White Utopias. Amanda J. Lucia
example, Wanderlusts—appear to be even whiter than that, with upward of 90 percent of participants presenting as white (though demographic information is not published on these festivals). Bhakti and Shakti Fests, with their explicit focus on the Hindu practice of bhakti, appeared to be upward of 95 percent white. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all informants in this study are white.
National statistics reveal that the United States is still a majority-white nation, with 76.5 percent of the population identifying as white and 60.4 percent identifying as white (non-Hispanic/non-Latino).48 Thus, one could argue that the ethnic composition of Burning Man and LIB closely mirrors national averages. In contrast, the more yogic festivals (Wanderlust, Bhakti and Shakti Fests) exceed national statistics of white majority by 15 to 20 percent. These figures become more incongruous if one considers the population percentages of non-Hispanic whites; when compared to those statistics, these festivals range from 20 to 45 percent whiter than the national average. The figures become even more stark if one attends to geography a bit more closely. Burning Man and LIB are as white as Oregon (77 percent white [non-Hispanic]), and the more yogic festivals are whiter than Maine (93.7 percent white [non-Hispanic]).49 This is despite the fact that many of these transformational festivals either take place in or draw on populations from California, a state where non-Hispanic whites comprise only 38.8 percent of the total population.50 For example, nearly 500,000 Indian Americans live in California, 120,000 of them in Los Angeles, but a mere handful of Indian Americans attend Bhakti and Shakti Fests, held just 128 miles from downtown Los Angeles.
When I started to study these festivals, I was most interested to uncover the nuances in the translation processes of globalized yoga and, particularly, its relation to Hinduism. Upon entering the field, I was struck by the significant presence of Native American traditions, and as a result, I began to further explore the soteriological composition of the category of spirituality in these SBNR populations. Importantly, SBNR populations are less white than the transformational festival and yogic communities that this study engages. SBNR populations are still predominantly white (67 percent), but there are growing numbers of African Americans and Latinx Americans who identify as SBNR.51 Throughout this book, I use the term SBNR as a convenient shorthand, noting throughout that while transformational festival participants largely identify as SBNR, people of color who also identify as such are not represented in these fields.
It is important to mention here at the outset that the intention behind this book was not always centered on whiteness. In honesty, it was only after several years in the field that I focused on the fact that these communities were predominantly, and in some cases entirely, white. Whiteness became a critical theoretical and practical axis around which many of these ideas revolved. Somewhere in the midst of my research, I listened to the African American writer Rich Benjamin speak on NPR about all-white communities that he called Whitopias.52 He defined a Whitopia as a community that is “whiter than the nation, its respective region, and its state.” It also demonstrates considerable growth from white migrants and has “an ineffable social charisma, a pleasant look and feel.”53 Benjamin investigated white exurban communities that attract whites whose anxiety about the insecurities of modernity has sent them in search of strong communities. This overt white flight is usually understood to be the purview of the Right: white evangelicals, Republicans, political conservatives, and white supremacists.
However, my research into transformational festivals and the yogic communities therein demonstrates that these very same factors are at play among populations that are usually understood to be on the Left: SBNR populations, Democrats, political liberals, and those who would celebrate multiculturalism. Like Benjamin’s exurban Whitopias, transformational festivals are also whiter than the nation, the regions, and the states they take place in; demonstrate considerable growth among whites; and are fueled by anxieties about modern forms of precarity that draw participants in search of strong communities. I also agree with Benjamin’s conclusion that “Whitopia operates at the level of conscious and unconscious bias. It is possible for people to be in Whitopia not for racist reasons, though it has racist outcomes.”54
These communities are unlikely bedfellows indeed, and there are many in the SBNR, transformational festival, and yogic communities who would be appalled at any presumed similitude. But this is not an accusation; rather, it is a demographic fact. The solution is not to ignore or suppress this fact but to question the filtering mechanisms in place that create these nearly all-white spaces in the diverse complexity of California, the United States, and the world. Why would so-called conscious, spiritual, and transformational festivals that centralize Hindu devotionalism (Bhakti and Shakti Fests), Indic yoga (Wanderlust), and “Radical Inclusion” (Burning Man) be so white? Where is the “WHITES ONLY” sign hung, and why is it there?
The study of American spirituality and yoga has not yet addressed this pressing question. While there is a significant field of study on New Age religion in the United States, few scholarly inquiries address its ethnic homogeneity beyond a passing mention.55 Postural yoga is a booming field of academic inquiry, but, with a few notable exceptions, it has a similar blind spot with regard to ethnicity.56 Similarly, few scholarly works on transformational festivals focus on ethnicity.57 Among scholars of American religions, in many cases, it is an unacknowledged fact that practitioners of Mesmerism, Spiritualism, New Thought, meditation, and yoga were (and are) white.58
In contrast, in Native American studies there is a significant scholarly literature that has centralized the whiteness of the New Age movement and condemned practitioners as false and blasphemous “plastic shamans.”59 Their spirituality is “playing Indian,” and their motive is commercial profit, neither of which is deemed to be authentic to Native religions. Their very presence silences Native voices. As Michael Brown explains, “The inequity lies [instead] with appropriators’ social capital, which leaves them better positioned than their Indigenous counterparts to reap financial reward.”60 In these analyses, whites flood the spiritual market with their neo-Native pseudoreligion and make-believe shamanism, claiming authenticity to the point that one Onondaga leader argued, “Non-Indians have become so used to all this hype on the part of imposters and liars that when a real Indian spiritual leader tries to offer them useful advice, he is rejected. He isn’t Indian enough for all these non-Indian experts on Indian religion.”61 It is a dark irony that love can result in such antipathy; it must be a suffocating love indeed, one deeply intertwined with the fraught ideals of “racial fantasy.”62 For there is no question that the New Agers who immerse themselves in and even embody Native American religions love Native culture. These are whites who sympathize with the religions of racialized others and attempt to act in solidarity through imitation. But as Philip Jenkins explains, “The more white people sympathize with Indians and try to show solidarity with them, the more they do so through forms of imitation that are seen as insensitive profanation rather than sincere flattery.”63 While whites may see imitation as the most sincere form of flattery, many Indigenous activists reject their presumptions of authenticity.
While the discussions of spirituality and yoga have not yet become as vitriolic, there are threads that resemble patterns of what Eric Lott so aptly terms “love and theft” in his seminal study of blackface minstrelsy.64 The debates over cultural appropriation raging on the Internet show no signs of abating; they have also captured the attention of select scholars.65 Cultural property and intellectual rights have become an increasingly litigious affair. In the field of yoga, classes have been cancelled in protest of the neocolonialism of whites teaching yoga,66 websites are dedicated to the project of “decolonizing yoga,”67 yoga teachers have tried to patent postures and postural sequences,68 yoga is being revived in India as a form of Hindu nationalism,69 and whites dominate the public representations of yoga in the United States (and increasingly across the globe) to the exclusion and erasure of Indian voices.70
Historically, cultural encounter, whether by trade or warfare, often involves the exchange of cultural forms; many of these moments of cultural exchange occur outside of the context of whiteness. But the notion of cultural appropriation focuses attention on individual white actors and their representative claims of nonwhite cultural and religious forms. Cultural appropriation