{"id":5714,"date":"2016-03-31T20:59:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T02:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/americanbuddhist\/?p=5714"},"modified":"2016-04-03T15:44:31","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T21:44:31","slug":"mutuality-at-the-limits-of-race-a-buddhist-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/americanbuddhist\/2016\/03\/mutuality-at-the-limits-of-race-a-buddhist-perspective.html","title":{"rendered":"Mutuality at the Limits of Race – A Buddhist Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A guest post by\u00a0Doshin Nathan Woods<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cA Black Man is a person who must ride \u2018Jim Crow\u2019 in Georgia\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013W.E.B Du Bois<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I walked to the Zendo the helicopters droned distantly overhead.\u00a0 The muffled announcement reverberating through the neighborhood: \u201cWhite or Hispanic male\u2026.wearing a white t-shirt\u2026..\u201d\u00a0 Indistinct, my attention turned to the matter at hand, where, upon stepping into the Zendo, I was about my business:\u00a0 \u201cHi, excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but the Zendo is closed right now, would you mind sitting\u2026.\u201d The man looked up from arranging his cushion:\u00a0 \u201cI can\u2019t meditate?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cYes,\u201d I replied, you can, but it would be best if you came back this evening to sit on the schedule, or if we went to another building\u2026\u201d\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re kicking me out\u2014would you kick me out if I was a white woman?\u00a0 This\u2026you\u2026you\u2019re racist\u2026\u201d\u00a0 \u201cNo, listen, that\u2019s not the issue.\u00a0 We have been locking the Zendo in the afternoons because\u2026\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIts because I\u2019m Black!\u201d\u00a0 Shocked that things escalated so rapidly, I replied, \u201cNo, no\u2026look I\u2019m Black too\u2026\u201d\u00a0 \u201cYour black?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cYes, look, we can go sit in the auxiliary hall\u2026\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWell, you don\u2019t look Black\u2026no one would ever know.\u201d Anger and heated argument gives way to discussion and a tenuous seed of spiritual friendship. Just another day in an urban American Buddhist<\/a> temple.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet several months after this conversation took place \u2014this scene of cultural misrecognition\u2013I continue to reflect on the interaction.\u00a0 Once again the topic of race is back in the national spotlight, although for many of us it never left.\u00a0 For Buddhists in the U.S. it has sparked anew a continued conversation, and with the rest of U.S. society many Buddhists have joined the national conversation, moving from advocating diversity to a demand for racial justice.\u00a0 Both concern a demand for inclusion: folding diversity into our communities, and encouraging the Buddhists in the U.S. to participate in a searching examination of racism.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

My journey to the Buddhadharma has been intimately tied up with race in the United States.\u00a0 It was the pain of growing up what some would call multi-racial\u2014and hence ambiguously brown\u2014that led me to my first meditation session, and it was the promise of release and fellowship that brought me back over and over again.\u00a0 Yet while the topic of racial diversity and inclusion is currently an urgent topic in Buddhist circles, I can\u2019t help but pause to ask, what are we including?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In another recent conversation, this time regarding the importance of myth in our contemporary spirituality, I took note of a curious and insightful remark: \u201cwe live in a culture devoid of myth.\u201d\u00a0 I was immediately struck by this insight\u2014how compelling, and yet how remarkably untrue.\u00a0 As Americans our greatest, most prevalent civic and secular myth is the \u2018myth of race\u2019<\/a>\u2014the notion that there are durable human races, that racial differences are biological, or somehow natural, and that these biological differences relate to individual and group propensities in important ways.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The notion of a myth may be defined equally as an important didactic story as well a widely held but false ideal or belief, covering both the mythical, or magical elements in our shared cultural life, as well as, in our secular way, dispelling the mythic through appeal to fact. Here the notion of race, and its appeal in the U.S. fits both definitions of the mythical: it is an instructive falsehood, untrue as a body of biological fact but definitively true for what it makes possible.\u00a0 The differences we acknowledge as indicative of race\u2014differences in body type, in hair texture, facial feature or skin color\u2014hold social and historical meaning, but are devoid of biological reality.\u00a0 Rather, as Alan Goodman notes<\/a>, race is \u201cnot based on biology, but rather\u2026on ideas we ascribe to biology.\u201d It is the great myth that frames our lessons about cultural recognition, belonging, and equality.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lessons of this myth run deep.\u00a0 Although human attributes such as language, religion, and class were durable distinctions for ancient peoples, it was only in the 16th <\/sup>C. that these features were increasingly organized according to physical characteristics, or race.\u00a0 The immediate outcome of this re-organization was the creation of brutal systems of colonization, slavery and genocide, and remains with us today in durable systems of racism, racial inequality, class oppression, gendered hostilities, social privileges, and hard won racial identities. In the U.S. we are awash in the great myth of race, its subtle rituals, overt ceremonies, and cultural cognates, where we have constructed over time a grand racial mythology.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As many recent commentators<\/a> have noted, communities of\u00a0 \u2018Western Buddhism\u2019 remain unexceptional in this regard.<\/strong>\u00a0 Indeed, one could argue that the very notion of \u2018Western\u2019 or \u2018American\u2019 Buddhism is complicit in this mythology, as shaped by the search to distinguish itself from \u2018Asian Buddhism,\u2019<\/a> and hence from the so called \u2018ethnic\u2019 Buddhist traditions in the U.S., and the influence of Asian national Buddhist traditions<\/a> more generally. Sadly, as many have pointed out, this effort is often predicated upon the exclusion of Immigrant and Asian American Buddhist communities<\/a>, and discrimination against People of Color<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

We find this myth in the grand stories we tell about Buddhism. As a cultural project I have always been suspicious of the notion of \u2018American Buddhism,\u2019 or its more sophisticated cousin, \u2018Western Buddhism.\u2019 Less a neutral term of historical geography, the concept of \u2018the West\u2019 connotes, at best, a Western European cultural project within Europe, and at worst a geo-political project, intimately tied to the Euro-American Colonial projects. By contrast, the concept of American Buddhism, while often used to denote Buddhism in the United States, or North America, has taken on a type of searching, nationalist waiting for the Buddhism to come.\u00a0\u00a0 When will American Buddhism arrive?\u00a0 How will it be recognized? How must we translate American Buddhism to American Audiences?\u00a0 Who is an American Buddhist?<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Efforts to answer these questions often serve as implicit vehicles for American exceptionalism. In this search the promise of American Buddhism\u2014once it finally arrives\u2014rests not only in its difference from Asian cultural traditions, but also in its redemption of the Buddhist tradition\u2019s problematic faults as expressed in Asian cultural settings.\u00a0 Witness Gary Snyder\u2019s now classic articulation<\/a>: \u201cThe mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East\u2026individual insight into basic self\/void.\u201d David Loy interprets<\/a> Snyder\u2019s sentiment to mean, \u201cthe highest ideal of Western tradition has been to restructure our societies so that they are socially just.\u201d\u00a0 This contrast in effect erases social history, mischaracterizing the diversity of Asian cultures while obscuring the coercive dimensions of Euro-American egalitarianism.\u00a0 While it is true that the societies of \u2018the West\u2019\u2014by which we mean Europe and the United States\u2014have enshrined liberty and equality as political ideals, they largely did so on the basis of exploitation, stratification and colonialism.\u00a0 The contradictory political and spiritual edifice of the \u2018the West\u2019 was in fact built upon the \u2018myth of race,\u2019 at one and the same time supportive of our political ideals of equality, and deeply enmeshed in the construction of a system of racial stratification.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In many ways I feel these are the wrong questions.\u00a0 American Buddhism already exists in the efforts to articulate a shared mutuality amongst practitioners, traditions and cultures.\u00a0 In my view Buddhism is best seen less as ethno-national tradition than, as Robert Thurman suggests<\/a>, a type of intercultural educational movement with a religious dimension.
\n\"jina<\/p>\n

In less dramatic ways we find the myth appropriately honored in a vast array of social rituals and ceremonies: in our rituals of schooling, consumption and labor, our rituals of recognition, and ceremonies of distinction.\u00a0 For Buddhists in the U.S., racial concepts remain intimately woven in to the intimate geography of \u2018Western Buddhism.\u2018\u00a0\u00a0 A sample from my everyday life turns up several anecdotal examples.\u00a0 After my ordination I received a message from a friend in Kyoto\u2014\u201cYou look more Japanese every day!\u201d Another day a friend complains, \u201c I just can\u2019t get into American Zen\u2014all these white people dressed up playing Japanese\u2014its all very Orientalist to me.\u201d\u00a0 And, by contrast, although from a similar perspective: \u201cI feel really uncomfortable with traditional Zen\u2014with the forms\u2014I mean, I\u2019m not Japanese.\u00a0 I\u2019m American\u2014let\u2019s be Americans\u2014chant in English, get rid of the robes and the bowing etc.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

On a different day, while giving meditation instruction to a distinguished older gentleman from Tijuana, he asked, \u201cAre you Chinese? I like Chinese meditation the best.\u201d I include ethnicity as a ritual cognate of race where, although now used to denote group membership or identity, it did not take on this meaning until the 1950s, but concerned rather the physical characteristics of national origin or cultural ancestry.\u00a0 In the early debates over immigrants from China, and later Eastern and Southern Europe, \u2018ethnic\u2019 referred to nonwhite, colonized or indigenous peoples, as well as working class whites, and Jews.\u00a0 After WWII, and the effort to repudiate scientific racism in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the notion of ethnicity was reformed to replace race.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

From this perspective the great question of the moment\u2014of how race matters\u2014is both an urgent question, and a distraction.\u00a0 Urgent because it stabs at the heart of spiritual friendship (kalyana-mittata<\/a>), the very basis of this movement, and a distraction from the questions of power and inequality that the notion of race mystifies, despite our best, most critical intentions. Current sentiments track closely with the limits of race in our national conversation: an appeal to race neutrality\u2014or color blindness\u2014and urgent demand to pay attention to how <\/em>race matters\u2014differentially and disproportionately impacting some populations at the expense of others<\/a>\u2013and thus the proliferation of strategies of racial awareness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what are we talking about when we talk about race or racism?\u00a0 For many, the two are now linked in a formula that combines cultural and ethnic difference with power.\u00a0 We see this in the current conceptual formulations of antiracism, and the pitched preoccupation with \u2018Whiteness\u2019 or \u2018White privilege,\u2019 where racism refers<\/a> to a form of oppression in which one racial group dominates another. \u2018Whiteness\u2019 at once consecrates the notion of race and obscures the contradictory historical exercise of racism responsible for the consolidation of durable racial groups\u2013the intersecting legacy of the American slave state<\/a>, and the expansion of the settler-colonial state<\/a> administered in racial terms. The legacy of each was subsequently combined in the importation of \u2018ethnic\u2019 workers in the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> century, and their subsequent racialization<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here I adopt Fields and Fields<\/a> suggestion that we see racism not as an effect of race\u2014a move that in effect naturalizes the non-existent\u2014but rather to view race itself as a product of the application of racism.\u00a0 Racism, on this account, is usefully defined as the \u201ctheory and practice of applying a social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry.\u201d\u00a0 In this sense racism is primarily a practice, both \u201can action and a rational for action,\u201d transforming racism\u2014something that is done\u2014to \u2018race,\u2019 something that a person is by dint of an imposed criteria.\u00a0 Nothing exemplifies this \u2018race craft\u2019 more potently than the deceptive history of slavery in the U.S., where we encounter at once a history of forced labor, and thus class, cultural extermination, and domination.\u00a0 As an example we might consider a popular suggestion that Africans in the United States were enslaved\u2014dominated\u2013because of their race, rather than for the labor that they were forced to provide<\/a>, \u201cas though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, and tobacco\u201d (117). The issue is not race per se<\/em>, but racism, the exercise of which is made possible by capitalizing on and extending existent conditions of inequality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Racism is the rejection of our natural given equality through the obliteration of human distinctiveness.\u00a0 From this angle the act of inclusion means nothing if it does not include the shadows of race.\u00a0 Not race, but rather domination, imprisonment, historical trauma and its intergenerational legacy, stigmatization, revilement, and the struggle against spiritual starvation.\u00a0 Not simply what we now call our \u2018racial identities\u2019\u2014hard won, to be sure\u2014but the political act of identification through the ritualized myth of race.\u00a0 While racial inclusion remains an important topic, the pressing question for Buddhist communities in this context is how to participate in the transformation of this myth of race, and the conditions of inequality that continue to make it relevant. Inclusion of racial difference in our communities does not mean opening to race as we would like it to be, but to the pervasiveness of racism as a widespread practice of inequality, giving rise to othering, domination, exclusion, and dehumanization.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since the 1970\u2019s\u2014in Buddhist communities, and in society more generally\u2014we have engaged innumerable strategies and tactics of racial awareness: race sensitivity training, consciousness raising, diversity training, anti-racism training, anti-oppression training, and even support in recovery from the dominant culture<\/a>.\u00a0 Here we have placed much emphasis on the power of cognitive-emotional change\u2014that we might change our minds to unlearn racism, and now, in this time\u2014when Black Lives Matter<\/a>\u2014it is imperative to support these endeavors. And yet I continue to ask under what conditions do we practice equality through being in relationship\u2014of being equal to one another\u2014not as a given, but as a mutual and embodied accomplishment?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last summer I joined the Zen Peacemakers\u2019 Native American Bearing Witness Retreat<\/a>, where with some 200 others I traveled to South Dakota to bear witness to the genocide and ongoing historical struggle of Native peoples linked to the founding of the U.S.\u00a0 During the retreat we had the great privilege to receive teachings from Grandmother Beatrice Long Visitor Holy Dance<\/a>, a member of the Oglala Lakota, and International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers<\/a>.\u00a0 I was greatly moved by her prayers and her emphasis on the important need for spaces of reciprocity, where people come together to deeply listen and share in their cultural distinctiveness, as well as in their historical sorrows and traumas.\u00a0 Her teaching helped frame what was for me a major theme of the retreat: cultivating reciprocity in the face of cultural domination and giving up dominion to share in mutuality.<\/p>\n

\"Grandmother
Photo credit: Shizuka\/Darrell, \u20182015 Zen Peacemaker Order Native American Bearing Witness Retreat\u2019 www.zenpeacemakers.org<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Carrying this home to my community, and in my own practice, I find myself asking: \u00a0How do we harmonize distinctiveness and equality in our communities, where harmony is defined as mutual recognition? We hear echoes of this in the Ambattha Sutta<\/a>, where during a particularly contentious moment of co-inquiry, the Buddha suggests:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the supreme perfection of wisdom and righteousness\u2026there is no reference to either the question of birth, or of lineage, or of the pride which says you are held as worthy as I, or you are not held as worthy as I, for who so ever\u2026is enslaved, or in bondage to the notion of birth, or lineage, or the pride of social position, or of family connections, they are far from the best wisdom and righteousness.\u00a0 It is only having got rid of all such bondage that one can realize for oneself the unexcelled perfection of wisdom and conduct\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is not race that is at issue here \u2014with its logic of sameness and difference\u2013 but rather distinctiveness seen through the lens of equality. Human distinctiveness and ancestry are not natural equivalents to the notions of racial difference.\u00a0 Rather race provides a justification for their distortion, as produced through the practice of inequality, a feature of which is domination, exclusion, otherness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Can we extend our spiritual friendship beyond the meditation hall and beyond the protest to enter into long-term relationships of accompaniment<\/a>\u2014a spirituality of solidarity partnerships\u2013with others around common issues of inequality and justice? \u00a0\u00a0For those that believe themselves to be \u2018white,\u2019 can we pursue relationships of accountability with POC groups?\u00a0 As for example, as is now practiced in the Native led Rapid City Community Conversations<\/a> initiative in South Dakota, or the Society of Friends support<\/a> of the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For people that identify as POC\u2014can we enter into intergroup<\/a> relationships of support across cultures or for those in our communities of different class standing?\u00a0 Such as the Tamejavi project<\/a>\u2013PanValley Institute<\/a>, or Causa Justa, Just Cause<\/a>, or the UCCRO<\/a>. In mixed communities can we institutionalize engagement with tangible issues of inequality, such as in the Mennonite Central Committee\u2019s Indigenous Visioning Circle\u2019s work<\/a> on dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery<\/a>.\u00a0 Finally\u2014with full embrace of our diverse identities\u2014can we support broad projects, such as Interfaith Worker Justice<\/a>, or the Center for the Working Poor<\/a>, or the Right to the City<\/a>, that seek Justice for the poor and the Working Class. Where are our new ceremonies of mutuality?\u00a0 Rituals beyond the color line, or the \u2018ethnic division\u2019 in American Buddhism that celebrates being in relationship.\u00a0 Where, as Ven. Dr. Pannavati Bhikkuni states<\/a>: \u201cthere is not one that sees you, but when one sees you, he sees himself, and when you see one, then you also see yourself through that one\u2026.\u201d How can we celebrate and honor the dignity of the common regenerative future at hand?<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n

\"NathanDoshin Nathan Woods (Ph.D., Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center, NYC, 2015) is a writer, scholar and novice Zen Buddhist Priest under the spiritual direction of Seisen Anne Saunders, Roshi. He specializes in the Historical Anthropology of North America, and his research agenda focuses on the organization of knowledge, expertise and education, with a particular focus on institution building and institutionalization in the fields of higher education, science, the environment and religion.\u00a0 His current research program concerns the history of Buddhist-based institution building in North America. He lives in community at the Sweetwater Zen Center<\/a> in National City, CA, in the Tijuana-San Diego Border Region.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A guest post by\u00a0Doshin Nathan Woods \u201cA Black Man is a person who must ride \u2018Jim Crow\u2019 in Georgia\u2026\u201d \u2013W.E.B Du Bois As I walked to the Zendo the helicopters droned distantly overhead.\u00a0 The muffled announcement reverberating through the neighborhood: \u201cWhite or Hispanic male\u2026.wearing a white t-shirt\u2026..\u201d\u00a0 Indistinct, my attention turned to the matter at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":5717,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,20,9],"tags":[523,519,520,182,53,48],"class_list":["post-5714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academia","category-activism","category-american-buddhism","tag-activism","tag-american-buddhism","tag-buddhism","tag-race","tag-western-buddhism","tag-zen-in-america"],"yoast_head":"\nMutuality at the Limits of Race - A Buddhist Perspective<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A guest post by\u00a0Doshin Nathan Woods \u201cA Black Man is a person who must ride \u2018Jim Crow\u2019 in Georgia\u2026\u201d --W.E.B Du Bois As I walked to the Zendo the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/americanbuddhist\/2016\/03\/mutuality-at-the-limits-of-race-a-buddhist-perspective.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mutuality at the Limits of Race - 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