Zen and Dismantling Racial Constellations of Harm

In her book, Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out, Ruth King writes: 

It would be wholesome for all of humanity if white people, as a collective, were to see themselves as racial individuals and to recognize whiteness as a racial constellation with roots, history, power, and privilege that negatively impact other races, and then to organize themselves to dismantle racial constellations of harm.

I love Ruth King's book. In Boundless Way Zen, we are reading it in our recently formed Racial Justice Group. We also discuss race openly in Morning Star Zen Sangha. 

Not everyone is entirely comfortable with this direction. One sangha member suggested that raising questions about race in a Zen sangha is unwise. I understand his concern. This is not an easy topic. I do worry sometimes that we may unintentionally harm one another in this fraught territory, particularly as a mixed-race, mixed-ethnicity group. There is risk involved. 

But Zen offers us unique precepts, insights, and practices that can help us wake up with compassion to the construct of race and racial constellations of harm. 

Why Race?

Racism is a particularly salient form of oppression in American society resulting in imprisonment, poverty, disenfranchisement, inadequate healthcare, environmental injustice, limited educational opportunities, internment, hate crimes, and more. There are other intersectional forms of oppression that deserve our attention; antiracist activism excludes none. But our American “caste” is rooted in a relentless series of targeted policies that have disenfranchised and oppressed people of color while economically propping up white people. 

White families in Boston have a median net worth of $247,500 while Black families have just $8. To say the discrepancy is Black people’s fault is a racist idea. This inequity is the result of hundreds of years of racist policies, including slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, and disproportionately criminalizing Black and Brown people. These policies and many more have led to stark inequities that persist for people of color. 

Ibram Kendi* argues that racist ideas are born when people blame the racial group, not the racist policies, for ongoing inequities. Such racist tropes are numberless in our culture, contributing to often unconscious senses of superiority and inferiority.

Once we blame the victims in this way, we become silent and complicit in ongoing oppression. Many of these implicit biases need to be brought to light through close attention, or they remain hidden to us.

What Zen Brings

Part of Zen practice is awakening to our own delusions, taking responsibility for them, and seeing through them. We chant, "delusions are endless; I vow to end them." In Zen, we are encouraged to turn the light around, shine it within, and actually examine the delusions that generate suffering. 

What is our motive for this work? Our great vow is to liberate all beings from suffering. Awakening is central to that path, but it does not mean ignoring injustice. In fact, it helps illuminate the delusions that lead to injustice. 

Part of what we realize in introspection is that our thoughts and conceptions are not reality itself. This may seem obvious, but in day-to-day life, we are often deceived. My conception of a person is not the animated presence before me. 

This is a helpful insight when becoming aware of our racial views. It is important to recognize that our inherited conceptions of races are socially conditioned and biased. Race is actually a biologically meaningless category. Kendi calls race "a mirage." From the "absolute" perspective of what Zen folks call emptiness, races do not have intrinsic or fixed essences at all. Nothing does. 

However, Kendi also appropriately argues that these mirages of race have enormous power in our hearts, minds, and society. We get "lost in the absolute" when we try to whitewash problems through claims of “oneness.” It’s a form of denial that is privileged, uncompassionate, and dishonest. 

So from the Zen perspective, though we recognize concepts as concepts, we also recognize the "relative truth" that these socially constructed designations have consequences.

White people in particular may wish to "spiritually bypass" examining how impressions of races live in our hearts, minds, and society due to our history of creating policies that oppress people of color and economically benefit white people. One example is the way white Zen practitioners might try to use a focus on "awakening" as an excuse not to turn toward injustices. This may be because we feel shame. White people often react negatively to being asked to think about  privilege and racist policies. We quickly move into defensiveness, dismissiveness and deflection perhaps because deep down we know we are complicit in policies that have resulted in inequitable outcomes, we have perhaps benefited economically, and we have not remedied those inequities.

But white people also suffer due to racism. We suffer disconnection and a loss of kinship. We suffer segregation. And we suffer a loss of capacity to love as we become cold, disengaged, or even hateful. We are not separate from this suffering world after all. Awakening heightens rather than erases our awareness of our interconnectedness. 

Zen practice teaches us that we can meet our personal and collective suffering, and we can talk about it skillfully by honoring the precepts of not speaking falsely and not elevating ourselves at the expense of others. In this way we take personal responsibility.

We also practice listening compassionately. When pain arises in ourselves and in others, we need not turn away. This is possible because through practice, we recognize that we are not only our suffering. We are also the earth and sky. This "wider container" gives us space to acknowledge suffering without getting swept away in reactivity. The vast sky gives the thundercloud infinite space. Put differently, we are like boundless oceans containing tumultuous waves. We don’t deny the waves; we give them space to arise, roar, and fall. In meditation, we discover a boundless compassion that allows us to take the suffering of the world into our hearts. When we see suffering and its causes clearly, we are moved to take action to help alleviate that suffering.

As one white sangha member put it, "I have never thought about what it means to be white. I wonder why not?" White people have our own work to do in realizing that we are indeed racial beings "with roots, history, power, and privilege that negatively impact other races" but that could be used to help create a more just society.

Every time we practice together in Morning Star Zen Sangha, we vow to atone for our endless greed, aversion and ignorance. We vow to liberate all beings from the suffering these three poisons cause. Dismantling racial constellations of harm is one important way we can enact this vow. 

*Ibram Kendi has written two great books, How to be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning. I also recommend Coates’s The Case for Reparations, The 1619 Project, and Ruth King’s book Mindful of Race. If you want to watch a powerful, informative documentary, check out 13th on Netflix. It describes our modern day slavery in the criminalization of Black and Brown people. I also highly recommend Jeff Chang's essay, The In-Betweens: On Asian Americanness. For more on residential segregation by design, check out this short video. Finally, for a quick look at how many of us have been miseducated, check out this John Oliver clip.