Buddhist Practitioners of Color
Call to Solidarity for Racial Justice
This Call to Solidarity has been revised since its original release. BRJ has incorporated the comments of our Japanese American and white allies mahasangha members (posted below) in order to create a more complete and inclusive Call. 7/13/16
This is a Call for solidarity among Buddhist teachers, leaders, and practitioners of color across traditions to support racial justice and healing within the United States.
As Practitioners of Color (POC), we collectively represent the full spectrum of the Global Majority* – First Nations, Aboriginal, and indigenous people; people of African and Latino/a ancestry, and people from the Middle East, East, Southeast, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands. We embody the complexities of varying skin colors, ages, socioeconomic classes, genders, sexual orientations, mental conditions, and physical abilities. Many of us carry multiracial identities, are in biracial relationships and/or have multiraced families. Our collective also includes Dharma practitioners choosing not to identify as Buddhist, who walk in other faiths and are cautious of the risks of cultural appropriation.
The term “POC” is a simplistic way of drawing attention to being among the peoples that have been systematically, generationally, and presently oppressed in the United States because of our appearance and skin color. We share, like the earth herself, in experiences of genocide, marginalization, colonization, exploitation, and enslavement in varying historic and present day degrees, including experiencing daily the escalating hatred and resulting trauma from the continued killings of and brutality towards African Americans and darker-skinned individuals in our communities and throughout the United States.
Within convert Western Buddhist institutions, teachers and practitioners of color experience more subtle unconscious racial bias. We are challenged by direct and structural discrimination as well as by cultural expectations to remain silent or confine racial discourse to teachings which emphasize individual over community awakening. Many of us feel isolated and want to discover who we are as a collective, and to heal and practice with each other.
Within longstanding Buddhist communities of Asian American ancestry racial bias and structural racism play out in equally pervasive ways. The history and experience of Asian Americans in traditional Buddhist temples includes anti-Asian legislation and exclusion and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (a majority of whom were Buddhist), as well as the obstacles that more recent Buddhist immigrants face including discrimination based on language, ethnicity, color, culture, and immigration status.
Clearly the ways in which Buddhists of color interface with, and are affected by, the oppression of structural and cultural racism is varied and complex. Our invitation to practitioners of color is to bridge these differences and “remember” ourselves as Buddhist practitioners devoted to racial justice, thereby joining together in Response to this Call:
- To Heal: To recognize and repair internalized oppression and its impact on our relatedness as a diverse body of practitioners of color. We need time together to apply our practice towards discovering more personally who we are as a diverse body of color.
- To Discover: To know who Practitioners of Color are as a diverse body, recognize the integral roles we play in the broader spiritual community, discover how we currently enhance racial equity, leverage resources, and form natural collaborations.
- To Bridge: This call invites us to explore how we align our energies in ways that bridge racial separation between historically divided communities of color. Many of us also seek to reconcile and collaborate with white practitioners, allies, and institutions without causing or experiencing harm.
- To Justice: We call practitioners of color to humbly recognize our interdependence across the very systems which perpetuate the vestiges of our exploitation/enslavement, including economic, healthcare, educational, environmental, transportation and legal systems controlling housing, property and national borders. Of relevant concern to us is how racism relies on greed and class stratification, the weight of which is not only ravaging the poorest communities of color but also rapidly destroying the planet.
There are many places to begin, and for many of you, to continue. We are calling upon the community to make visible ourselves and the good work we do so that we may form natural collaborations and share interest and energies in challenging these intersecting areas of racial injustice.
A CALL TO HEAL
Our meditation and spiritual practices offer clarity to confront oppression and recondition our own habitual patterns which cause more harm to ourselves and others. Together, we bring many resources that help to identify wounds of injustice and to heal these wounds. The resources we bring may include Buddhist practice as well as culturally specific rituals, creative expressions, and ceremonies that reflect our varied cultural heritages. Taking refuge within Buddhist and non-Buddhist communities of color can further restore compassion for our own suffering and reveal our capacity for interdependent liberation, but because these sanghas can be fragmented and under resourced, we don’t always know where to seek support.
We Call all practitioners of color to join us in cultivating conditions within the Buddhist community which support the growth of generosity, love, and wisdom – the wholesome roots of mind and heart. To help us do this, we envision a web based portal to offer resources to support our important work of healing and reconciliation. This Resource & Opportunity Listing would include information that can support us in learning, engaging, healing, and uprooting racial suffering and its many manifestations. Categories include:
- Organizational Resources
- Historic/Cultural Resources and Study Groups
- Group Healing Resources for POC
- Socially Engaged Acts
- Individual Practices/Healing Resources for POC
- Reconciliation and Bridging Across Differences
- Right Livelihood and Personal Development Opportunities
We envision a Resources & Opportunity Listing that will be a co-created database by the larger POC community. Once the infrastructure is in place, you will be able to click through to a separate form to submit information into the database, as well as view its contents.
If you would like to volunteer your time and/or resources to help get this database up and running, please click here. Meanwhile, if you have resources or opportunities you would like to share with the larger community, you can do so by leaving a comment on this page.
A CALL TO DISCOVER
As active participants in this imperfect world, practitioners of color have absorbed and internalized the messages which privilege and preserve leadership, teachings, and experiences by white practitioners. Buddhists of color are doing important work around racial justice, yet in large part, the Dharma community is unaware of these efforts. This unconsciousness keeps us fragmented and unable to know ourselves as a body and leverage our efforts for effective healing and action. To begin to heal this fragmentation, we propose one vehicle to increase connections and facilitate collaborations between Buddhist practitioners of color: A National POC Buddhist Directory.
The proposed Directory will electronically draw together our diverse community and reflect back to us some of the following: who we are, where we live, our racial and other identity reflections, our practice and lineage, ways we currently engage with uprooting oppression in our individual and collective lives, and racial equity and other social justice topics of interest. In order for it to thrive, such a directory requires contributions from the Practitioners of Color who hear this Call. At this stage, we seek your participation in advancing two goals: 1) resource a robust infrastructure to collect, secure and make the data user-friendly; and 2) develop access and operational terms reflecting community need. To arrive at consensus around the above and other specifications, and to gather the resources to build such a tool, we are turning towards our collective, looking for:
- technical skill with database development
- experience with data security
- familiarity with building networks
- financial backing or access to resources
- other (please offer your comments and suggestions!)
To offer your time or resources to this initiative, please click here.
A CALL TO BRIDGE
This call invites us to align our energies in ways that bridge across racial identities and spiritual traditions. Together, we may transform our understanding of both relative and ultimate truths of our suffering. Like the Buddha we too must seek skillful means to bridge racial division appropriate to our times. We aspire to create an evolutive dharma as taught by Thich Nhat Hanh and a beloved community as envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
For practitioners of color active in confronting racism within convert Western Buddhist institutions, fatigue is immense. For decades, Buddhist teachers and leaders of color have addressed racial equity alongside white allies. While some practice within the predominately white Buddhist communities in the U.S., many of us have found it necessary to create safe and independent spaces for concentrated practice. In our call to bridge across difference, we continue to honor spaces which allow us to practice without repeatedly educating dominant group culture on its impact. We also encourage support for teachers – regardless of race—who know themselves as racial beings, and who, through their own example, are transforming their own personal suffering into a healing salve that liberates all beings.
Our practice of wise understanding informs the pace, intensity and focus of our transracial efforts. We Call upon practitioners of color to engage with practitioners beyond our affinity groups while being mindful to rise above tokenism and superficial displays of pluralism. Symbolic gestures alone do not transform hearts. Transforming the continuing effect of racism on us all requires ongoing examination of our implicit biases. This is our path of healing together in solidarity. In the above referenced Resource and Opportunity Listing, we are committed to including information that supports Reconciliation and Bridging Across Differences. As previously stated, if you have relevant resources and opportunities to share now, while the database is under construction, please do so by leaving a comment on the page.
A CALL TO JUSTICE
The weight of the nation’s social karma reminds us that our awakening is conditioned upon the liberation of others. One of the major contributions of the historical Buddha Shakayamuni, himself a practitioner of color, lie in his articulation of interdependence and the potential for enlightenment of all human beings. We call Practitioners of Color to fertilize our Buddhist roots with the same spiritual force used to challenge the caste system and the exclusion of women in the Buddha’s lifetime.
Justice is an action and, for some of us, the most concrete method for inclining the mind toward generosity, love and wisdom. In turn, the Dharma empowers our pursuit of justice by revealing the seduction of self-righteousness, the delusion of divisiveness, and the suffering of retaliation. We are surrounded by examples of Practitioners of Color who are compelled by their racial identities as well as their spiritual identities to compassionately confront social injustice. How are you or your Sangha engaging the social justice roots of Buddhism? We invite you to share the varied ways you are called to justice by leaving a comment on the page (in the future, this information will also be included in the Resource & Opportunity Listing).
***
We are witnessing a unique moment in the history of the Dharma; for the first time in its 2,600 year evolution all the traditions of Buddhism are in contact and dialogue. As Practitioners of Color in the U.S., we represent the many different lineages and expressions of these precious teachings. Individually and in smaller groups, we have discovered the relevance and power of these teachings to help us heal the trauma of racial injustice which manifests as personal, collective and ancestral rage and grief. And now we have this blessed opportunity to connect as a larger collective and intentionally organize ourselves on this profound path to liberation. Let us come together in a Mahasangha that is truly inclusive and through this call to justice we heal, discover and, bridge, thus manifesting a fuller expression of the Buddhadharma.
May all beings may realize liberation. May all beings be free.
*One thing we have in common is that people of non-European ancestry constitute the global majority. Referring to ourselves as practitioners of the global majority (POGM) calls on the diasporic roots we claim and the power and presence of our peoples worldwide.
Thank you for your important work in advocating for the healing of racism as an essential part of Buddhist practice; I have the utmost respect and appreciation for your work with this and your other calls. I am writing this comment as a Buddhist white ally.
Simply put, I don’t feel that this call adequately acknowledges the experiences of many Asian American Buddhists and their communities. These communities are so often unacknowledged in all the conversations about so-called “American Buddhism,” conversations that are usually coordinated by organizations and publications led by white convert Buddhists, despite the fact that they communities are the oldest and largest Buddhist communities in the US.
I think a discussion of the racialized experience of POC Buddhists in America should mention the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It should mention the first Buddhist temple on US soil, built by Japanese American Shin Buddhists in 1899 in San Francisco. It should mention the stories of the Asian immigrants who were the first Buddhist teachers in the US.
I believe that working against the effacement and exclusion of Asian American Buddhists, their history, and their present experience, is an essential part of the healing of racism in the American Buddhist mahasangha. Anything else perpetuates the dominant-culture stereotype of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, still left out of the definition of “American Buddhism” despite two, three, or four generations of being American Buddhists, and still constituting a majority of American Buddhists.
Perhaps there was not room for all of that in this call, but I’d argue that it would have been stronger had the experience of Asian American Buddhists practicing in predominantly Asian American Buddhist communities been specifically acknowledged at least once in this letter. The second paragraph would have been a good place: it mentions POC practitioners who do not identify as Buddhist because they are “cautious of the risks of cultural appropriation”; what about those who might feel that it is their culture that is being appropriated? Several times, this call names the context of “convert” Buddhist institutions or communities, but never that of communities predominantly made up of people born into that community. The language is awkward, and “non-convert” would obviously be problematic terminology; but spelling it out is worth the effort. I have read this call several times now looking for acknowledgment of these communities, but I only find more small generalizations that do not include them.
This call is an opportunity to address this fundamental racialized fissure in the greater Buddhist community in this country—the exclusion of Asian American Buddhists, especially those whose traditions are not meditation-centric, from the popular picture of so-called “American Buddhism” today—but I believe that the fissure must be called out specifically, many times and by many people, for that healing to be possible.
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I stand with you. I understand the level of fatigue and commitment here, and I will do my part to deepen and broaden our collective action for justice and liberation.
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I applaud the important efforts of the POC Call to Buddhists. Yet I, too, and was puzzled, curious and dismayed — at the lack of acknowledgement of Asian American Buddhists, both long-time practitioners who have faced historical, legalized racism up to and including mass incarceration (during World War II of Japanese and Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were Buddhists), as well as more recent immigrants Buddhist communities who continue to face challenges related to language, cultural barriers and immigration status.
As Andrew Merz suggested in his earlier post, clear acknowledgement of these experiences and POC sectors is currently missing. I share my thoughts here as a Japanese American whose Buddhist roots reach back to the start of Buddhism in Hawaii (my grandfather served among the first overseas ministers) and as a member of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco, the first Jodo Shinshu temple on the continental US, and home temple of the Buddhist Churches of America.
For a majority of its 117-year old history in the continental US America, the temples and churches affiliated with the Buddhist Churches of America have been mainly ‘ethnic Japanese’ sanghas, having developed, of necessity, as a ‘safe space’ to practice Buddhism as well as ‘be themselves’ (Japanese, Japanese American and Buddhist Americans), in an environment of racism, discrimination, exclusion and internment.
In the past decade or so, some of our temples/churches have slowly become more diverse ethnically, and racially, although there are still few African Americans and Latinos. This is a major organizational challenge which many of us recognize and that is one of the reasons the POC Call to Buddhists caught my personal interest. The issues are complex and require all of us to keep hearts and minds open in keeping with our Buddhist values.
Doctrinally and organizationally, our Pure Land school of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism has been steadfast in upholding the principles of non-discrimination in all aspects of our lives. Scholar Jeff Wilson’s research found that the first same-sex marriage conducted in a Buddhist temple, internationally, took place here at the Buddhist Church of San Francisco, over 40 years ago. This happens to be my temple, and today we are blessed with an active sangha that is becoming more diverse ethnically, racially, and sexual orientation, while at the same time, respecting our Japanese roots, traditions and elders. It IS possible, although by no means is it a smooth ride all the time! This is always a work in progress. We strive to keep it dharma-centered and arefortunate to have an attentive, engaged ministerial team. All are welcome to visit and join us.
The POC Call to Buddhists’ proposals is a promising platform for a new level of dialogue and collaborative practices for deepening our capacity to listen deeply to the Buddha and guide us to act meaningfully with wisdom and compassion. Thank you for this opportunity to share some thoughts,
Gassho/With palms together.
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I am a third generation Japanese American (sansei) Buddhist; my grandparents were immigrants to the U.S. from Japan. My maternal grandfather was a Soto Zen Buddhist; my maternal grandmother was a Jodo-Shinshu Buddhist practitioner.
I am both appreciating and agreeing with what Yumi Hatta wrote, above: “I applaud the important efforts of the POC Call to [U.S.] Buddhists. Yet I, too, was puzzled, curious and dismayed — at the lack of acknowledgement of Asian American Buddhists, both long-time practitioners who have faced historical, legalized racism up to and including mass incarceration (during World War II of Japanese and Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were Buddhists), as well as more recent immigrant Buddhist communities who continue to face challenges related to language, cultural barriers and immigration status. As Andrew Merz suggested in his earlier post, clear acknowledgement of these experiences and POC sectors is currently missing.” [end of quote]
It seems to me that this call to action could benefit from the addition of “clear acknowledgment of these [Asian American and more recent immigrant Buddhist] experiences and POC sectors” to be more inclusive, effective and complete, and to model the bridge building that is called for in the Call to Action.
With gratitude to the authors of this Call to Action, and to Andrew Merz, Rev. Bush, and Yumi Hatta, who have engaged with this dialogue thus far,
Mushim Ikeda
Oakland, California
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