debs’ detractors of “white supremacist violence” (by which she meant disagreement). A Guelph English prof named Mark Lipton said he was “disappointed and embarrassed you”—meaning me—“have a right to speak.” And T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary biologist and department chair at Guelph, emitted a number of Twitter fusillades in support of Debs’ segregated approach to yoga instruction.
The whole episode is a case study in horseshoe theory, which holds that extremists on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum tend to embrace many of the same (bad) anti-liberal ideas. Each are skeptical of democracy. Each are skeptical of due process and free speech. And each, it turns out, aren’t crazy about racial mixing.
These events also present an example of how the academic anti-racism industry sustains itself in the manner of a self-eating donut: (1) A ludicrous event is organized in the name of anti-racism. (2) People predictably offer criticism of said ludicrous event. (3) That criticism is then cited by “anti-racist educators” such as Debs as exemplifying precisely the sort of racism, white supremacy, opression, etc. that they must exorcise with their pedagogy. (4) This, in turn, yields more ludicrous anti-racism stunts, and the cycle begins afresh.
Or as a Guelph-area activist named Candice Lepage put it, criticism of Debs is “EXACTLY why Black people are asking for Black only spaces.” I.e., If you don’t like segregation, that just means we need more segregation.
But perhaps the weirdest response I saw was from one Shoshanah Jacobs, an Associate Professor in Guelph University’s Department of Integrative Biology. As Jacobs sees it, “no segregation occurred,” because, while, yes, this was a black-only event, “Black folks come from many different backgrounds.”
By this logic, a white-only Guelph University yoga class would be fine by Jacobs, so long as there was, say, an Irishman, an Italian, and maybe a few Slavs. All of these people are white, yes, but they come from different “backgrounds.”
I’d really like to see how that kind of event would go down with Jacobs and other members of the Guelph University community. Just a guess, but I doubt anyone wouldn’t find it particularly “sacred.”
This batshit crazy. The West has gone mad.
If I didn't know better I'd say this was a Titania McGrath post!
"Salem Debs self-identifies as “a Black Ethiopian anti-racism educator, an anti-oppression coach, a social justice advocate, a student in dismantling anti-Black racism, an accomplice in dismantling anti-Indigenous racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, and a believer in LGBTQ2S+ & disability rights through an intersectional lens.” Her anti-racism, she says, is “rooted in the understanding that we must acknowledge and identify the insidiousness of white supremacy before we can dismantle colonial belief systems.”"