I want to say a little more about Alan Senauke's "Race and Buddhism" that I started to discuss yesterday. In exploring ways to make Buddhism more inviting to people of color, Senauke said,
It seems so hard to recognize the truth that Tibetan Buddhists teach: that every being was at one time my own mother. The root of racism is denial of this truth. It is about seeing people as other in a systemic way. It is such an entrenched habit we are not usually aware of.
That may be true, but in the U.S. Tibetan Buddhism doesn't seem to be attracting African Americans, either. As one disillusioned practitioner said, "When was the last time you saw a group of African-Americans at an empowerment?"
The point is that the disproportionate whiteness of some schools of Buddhism in the West may be as much a matter of self-selection as anything else. African Americans may be disinterested in Zen, for example, for reasons only tangentially connected to race, not because Zen centers are hotbeds of racist oppression. And as discussed in the working-class Buddhism post, Zen was never a broadly popular school in Asia, never mind in ethnic Asian communities in the U.S.
If anything, American zennies tend to be liberals who trip all over themselves trying to not be bigots, even when pervasive cluelessness causes them to retain some bigoted attitudes. I'll come back to this in a minute.
Senauke continues,
The answer to how [entering Buddhist practice] feels to anyone largely depends on two further inter-related questions. First, does one feel safe and seen in the community? Are the conditions of one's life acknowledged, welcomed, explored in the sangha?
These are issues not limited to racial minorities. All kinds of conditions can make us feel uneasy, defensive or invisible among others.
This is true of people of color in a white majority; it's true of gays in a straight majority; it's true of women in male-dominated cultures and professions;� it's true of people who have endured extreme trauma, from sexual abuse to war experiences . For all kinds of reasons, all kinds of people feel uneasy and invisible in groups.
Many of us keep chunks of ourselves partitioned off and hidden from others.� Those who are fractured want to be with people with whom they can be whole.
I've come to think the biggest failure of many Zen and other dharma centers is a failure to build community. A dharma center shouldn't just be a place where individuals go to meditate and receive teachings. In a community, people are there for each other, supporting each other's lives and practice. Community builds trust, shraddha, in others and in ourselves.
And this takes us back to the pervasive cluelessness. Community practice really can help the clueless perceive their cluelessness in a way that doesn't require anger and accusation. At the same time, we all need to learn that we can't know what someone else has experienced just by their appearance. Whiteness confers many social advantages in the U.S., but it does not provide absolute protection from all forms of abuse, trauma, and disadvantage.
So, the work of trust, acceptance, and respect has to go both ways.
Alan Senauke quotes African American scholar/practitioner bell hooks --
"... globally the resurgence of notions of ethnic purity, white supremacy, have led marginalized groups to cling to dualisms as a means of resistance....The willingness to surrender to attachment to duality is present in such thinking. It merely inverts the dualistic thinking that supports and maintains domination.
"Dualities serve their own interests. What's alarming to me is to see so many Americans returning to those simplistic choices. People of all persuasions are feeling that if they don't have dualism, they don't have anything to hold on to."
A commenter to the last post asked, "In what way is "identity" (racial, ethnic, sexual, whatever) anything other than ego -- anything other than a dualistic way of viewing ourselves and others?"
Of course. But here is what I know -- people who are deeply wounded, especially early in life, learn to identify with their wounds. And it can be a lifetime's struggle to let go of that. The most cruel thing you can do to someone going through that struggle is to invalidate what they feel. If you don't share the experience, just respect it.
At the same time, people who are deeply wounded also tend to grow very thick emotional armor. The path to liberation requires taking off that armor and letting go of the wound. For a very wounded person, that can be wrenching and terrifying and take a long time, and they have to do it themselves.
What can others do? The worst thing you can do to someone is deny their experiences and invalidate what they feel. If someone is angry after a lifetime of discrimination, they don't want to hear "you shouldn't feel that way," especially from someone who hasn't walked the same road.
However, encouraging people to feel angry and victimized isn't helping them, either. Respect it, but don't feed it. Inverse bigotry is still bigotry, and it's a poison.
A community can help create a place where that work of de-armoring can be done, but no community can create a place where all the pain and armoring drops off in a twinkle as soon as a wounded one walks through the door. And the most open, progressive, welcoming place in the world will still feel oppressive to someone who is living inside a wound.
Walt Whitman wrote (in "Song of the Rolling Earth"):
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
It really is that simple. But that can be a hard, hard thing to learn.
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