The wellness industry is not accessible to all people because it thrives on oppression

The argument

The argument here is that wellbeing, and therefore wellness as a whole, is not equally available to everyone, and that this is not an accident of how the industry happens to have developed. On this account the industry thrives on white supremacy, heterosexism and racism — its lack of inclusivity is sustained by the systems of oppression running through it, which proponents identify as racism, classism, sexism, ableism, cissexism and heterosexism together. Exclusion is therefore not a gap in an otherwise sound enterprise but something the enterprise reproduces. Two practices are offered as making the problem worse. The first is the promotion of spiritual teachers who say they do not see race. Claiming not to see race does not remove its effects; it removes the vocabulary for naming them, so the exclusions continue while the means of raising them is withdrawn. The second is appropriation. Cultural spiritual traditions are taken up and sold within the industry without adequate acknowledgement of where they came from and without the study that would be required to understand them — traditions drawn from communities that are themselves largely absent from the spaces where those traditions are now marketed. The most direct exclusion is financial. Wellness opportunities are exclusively priced, which places them out of reach of the lower classes, and those classes often include the same ethnic minority groups the industry's stated values would suggest it wants to serve. There is generally no provision of monetary support for marginalised groups to close that gap, so pricing functions as a filter determining who can take part at all. Because the wellness industry is inaccessible in this way and thrives on the oppression that keeps it so, the argument concludes, the wellness industry is racist.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics of this position argue that the inaccessibility it describes is largely a matter of cost and class rather than racism as such. Premium yoga studios, retreats and supplements are expensive and therefore out of reach for lower-income people of every background, which is a critique of a luxury market's pricing, not evidence that the industry is organised around racial hierarchy. Conflating 'priced beyond many people's reach' with 'thrives on white supremacy' packs a strong causal claim into an observation about affordability. They add that the appropriation charge is contested: practices like yoga and meditation have spread globally and are often taught, adapted and sold by people from the cultures of origin as well as by outsiders, so cultural exchange and commercialisation are not the same as racism. On this view the wellness industry has real problems of exclusivity and commercialisation, but calling the industry 'racist' as such overstates and mislabels what is mostly a story about price, marketing and a high-end consumer market.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics argue that a wellness market being expensive and exclusive reflects its pricing and class dynamics, not that it 'thrives on white supremacy'; the strong causal claim does not follow from the observation of inaccessibility. [Rejecting P3] High prices exclude low-income people of every ethnicity, so cost-based inaccessibility is a class critique; treating it as proof of racism assumes rather than demonstrates the racial mechanism.