Zara Khan
Last summer, something mysterious kept happening at any yoga studio I’d frequent. I’d love to say I mastered the handstand or scorpion or that I’d made my 6am start. But I couldn’t shift the sinking feeling that I was somehow out of place. Looking around, it finally dawned on me: it was because I was often the only PoC (person of colour) present – or in some cases, one of two.
Sure, the mainstream yoga community has long claimed that ‘yoga is for everyone’. So why then are women who look like me, for one, absent? One study seems to support my suspicions, finding that 85% of practitioners Stateside are white and university educated. And that was back in 2002. And yet nothing seems to have changed more than a decade on.