Nikhil Umesh is a senior environmental health science major from Greensboro.

“Where were you on 9/11?” The question is embedded in the national consciousness.

But more importantly, as I found out when I came to the United States as a 13-year-old, the question served as the moral justification that allowed classmates to joke about how I might single-handedly blow up our middle school. Terrorist. The word was tossed around with such ease.

I live in an America where my brown body is a stain, a mark of “other.”

During my time at UNC, I have noticed that yoga is a popular pastime among white Chapel Hill residents and students. Yoga is historically and presently a spiritual and meditative practice, whose origins lay in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Yet the Western variant of this centuries-old religious tradition has been whitewashed into physical mastery of various contortions for their own sake.

The West has ravenously exotified, fetishized and butchered yoga. Like a pig ready to be picked, it has been hacked apart into a $27 billion industry. Aside from $100 Lululemon yoga pants, attempts have even been made to patent yoga positions and postures.