Yoga: do your thing my brownz

Razib Khan 路 June 9, 2021 路 9 comments

Sometimes I can’t help it, I’m going to do it. So here it goes, Yoga Teacher Jessamyn Stanley Believes White Supremacy Has Polluted Yoga – and It’s Time to Talk About It:

Jessamyn Stanley needs you to know what yoga is really about – and it’s not the poses.

In her new book Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, the yoga instructor and body activist shares reflective personal essays that touch upon everything from racism to the cultural appropriation of American yoga, from consumerism to cannabis.

…

The book explores the existence of white supremacy and cultural appropriation in American yoga. “I would venture to say that everything in our collective society is rooted in white supremacy. I am sure there are many people who would disagree with that, and honestly I don’t care because I believe that and I know it’s the case,” she says.

…
“The appropriation comes from practitioners who are not South Asian looking at South Asian teachers and saying, ‘I need to do exactly what they’re doing. I need to practice yoga exactly how they’re practicing it.’ Yoga as a concept exists in so many cultures. It’s literally the basis of so many different things: the idea of acceptance and the yolking together of the light and the dark. But these teachers are just saying, ‘Practice yoga.’ They’re not saying, ‘Pretend to be Indian.’ They’re not saying, ‘Steal someone else’s ethnic identity.’ They’re saying, ‘Practice the balancing of truth and light within yourself.’ “

Two words: Kali Yuga. This whole timeline is cursed. It’s absurd. It’s perverted.

I’m not Hindu, so I don’t “believe” in yoga in a spiritual sense, though I have seen its efficacy is a form of exercise firsthand.聽 But the way it is…yoked, to the most absurd and bizarre social justice movements today is just a wonder to behold.

White privilege, and how to get it

Razib Khan 路 June 7, 2021 路 19 comments

The figure above shows that Indian American women make $1.21 for every $1.00 that a white man makes. I knew this data, but the infographic was brought to my attention to illustrate that not all South Asians are privileged. Pakistani women make $0.84 and Bangladeshi women $0.69.

Here’s the “problem” – 84% of “South Asians” are Indian American.

The reason that Indian Americans do so well is pretty obvious: human capital. They’re educated, they’re entrepreneurial, etc. At least to me. What if you believed that all outcome differences between nonwhites are due to white supremacy?

What have you heard about this? How is it people who now accept The Narrative explain how brown-skinned Indian Americans do so well while brown-skinned Pakistanis don’t? What have you heard?

Stolen oppression

Razib Khan 路 June 5, 2021 路 47 comments

‘The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind’ – A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale’s Child Study Center spoke about ‘unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way’.

The psychiatrist in question is Aruna Khilanani. Her parents are doctors. She was educated in private schools. But, she talks about her experience with discrimination. You know, stuff like not being supported as much in her medical residency as a blonde peer.

We have a problem. Who has the standing to point out the hypocrisy and manipulation of these people? I’m frankly sick of it. Any brown person in the United States does experience some racism. But those of us with education and resources are not really underprivileged in any way. The vast majority of white Americans, whose life expectancy is decreasing, have it worse off than us. That’s just a fact.

Pivoting to the future

Razib Khan 路 June 1, 2021 路 53 comments

2020 and 2021 are clearly going to be lost years. Delhi Reopens a Crack Amid Gloomy Economic Forecast for India:

The Indian capital, which just weeks ago suffered the devastating force of the coronavirus, with tens of thousands of new infections daily and funeral pyres that burned day and night, is taking its first steps back toward normalcy.

Officials on Monday reopened manufacturing and construction activity, allowing workers in those industries to return to their jobs after six weeks of staying at home to avoid infection. The move came after a sharp drop in new infections, at least by the official numbers, and as hospital wards emptied and the strain on medicine and supplies has eased.

Life on the streets of Delhi is not expected to return to normal immediately. Schools and most businesses are still closed. The Delhi Metro system, which reopened after last year鈥檚 nationwide lockdown, has suspended service again.

But everyone has to focus on the future. So what’s going on? How’s Modi’s going to supercharge the economy? I’m not Indian, I’m American. A strong India is good for America. An economically vibrant India is good for humanity.

What the internet is today

Razib Khan 路 May 28, 2021 路 18 comments

The troll above lives in Frisco, TX. If I spent $1 I could look up their name and identity. I have 35,000 Twitter followers, and blogs and newsletters that get tens of thousands of pageviews a day. I could make this person “famous” very quickly!

I (probably) won’t do this, but the lesson I want to put out there: be careful who you troll with appropriate “opsec.” Most of the time you people are beneath notice, but I am becoming aware I will have to “make examples” at some point soon to dissuade some of the more nasty behavior that crops up on the internet.

You don’t hide behind anonymity as much as you think. I “own” what I do say on the internet. Many of you lack courage so behave in a nasty manner under “pseudos.” But the day is something when monsters will get hungry, and even anchovies will appetizing.

They forgot who they were?

Razib Khan 路 May 26, 2021 路 40 comments
Romani girl from Czechia

Right now I am working on a piece about Romani for my Substack. The first clear mention of Romani in Europe is in Crete in 1322. This is certainly postdated their arrival, but there is a good amount of circumstantial linguistic and genetic evidence that they left the Indian subcontinent not much earlier than 1000 AD.

Genetically on the whole the Romani are ~30% South Asian in ancestry (some groups and individuals are closer to 50%, others to 20%). Even besides this fact, just physical inspection of some of the Romani makes it clear what part of their origins are. Their language is similar enough to other Indo-Aryan languages that a Hungarian Reformed theologian who learned some Sinhalese at a seminary in the Netherlands in the 18th century was the first to identify that it was Indo-Aryan because of its similarity. Some lascars did the same in the United Kingdom when they overheard Romani talking to each other in Wales.

But this brings me to a curious fact: the Romani seem to have forgotten their Indian origins by the time they arrived in Europe, after a sojourn of centuries in the Middle East. The Romani are nomadic people who have an oral culture. There is a great deal they remember. The term for a Christian “cross” in Romani is trushul. But they forgot where they came from.

How much steppe is there in Pakistan?

Razib Khan 路 May 24, 2021 路 19 comments

In the annoying dick-swinging competition that are the comments-board, someone asserted Pakistanis have a lot of steppe even on the maternal side. Really?

We have Sintashta mtDNA and the discordance was shocking to me. But there are some groups in Pakistan with detectable Sintashta mtDNA. These samples from Hazara, Kho, Pashtun, Kashmiri,and Kalash. They identify 8.4% steppe mtDNA. Pakistan as a whole has a lot more “West Eurasian” mtDNA, but that’s obviously due to the legacy of the IVC. Anyway, Complete mitogenomes document substantial genetic contribution from the Eurasian Steppe into northern Pakistani Indo-Iranian speakers:

In summary, based on available archeological and high-resolution mitogenome data from northwestern Pakistan, especially from Iranian and Dardic populations, who are suggested to be the surviving traces of early Indo-Iranian groups, we identified the genetic contributions of different dispersals from west Eurasia into northern Pakistan during the Bronze Age onward. Importantly, we identified five haplogroups as the genetic legacy of IE speakers from the Eurasian Steppe, likely dispersed along with the migration of IE-speaking populations during the Bronze Age into northern Pakistan, thus implying that IE language expansion into South Asia was not simply mediated by cultural diffusion. This migration contributed 8.4% of the gene pool of northern Pakistani IE speakers, suggesting this demographic connection, which is a possible source of IE language diffusion, could be one part of the complex demographic history of the region. Our results also provide implications on the two main hypotheses of IE language origination, viz. Anatolia and Steppe hypotheses. Considering that Steppe components were observed in all Indo-Iranian groups in northern Pakistan in our study, as well as in other regions in South Asia [10], while lineages possibly representing the genetic legacy of Neolithic farmers, e.g., R2e, K1, were either absent or not found in all of the IE-speaking groups in northern Pakistan, our results lend more support to the Steppe hypothesis, at least from a matrilineal perspective. Furthermore, these IE speakers, as evidenced by the genetic legacy identified here, also moved southward and contributed genetically, though to a rather limited extent, to the Indian subcontinent, suggesting northern Pakistan as a corridor in the spread of IE languages during the Bronze Age dispersals into South Asia. Since our study is only based on mtDNA data, which only reflect maternal histories of populations, more investigations based on genome-wide data are also needed to intensively dissect the expansion of IE speakers into South Asia.

Brown Pundits