Arun at Angry Asian Buddhism has published a lovely essay by Alan Senauke called "Race and Buddhism" that I encourage you to go and read. I just want to add a few observations.
The essay is written from the perspective of a Zen student, mostly about American Zen, which stubbornly remains overwhelmingly white. As I pointed out in a recent blog post on working-class Buddhism, Nichiren Buddhism in America does not seem to have that problem. I say "seem" because I have no recent data to go by, but it's my understanding that at least 20 percent of Soka Gakkai membership in the U.S. is African American.
Now, assuming this is true, why would African Americans feel more at home with Nichiren practice than with Zen, Theravada, or Tibetan Buddhism? And the first thing that pops into my head is that the meditative schools of Buddhism require an ability to arrange one's time to do the meditation and the retreats, and this probably is easier for upper-income professionals than for people working for an hourly wage.
It may be that money is a factor as well, since the meditative schools usually require, at minimum, a meditation hall to be rented or purchased and a teacher or lama in attendance. In some cases students are struggling to pay mortgages on entire monasteries. The�perpetual fundraising and the dues or fees we are often asked to fork over can be a real barrier.
However, Clark Strand wrote in "Born in the USA: Racial Diversity in Soka Gakkai International" that these are not the real reasons for the racial disparity. "Many of today's African American SGI members have careers that afford them the time and money to attend a Zen retreat, if they want to," he writes.
The difference, Strand writes, is twofold. One, SGI, which began as an educational reform movement in Japan, in particular puts a strong emphasis on self-empowerment and societal reform. "For it is the disenfranchised in a society who are most likely to seek to reform it, the disenfranchised as well who are most likely to understand that self-empowerment is the only effective plan."
Second, Strand says,
"For all the Asian-Buddhist flavor of lighting incense, sitting on zafus, or chanting in Tibetan or Japanese, these traditions are in reality dominated by a white culture that is virtually invisible to its own members, who as representatives of the dominant culture have limited awareness of race issues and little real incentive for addressing them. ...
"... When African Americans step into a Buddhist meditation center, that invisible culture is the first thing they see. They may be strong enough to participate in it without losing heart, or their racial identity, or both. Or they may be so strongly motivated to practice in that particular tradition that it just doesn't matter. In any event, they won't be kicked out for being black, because there are few outright bigots in the white Buddhist world. But the deeper racism, the passive racism committed to all the mannered nuances of its own culture--that is felt right away. No wonder most African Americans never make it through the door. There's no sign saying they can't come in. There doesn't have to be."
I do appreciate how the mannered nuances create discomfort. On the other hand, Strand is saying here that African Americans feel all those mannered nuances before they even set foot in the Zen center, which suggests to me there is something else going on beside the mannered nuances.
I'm not denying that white Zen students can be insensitive to the experiences of people of color. Once in my current Zen center, in a group discussion about anger, an African American woman described the anger she feels when dealing with racists. And lo, a white guy in the group actually spoke up and advised her how she was supposed to deal with this anger, like he had any idea what she had experienced. (And if you're reading this, fella, you know who you are.)
I was sorely tempted to jump out of my chair and smack him with a sutra book, but I am way too repressed. And I assume there are rules about sutra books that prohibit using them to smack people. However, at the first opportunity I let the woman know that the guy was being a jerk and deserved to be smacked, even if I lacked the courage to do it myself. I hope that helped; it felt a bit inadequate.
But it's also the case that Zen centers and monasteries are intimidating to just about everybody at first. I know I was scared to death of the Zen Mountain Monastery zendo the first few times I walked into it, back in the 1980s.� The monks were very stern about proper zendo etiquette. I was terrified I was going to do something wrong, like bow at the wrong time. It was not a cuddly, welcoming sort of place; you had to really want to be there.
So if the issue is that people of color are really tired of going places where they feel out of place and unwelcome, and they'd rather avoid it in their spiritual lives, that's very understandable. But if that's the case, I don't see that changing in Zen, anyway, anytime soon. And this is as much about the nature of Zen as the nature of clueless white people.
My current urban Zen center is about as warm and welcoming as Zen gets, and even then I occasionally notice people -- white ones, even -- who are clearly freaked out by the place. It takes some getting used to.
It's also the case that women were made to feel unwelcome in some of the early U.S. Zen centers, or at least this has been reported back to me. I can't say that I've experienced this myself, but over the years I've heard horror stories about sexism from my elder Zen student sisters. I think this is much less of an issue now, especially since a big percentage of American zen teachers are women these days.
Well, so far I've gone on and on and not actually said anything about Alan Senauke's essay. I think I will save that for the next post.
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