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

The argument

Wellbeing, and therefore the wellness as a whole, is not available to all people. This is in part because the wellness industry thrives on white supremacy, heterosexism, and racism. Systems of oppression within the industry including racism, classism, sexism, ableism, cissexism, and heterosexism perpetuate its lack of inclusivity. Such problems are made worse when spiritual teachers who "don't see race" are promoted, and cultural spiritual traditions are appropriated without adequate acknowledgement and study. Wellness opportunities are often exclusively priced and inaccessible to the lower classes (often also the ethnic minority groups) without provisions of monetary support for marginalised groups.

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.