The Left Makes You Crazy

This article got a well-deserved beating in the light-cultural press this week.

For those of more sober interests, I'll summarize:  Writer Jen Caron was at her yoga class when a "young, fairly heavy black woman" joined, taking a place right behind Caron. The newcomer was immediately overwhelmed by the experience, and stopped participating. She spent the class " crouched down on her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable," as Caron reports it.

Caron had many occasions to face the woman directly. " Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body."

I realized with horror that despite the all-inclusivity preached by the studio, despite the purported blindness to socioeconomic status, despite the sizeable population of regular Asian students, black students were few and far between.

Caron wondered if she shouldn't, you know, say something to make the woman feel more comfortable, but opted instead to go home, where she "promptly broke down crying."

The following is notable:

 Knowing fully well that one hour of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the deserving target of a racially charged anger is nothing, is largely my own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket, is the tip of the iceberg in American race relations, I was shaken by it all the same.

 Then:

The question is, of course, so much bigger than yoga—it’s a question of enormous systemic failure. But just the same, I want to know—how can we practice yoga in good conscience, when mere mindfulness is not enough? How do we create a space that is accessible not just to everybody, but to every body?

That's where leftism puts you. You talk yourself into trauma. You recognize your trauma is meaningless. You blame an abstract system. You congratulate yourself for being unsatisfied with the system. You are paralyzed and you do it to yourself.

The article is silly. Jen Caron is silly. The presence of a black woman immediately shocks her into racial awareness. What's the difference between a "racist" seeing a black woman and assuming that she's there to go through the students' purses and a SWPL thinking she's victimized by all the skinny white bodies? The left doesn't want you to stop stereotyping other groups; they just want you to stereotype them the left's way.

Most criticism of the article has been relatively sensible. "What's wrong with this woman?," is the gist. Flavorwire's Michelle Dean (who we last saw becoming exhausted at magazine cover controversies) is more damning:

But at every yoga class I’ve ever attended — and I go to few these days — I have noticed a few Jen Carons eyeing the circumference of others’ thighs like it’s their job. Women are trained from birth to judge and scrutinize each others’ bodies in a particular way; there is no reason to believe that gets left at the door because of light-Buddhist blather about suffering and impermanence and a few “no judgment” posters on the wall.

Caron comes off as a foolish narcissist, but not as a sizist--and definitely nothing like how Dean has characterized her here. But, of course, it's not Caron's fault--she was "trained from birth" to eyeball other women's bodies.

There’s no reason to believe a lifetime of subtle training to characterize black people as “others” full of “hostility” will be left at the door, either, no matter how many meditation classes one takes. Racism just has a better foothold in the culture than the sort of light New-Agey-qua-Buddhist philosophy that is unevenly applied in yoga classes.

Yes, you read correctly:  Caron's hysterical response to the racism she believes is inherent in the yoga system is the result of Caron's racism. Boy, you just can't win for losing, huh?

It hasn't surfaced enough here, but one of my pet peeves these days is that the only criticism we are allowed to make has to be from the left. Caron makes an ass of herself by climbing on the cross for her white guilt. Dean thinks that she didn't use enough nails.

But the real issue in the original piece is not that Caron interpreted her situation in a judgmental manner or that she gave herself a nervous breakdown contemplating the intersectionality of it or even that she felt it was necessary to tell the world about her experience. It's that she did nothing.

Now, she had no obligation to do anything. But she seems to have felt so strongly about it that it's pathetic she simply "thought about what the instructor could or should have done to help her."

That's the left, folks:  If you see someone suffering, you should complain because someone else--preferably an authority--didn't help them.

Utopia's right around the corner!