While you may have thought that the proliferation of people wearing yoga pants in public was bad enough, one professor is claiming that there's an even worse yoga-related atrocity: white practitioners of the Eastern spiritual and physical discipline are contributing to a “system of power, privilege, and oppression."

Fox News reports that Shreena Gandhi, a religious studies professor at Michigan State, recently co-authored, with Lillie Wolff, an article titled “Yoga and the Roots of Cultural Appropriation,” which declares that Americans who practice yoga are feeding white supremacy and the “yoga industrial complex.”

"White Americans should learn yoga’s history, acknowledge the cultural appropriation they engage in and possibly reduce the cost of yoga classes for poor people, a group that often includes people of color and “recent immigrants, such as Indian women to whom this practice rightfully belongs,” Gandhi wrote.

Wolff describes herself as an “anti-racist white Jewish organizer, facilitator, and healer” who has called for “decolonizing” yoga.

"The explosion of yoga studios, yoga video, apps, yoga pants, and other yoga swag over the last two decades is evidence” of the “(mis)appropriation of yoga” that “is part of systemic racism” built on “the labor of black people and people of the global south.

“We would argue one of the goals of white supremacy is to buffer white people from the pain that comes from the process of exchanging cultural grounding for the unearned power and privilege of whiteness,” they continued. “[T]his modern-day trend of cultural appropriation of yoga is a continuation of white supremacy and colonialism, maintaining the pattern of white people consuming the stuff of culture that is convenient and portable, while ignoring the well-being and liberation of Indian people.”

Gandhi said few white people “make the connection between their attraction to yoga and the cultural loss their ancestors and relatives experienced when they bought into white dominant culture in order to access resources."

It is possible, however, for white people to atone for their sin, according to Gandhi. “Given a deeper analysis of yoga, white yoga practitioners and teachers can engage in yoga in a decolonizing way that reduces harm and seeks greater cultural accountability.

“Especially during this time when the underbelly of capitalism — white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and xenophobia – is being exposed, it is imperative that everyone, especially those who have access to spiritual practices like yoga, ask difficult questions of ourselves and one another. We must ask, in what ways are we complicit in a system that harms people of color, queer and trans people, poor people, people with disabilities, and immigrants?”

That should really give cisheteropatriarchal yoga practitioners a lot to mull over the next time they meditate.