We Must Speak Up

Denouncing White Supremacy

In today’s climate, it’s evident that we as Yoga International must speak up. As a company, we formally denounce white supremacy. We denounce it in our culture and on our platform. This extends to the teachers and partners that we work with.

In all transparency and humility, we know that white supremacy has affected our operations — it’s a pervasive system that has woven its way into almost all aspects of business and culture. We have unconscious biases — some now realized and some still hidden. These biases have likely manifested in our treatment of others, our business practices, and our selection of content.

We vow to continue to shine a light on these unconscious biases through study, self-examination, hard work, and transparency. So far, we have done the following to help us uncover the ways that we may have perpetuated white supremacy, and to address them head-on:

• We have shifted our organizational structure, a shift that was spearheaded by our recently appointed director of people and culture, from an improved recruiting and hiring strategy to weekly diversity and inclusion intensives and monthly diversity updates.
• Members of our executive leadership, people operations, and content production teams are involved in study groups and training around dismantling white supremacy in our organization and in the world.

We know this process warrants our daily commitment to our core values and our mission to share yoga with the world, and that commitment can’t exist if we continue to perpetuate the cycle of white supremacy in silence.

Additionally, we have a zero-tolerance policy on racism within our organization — and have our eyes wide open so that we don’t miss it and are able to root it out.

For us, equity and inclusivity are not taglines or trends; they are to be woven into the fabric of our brand and business function so that we may one day proudly proclaim ourselves to be an antiracist organization. Our first step toward this is to denounce any affiliation with white supremacy and all its iterations.

To all our teachers and partners who are educating themselves and sharing their antiracism efforts with others, we see you and we stand by you. We too are doing the work inside and out.