To Buddhist Teachers, Monastics, Priests, Leaders, Ministers, Practitioners, and Clergy
(you are invited to endorse this letter, below)
As Buddhist teachers and leaders we are deeply shaken and saddened by the intentional and premeditated murder of nine worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015. We send our heart-filled condolences to the families, loved ones, church, and communities, who have experienced this grievous loss.
While this terrorist act was apparently perpetrated by a single individual consumed by racial hatred and a desire to ignite a race war, the soil in which this massacre took root is the legacy of slavery, white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and the resulting racial inequalities and injustices that persist in our individual and collective consciousness and institutions. The daily experience of violence against people of color has become more recently visible through highlighted media coverage of the ongoing brutal treatment and killings of unarmed African-Americans by law enforcement agents across the country.
As Buddhists we realize the interdependence of all of our experiences—and that violence towards one community is violence perpetrated upon us all. As spiritual leaders, we must be committed to healing the wounds of racism that are such a primary and toxic part of the landscape of our country. This calls on those of dominant white communities to inquire deeply into and transform patterns of exclusion to power, inequity in resources, unseen bias, and unexamined disparities in privilege. There is an urgency to affirm that Black Lives Matter and work with religious and secular communities to respond to racial injustice.
In this time of grieving and cultural trauma continuing from the mass killings in Charleston and the systemic violence by law enforcement groups against African Americans, other people of color and indigenous peoples, we call on teachers and leaders of Buddhist communities to respond definitively by connecting spiritual intentions of non-harm with meaningful and tangible action, including: turn towards the collective suffering of race/hate violence and white dominance that our society is experiencing, rather than ignore it.
We advocate our Buddhist spiritual leadership (in all its diverse lineages and traditions) to address the current events in our teachings, dharma talks, our meditations, our community meetings, our dharma classes, our practice sessions, and to ask our individual Buddhist sanghas to join in the greater spiritual communities of faith in solidarity with the families of Emanuel AME Church and the broader African American community. We also encourage your active call for changes in gun laws to help prevent further loss of life, and destruction of our families and communities.
We believe it is especially important that as Buddhist teachers and leaders, we encourage the white members of our community to continue to awaken to the history and dynamics of white privilege and the impact of unconscious collective racial bias. In a parallel way, it is essential that people of color continue to investigate their own unconscious patterning that perpetuates the suffering of racism. As support for these processes, and more broadly for activism dedicated to racial justice, we are offering two versions of a “Call to Engage.” One, available here, is for white members of our community, and the second, for members of color, is forthcoming (you can sign up here to be notified of its arrival).
Together may we help serve the creation of Beloved Community—a society that is just, equitable, grounded in respect and love.
With prayers for peace, healing and awakening,
Editors note, July 18, 2015: The text above has been altered from the original version as follows: “the serial killing of African American men by our law enforcement groups” has been changed to “the systemic violence by law enforcement groups against African Americans, other people of color and indigenous peoples.”
thank-you Tara and everyone who is instrumental in getting this together. I am touched by my U.S brothers and sisters writing and signing up to this together. My heart is available and my body and speech more ready for action.
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Perhaps we need to organize legions of us to go south and sit in black churches at night.
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I’m a little confused why a statement on racial equality has separate letters for white and people of color respondants. ??
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It looks to me like there is only one letter, but there are two different calls to action. This feels appropriate to me. Given the legacy of white supremacy that we live with, the work is different for white folks than for people of color. White folks are in a particular kind of delusion, and we need to wake up to the reality of white supremacy that we so often deny, and awaken to how this deeply embedded system expresses itself through our particular embodiment as people with white skin.
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I support this 110%. Thanks for all the support.
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Thank you Tara this. As a person of colour in the practice I am glad we have engaged with this.
Rehena
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i think that what we need to do is talk to each other about the ways we contribute to white supremacist culture and then start dismantling it in our hearts and minds. Action will follow.
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It does not stop at race – any desire to feel superior to another is a hindrance to awakening. Like with most assertions of “I, mine, my, and ours”, the tendency is to separate one or one’s reference group from others in an effort to cling to fleeting, pleasant feelings associated with specialness, when the goal of Buddhist practice is exactly the opposite.
Completely letting go of “I, my, mine, ours” and their associated feelings, breaks down the walls between self and others and permits one to move further along the path to spiritual liberation from suffering in samsara.
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Yay for coming together to try and create a more equitable society, grounded in respect and love. Boo on having separate letters for white and non-white Buddhists, as if either were a homogenous stereotypable group. When did we go back to black-white thinking and terminology particularly in more progressive communities? Did Buddha give teachings based on ethnicity or understanding? To focus on racism by a single group of people based on their skin color is to practice and perpetuate stereotypes and racism. To talk of white dominance when there are more white people in poverty than black, when African-Americans and Mexican-Americans have more wealth and less people than the poorest 150 million or so Euro-Americans is stretching bias to the point of ? counterproductivity? hatred? delusion? Turn towards the racism in all communities in this society (even yours) even if your personal goal is to help only a small segment of society. Using “dynamics of privilege” and “unconscious collective racial bias” to describe one group’s mind conditioning while another group’s mind conditioning is called “unconscious patterning” reflects a judgmental bias. Can privilege and bias be considered positive or neutral terms? Patterning i think can be. How is this kind of thinking respectful? How is it based in love? It perpetuates stereotypes of all Euro-Americans. Ignores the racial bias that is part of the patterning of many other Americans. Plus, if we’re Buddhists, we really ought to follow the Buddha’s lead and while not ignoring the problems, quit perpetuating the idea that race exists by using such words. Yay for recognizing interdependence at some level.
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There is definitely a racial bias problem in America when nearly all of the ‘control’ positions (e.g., news editors of major media, publishers, producers, CEOs at Fortune 1000 companies, partners at major law firms, tenured faculty at elite universities, etc.) and positions where most of the wealth is generated (e.g., investment bankers, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, private equity, etc.) are dominated by white people. This is in ‘addition’ to the problems addressed in the Open Letter concerning police shootings of unarmed black men, the prison-industrial-complex, white flight and crumbling inner-city schools, etc.).
While I definitely do not have a problem with the acknowledgment of this white privilege, I am not sure the solution has been properly conceived. It is sort of like saying “there are no blacks in Silicon Valley” ten years ago, and then saying the same thing 10 years later. The solution is hiring more blacks, but the decision makers who make these hiring decisions are still working with the same mindset as they were 10 years ago.
I am actually not sure there are sufficient Buddhists in these control positions to make a difference, as Buddhists only make up 1.4% of the US population, and many of us have opted out of the rat race to live more fulfilling lives in service to others or simple existences with fewer duties so that we can pursue spiritual liberation. That said, taking a stand against racism is important as a community, and to the extent that this Open Letter does that, I fully support it. In the Buddha’s time 2,600 years ago in India, it was taking a stand against caste more than race, and against sexism that excluded women from serious spiritual practice.
As stated in my earlier comment, whether it is race, caste, sex or some other mental fabrication, the Buddha’s teachings are clear concerning non-clinging to ‘any’ idea that tends to make one chase pleasurable feelings associated with “I am” or “we are” superior to others. The feeling never lasts, and chasing the feeling can harm oneself and others.
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As Buddhists, I think we need to address the genocidal maltreatment of the Rohingya, as well as the racist violence in the US. We should not be allowing people who preach harm and hate, let alone commit it, to be doing so under Buddhist auspices. I realize that those Buddhist nationalists are operating under self-granted authority, but at the least, we should be denouncing nationalism as incompatible with Buddhist teaching and defaming the Dharma.
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As Buddhists, we also need to have a more sophisticated understanding of world affairs and geopolitics, and not accept at face value the framing by news editors in the mainstream press who have their own marching orders and agenda.
There is little doubt that the United States sees itself as the Empire of the World, and even comforts itself with talk about this century being an “American” century. In the minds of these think tanks who fill many of the key roles in US foreign policy, it is a zero-sum “king-of-the-hill” childish game of sitting on top of the perch and trying to knock down all other countries rising up the hill. Right now, the US sees China as the biggest threat to its world dominance and hegemony and therefore is trying to manipulate smaller countries like Burma to become part of their broader China Containment strategy. They therefore attempt to discredit the government unless they allow themselves to be used in the US’s China Containment game. You would not hear anything about the treatment of Rohingya in Burma if the government there was fully on-board with the US’s China Containment strategy.
The US is pursuing a similar approach here in Sri Lanka, in which it went to great lengths to discredit the previous government because they openly refused to go along with the US’s China Containment strategy and even allowed a Chinese submarine to dock in Sri Lanka. Now that the government was ousted and replaced with an anti-Chinese, pro-US government, we hardly hear a peep out of the US on human rights in Sri Lanka, even though nothing has actually changed on the ground at all.
At some point the United States through its electorate will need to accept that this century does not ‘belong’ to the United States, it belongs to all people of the world who have the same aspirations for themselves and their families. ‘Containing’ any country simply because they are not white or not following the dictates of the United States is an act of oppression, and should be condemned by all people – including Buddhists – as completely incompatible with a world that values all human beings in the same light.
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This open letter is a beautiful recognition of the need for, and commitment to, change. Thank you so much! I would like to suggest one important correction. It is not just black men, but black women as well who are suffering at the hands of law enforcement. There is a lengthy list of black girls and women who have died just as shockingly, and it is only a perpetuation of misinformation that we focus on this happening to men. Thank you.
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Hi Sher!
Thanks so much for pointing this out. This was flagged earlier, and we changed the text from African American men to, simply, African Americans. Now I see that we needed to make this change in two places, and have made the second change after receiving your comment. We are so happy to be in conversation and community with you around this initiative. Sincerely, Eleanor
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I’m a Quaker though I am trained in Buddhist meditation. I’ve started a new Facebook group called WAR-PACT, which will develop a five day anti-racism training based on AVP and PACT, a method which I piloted in 2004. If you like this kind of stuff or want to take part, please request to join the group on its page. The new WAR-PACT pilot will initially be done to train white Quakers, though this will not be a whites-only group. WAR-PACT stands for Whites Against Racism — Peacemaking and Conflict Transformation, and the ‘whites’ part describes the purpose, not the makeup of the group or the training teams — those will be racially heterogenous.
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I think this sort of unified action is long over due coming from Buddhists. But I fail to understand segregated letters. Obviously the levels of engagement and types of action will differ based on a host of capacities, privileges and interests. But now more than ever solidarity is critical. A joint statement is appropriate. At the very least, if you have separate letters to sign, offer them together so that you are not re-creating the age old issues of separation and power imbalance.
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Thank you so much for your honesty and bravery in stating what needs to be said so clearly. With many blessings.
Bob Doppelt
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The intent was nice, but, I found much of this letter to be divisive and judgmental of entire groups based on stereotypical thinking. The idea is wonderful, but this separation and condemnation of some groups is disturbing. I think it needs to be rewritten with more love for all life evident, and less labeling and judging.
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MrsRikkiLynn, why not write your own letter that reflects your own vision? There doesn’t need to be only one.
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