A hashtag led to hundreds of cancellations just as the company was readying to reopen. But some teachers wonder how closing down helps Denver’s yoga community make progress.
By Jennifer Brown | 29 June 2020
THE COLORADO SUN — Patrick Harrington is sitting on a rock high on a hilltop, using his bare feet to push his flip-flops around the sandy gravel, his head in his hands.
The owner of Kindness Yoga, and one of the most well-known yogis in Denver, is struggling to piece together the words to explain what happened — in the span of a week — to his once-stellar reputation and his 19-year-old business. He is stunned, though remorseful. He is eager to speak up, yet on edge for fear of saying anything that could make all of this any worse.
”My goal is to represent our attempts at being a diverse, inclusive place where people felt like they belonged,” he begins, slowly. “I may not say things perfectly … I’m practicing learning how to speak in a way that is more inclusive and caring of diversity.”
Harrington, a straight, white guy who expanded Kindness to nine studios and 160 employees across metro Denver, announced last week that he was closing them all after a handful of yoga teachers, including a Black woman and a transgender man, called out Kindness on social media for “performative activism” and “tokenization of Black and brown bodies.” The teachers’ public comments, following a Black Lives Matter post on Kindness’ Instagram page that they termed too little, too late, evoked a backlash that was fierce and immediate.
Within 48 hours, as the nightly protests over police violence unfolded around the Capitol in Denver, just three blocks from Kindness’ Capitol Hill studio, the yoga company received nearly 400 emails from students who were upset, including many wanting to cancel their memberships. A week later, the emails had reached 800 and counting. Harrington has yet to read all of them, but with each one he opened, the direction his already precarious business was heading grew ever more clear. […]
This is a lengthy article, but it’s an incredible tale of how even a super-sensitive, New Age, “woke business can be shut down by BLM activists. In this case, it was a coup by the business’ own black and LGBT employees. There was nothing the owner could do or say to stop it from happening.
This is a lengthy article, …
Written by a woman — she counts as a woman in the “workforce” — and this is an example of her “work° — millions of women in the “workforce” are just as useless.
My visceral disgust at the whole affair kept me from doing more from skimming the article — but I did read the tags at the bottom: “LOL”, holy shit — I would say the problem is more that this dude even considered saying or doing anything to placate these losers and freaks, the “black and LGBT employees” — who if they really were employees, are all now out of a job since, as I understand it, all the studios he owned closed — ?
Tja, dumm gelaufen.
Maybe Harrington will repent. What has boomer proselytized Hindu ‘yoga’ done for America in the past 80 years other than help turn us to today’s clown country? How can any straight white man believe the perverts & coloreds working for him won’t betray him?
If you thought this was bad (I obviously did), take a look at a more recent piece by this same woman:
The number of LGBTQ foster kids is on the rise, but does Colorado have enough accepting homes? — A handful of child placement agencies and a county child welfare program are standouts in seeking same-sex couples and LGBTQ-affirming foster homes
Skim the text (or read it if you have the time and stomach for that), and note the fotos.
If you’re starting to get the feeling that naturally empathetic, conformist, consensus-seeking women flooding into higher education, where in the US they now significantly outnumber men nationwide, and overwhelmingly major in soft subjects like the liberal arts, after which large numbers of them find jobs in education and the media, was a really bad idea, then you are not alone.