Why is Tantra so white?

Given that Tantra is a non-white tradition from the subcontinent, why are most Tantra teachers and participants in the West overwhelmingly white and privileged? This isn’t a comfortable conversation, but it’s a necessary one.

The problem of assimilation

Tantra has never been allowed to be what it traditionally is—part of a web of meaning, part of a way of understanding the world. A way, like science, that offers us a map for understanding the world and practices and techniques for living in the world according to its understanding.

Tantra isn’t a self-development tool and it isn’t a way to make you an amazing lover. Tantra isn’t a way to fuck well. I mean, it adds a beautiful repertoire to love making, but that’s not what Tantra is. The sexual techniques within Tantra are a tiny, tiny bit of the tantric teachings.

As with Buddhism, as increasingly with shamanic practices, as with Tantra—it is assimilated within our individualistic Western point of view and it is treated as a self-development tool. You do Tantra to develop yourself, to make yourself a better and more effective individual.

And who is drawn to self-development? Well, middle class white people with money who want to make themselves more effective and who have the time to do so. So the whole self-development community is white and privileged. Tantra is seen as part of a toolkit of self-development, so the people that do Tantra are white and privileged overall because they’re the ones that can access it.

A premium product

And that’s deeply sad because Tantra is a really powerful healing modality and it offers us a path to experiencing the world differently. That exhaustion of having to figure it all out by yourself, of being alone.

Tantra can offer us a path to feeling held in Love, part of and separate from everything else. And at this time that is so needed.

Tantra can offer us a way to heal trauma. Tantra can offer us a map of reality that could give us an alternative to this individualistic capitalist way of being and relating to each other.

And instead it’s a premium product where you can charge lots and lots of money and so only privileged people can come to it. That makes me deeply sad.

Gratitude and responsibility

I think there is a difference between trying to use language that speaks to this culture, this place and this time, rather than appropriating a language of a different culture and tradition—and failing to recognize the shoulders upon which we stand and where these traditions come from.

And they come from peoples that we have decimated, who have managed somehow despite colonialism to hold on to a mystic understanding of the world and practices that can really support us to live and to heal. And for that I’m tremendously grateful.