Extraction forms the fundamental infrastructure of whiteness.
Cultural extraction is where the white colonizer will steal the cultural symbols of the colonized and turn these cultural symbols into profitable resources.
One such form of cultural extraction is reflected in the practices of the white colonizer designed to become the colonized, claiming the genetic make-up or symbolic resources of the colonized. In these instances, the white colonizer lays claim to the identity of the colonized.
You witness this in the various instances of white women laying claims to indigeneity, without any indigenous heritage or whakapapa that connects to indigeneity. The performance of indigeneity by whiteness is calibrated to communicate authenticity, and built to swindle the colonized.
This fraudulent performance of indigenous authenticity forms the basis of the new markets that are secured by whiteness to expand its colonial reach.
The white pretending-to-be-colonized can lay claims to the various markers of diversity and inclusion, building opportunities for profiteering for themselves, from twitter followers, to Facebook following, to invited talks, to book deals.
In the context of Hindutva, you witness this in the discursive infrastructures of the white yoginis and yogis who claim to be more Hindu than racialized Hindus from the Indian subcontinent.
Adorned with their tikas and bindis, with their saffron shawls, and performative om chants, these white yoginis and yogis thrive on the markets they create for themselves by rallying behind the hateful ideology of Hindutva.
Hindutva hate is a thriving market that promises virality and status to the white yogini.
The logic of Hindutva hate brings together an exponentially growing audience, opportunities for talks, book deals, and ever-new market opportunities for peddling hate.
The logic of Hindutva hate brings financialised opportunities on platforms for fundraising to peddle hate, taking the form of raising money to do so-called research. In concocting up new schemes for swindling Hindus, the white yoginis will even fabricate degrees and lay made-up claims to graduate student status.
Various schemes of defrauding racialized Hindus are concocted by the white saviors of Hinduism.
They will cook up, feed, and reproduce binaries that construct Muslims as the other, and feed the infrastructure of Islamophobia. This, after all, is a key tactic of the colonizer to maintain and reproduce her/his white supremacy.
The grotesqueness of whiteness is evident in the attacks then these white yoginis and yogis will launch on Hindus at the raced, gendered margins, struggling to turn to the ethos of Hinduism in resisting the casteist, gendered, violent structures of Hindutva that thrives on the distribution of hate.
The Hindutva-espousing white yoginis and yogis will be quick to deploy their hate toward Hindus at the raced margins, calling us brown sepoys, cheats, liars, and servants, communicatively inverting their fraudulent enterprise fuelled by hate.
They will unleash the Hindutva troll armies on our bodies because we challenge the hate politics of Hindutva. After having done so, they will launch campaigns directed at denying we are being subjected to their infrastructures of violence.
Our articulations of syncretic traditions of Hinduism will be mocked, and we will be accused of working for either the Chinese Communist Party or the Islamists. Our universities will be targeted with the apparatus of disinformation and hate.
The white yogini will offer us lectures on how to be real Hindus, orchestrating infrastructures of hate and violence that carry forward their white supremacist agenda.
In crafting and disseminating disinformation-based hate targeting racialized Hindus that speak against the hate deployed by Hindutva, the Hindutva-espousing yoginis and yogis will secure the market positions for themselves as the champions of Hinduism. Hindutva ideologues will turn to them as resources to offer legitimacy to the infrastructure of hate because the ideology of Hindutva mirrors the violence of white supremacy.
The white yogini will be held up by the Hindutva ideologues as the white savior of Hinduism from Hindus, according them the respectful connotation of "ji." The white supremacist Hindutva-espousing yogini counts on the notion that she will soon be turned into a celebrity in the Hindutva ecosystem of hate.
In sum, the whiteness of Hindutva-espousing yoginis and yogis thrives on a pattern of scavenging behavior that is reflective of the colonial impulse of whiteness. In this instance, the performance of authentic Hinduism is the precise trope through which whiteness perpetuates its violence, working hand-in-hand with the extremist violence propelled by Hindutva.