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. 

Nourishing Bodhisattva Practice

what to do with your goat in a drowning world

hear the helicopters come over the roof
water's up to my attic windows
and I'm stuck here with my goat
I can see my neighbor in the hole on his roof
he's got two dachsies and a tomcat
just across the rushing river is his sister
she's cradling her baby and a rooster
circling helicopters circling helicopters
will take me but not my goat
will lift me up from muck and flood
but they won't take my neighbor's dogs or cat
or his sister's baby's rooster
helicopters overhead nation to the rescue
take the people damn their friends
I'm not going without my goat
he's not going without his pets
baby won't leave without her rooster
lord oh lord why don't we have an ark
that's the helicopters leaving
that's the nation to the rescue
leaving us here in the dark
             - Andrei Codrescu

Buddhists are called by compassion to alleviate suffering in the world. While there are innumerable forms this practice can take, two that I have explored are social justice and environmentalism. But anyone who has dared to turn toward these issues can easily feel overwhelmed, like the tide is literally and figuratively rising around them, and, as a way of feeling better, slip back into denial.

For me, these issues sometimes seem utterly overwhelming and intractable, especially in the face of a White House that is so regressive. Though I may put solar panels on my house, if the Trump administration simultaneously denies the reality of global warming, pulls out of international climate agreements, and boosts coal and oil production, I can feel defeated. And as a teacher, though I may help a Latin American or Black student advance into a higher level English class, if more aggressive border patrols separate migrant families from one another and children die in record numbers while in detention, I begin to feel hopeless.

In the face of such overwhelming odds, it is tempting to turn away from these issues to avoid feeling so disheartened. We may thus swing like pendulums from feeling motivated and taking actions to feeling overwhelmed and disengaging. In moments of overwhelm, we may tell ourselves, "it's all just too much. There's actually nothing we can do to prevent institutional racism and the destruction of our planet. It's inevitable." We may even pretend that our "Buddha-nature" liberates us from caring. But this is a misunderstanding of our Buddha-nature.

As I have described, if our insight into emptiness is genuine, our compassion naturally increases. We are all interwoven. We are all part of the same systems. We breathe the same air. In awakening to the inherent interconnectedness and beauty of the world, we can't help but be moved when we see what we love being harmed. Though sometimes it offers temporary relief from this world on fire, escapism is ultimately no refuge from what actually is. If our practice is authentic, withdrawal will, in time, give way to a more honest sense of co-responsibility every time we hear about the disproportionate imprisonment and poverty you of people of color, about historic storms flooding our cities, or about the eventual potential destruction of civilization due to global warming. This sense of co-responsibility is not a flaw in practice. It is our compassion urging us to save all beings.

But how can Buddhists stay engaged with social and environmental causes in a sustainable and effective way given how intractable the issues appear? I decided to write this post for myself as encouragement in the face of tough odds. I hope that some of my advice to myself will be of some use to you.

First, for me, Facebook is not nearly enough to nourish or carry out activism. Social media stirs us into a frenzy with its extreme headlines, but the most common outcome is that I react to a few posts, maybe write one myself, and then slip back into feeling overwhelmed.

In terms of inspiring effective and persistent activism, we might begin by spending more time appreciating what we actually love. We are, for example, more inspired to protect nature when we remind ourselves of how much we cherish being in it. I'm lucky. My father took me on a tour of many of our nation's parks when I was young and brought us mountain climbing every year. I vividly recall him standing on top of mountains looking over valleys of fall foliage with tears in his eyes. My love of nature was implanted early. But in our high-tech, busy society, it is easy to lose touch with nature and our love of its beauty. We need to nourish this love. Take walks in a park among the trees. Sit on a bench and listen to the birds sing and the wind in the leaves. Watch chipmunks scurry through the ivy and chirp at one another. Listen to children play in a green field. Remember that this is their world too. By being attentive in a meditative way in the real world, by "practicing" being awake to what surrounds us, we find our inspiration to save all beings. And we can cultivate this appreciative attention on the cushion practicing zazen. There’s nothing that sustains me more than this.

Another way to nourish ourselves is to join with others doing the same work. In a culture where things may be going in a direction with which we do not agree, we can feel like whatever we do is, as one friend put it, "a squirt gun in an inferno." And we can feel quite alone, without a clue what to do. But when we join with others, we get ideas and energy from one another. Each of us can carry part of the load. This gives us hope. Thousands of buckets of water just might make a difference.

Morning Star Zen Sangha, my practice group, is initiating "Bodhisattva Practice Group” to choose a few local actions to do together. It is easier to live according to our vow to save all beings when we are supported by others with similar values. There are so many organizations and people doing excellent work. We can carry out local projects with them like challenging school boards to address the achievement gap, picking up trash off the beach, or gathering signatures for more renewable energy. Perhaps most inspiringly, when we join with others, our efforts add up. Many drops become a wave.

If our sanghas align in practice but less in activism, joining other organizations can help. Groups that advocate politically offers us a personal hope that we can sway public policies in an altruistic direction. Eli Broad offers democratic engagement as the most effective and empowering means of joining with others to transform a society. He writes in the New York Times, "When a society helps people through its shared democratic institutions, it does so on behalf of all, and in a context of equality.  Those institutions, representing those free and equal citizens, are making a collective choice of whom to help and how.  Those who receive help are not only objects of the transaction, but also subjects of it -- citizens with agency.  When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship of inequality:  the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient." While democratic institutions may not always deliver on our hopes, actively participating on the local, state, and national level offers the real opportunity for our society to live up to our ideals. And when we do so with coalitions, our voices multiply and reverberate.

Another thing I have been reflecting on is how our mindfulness can help us attend to issues one moment at a time. For example, we might notice the way we casually buy, use, and "recycle" plastic. But most plastic that we drop in the recycle bin is not actually recycled, and huge amounts of it end up in the oceans, dissolving and entering our food chain. (Turns out things actually are interconnected!) When we see how much we waste and the harm it causes, we can attentively curb our waste. These commitments, when shared among friends, begin to feel meaningful, like maybe we can turn the tide.

Finally, I need to remind myself to notice successes, not just failures. Even though there are many people who may buy styrofoam cups, if I don't buy one, there is one less cup for a whale to swallow. As a child, my daughter used to take the rings that held six-packs of cans together and cut them so they would not strangle sea turtles and birds. We can all become children again, taking great care of what we naturally love and feeling good about the small things we are doing. After all, each being we save is a universe unto itself!

So spend time appreciating what you love, join with others to take action, and celebrate the successes along the way. Most fundamentally, we need each other if we hope to save all beings. If we are left alone on the roof of a house and the flood waters rise, we will not be able to save ourselves, never mind those we love. But if we can build bridges to one another, we can save all beings, one being at a time.