Module 4 Materials
Dharma friends at the first U.S. Buddhist Delegation to the White House in 2015.
You can find a personal testimony about that event here.
1) One family’s journey of turning towards its karma
We invite you to watch and reflect upon this documentary, Traces of the Trade.
First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne discovers that her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Nine fellow descendants journey with Browne to retrace the steps of the Triangle Trade. They gather in their hometown of Bristol, Rhode Island; then travel to the slave forts in Ghana, and finally to Cuba, discovering the ruins of one of the family’s sugar plantations. How does Northern complicity change the way the story of slavery is usually told? What would repair – spiritual and material – really look like and what would it take?
Katrina Browne is deeply motivated by her faith and involved in the Episcopalian Church. The story of the family evolves into the story of the Church’s efforts to deal with its complicity in the institution of slavery.
Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
The documentary is 1.5 hours. (We have purchased a group license- you can watch it alone or in groups for free. Note that the resolution will be better if you download onto a computer and watch it from there, versus streaming it from this Google drive).
Note: In the additional resources below there is a short extract of a documentary about family members reckoning with the history of race in the UK (“the Jolly family”).
2) Reflecting on karma and race
Larry Ward wrote a short and powerful book called “America’s Racial Karma”… In it, he unpacks aspects of colonial thinking and ways of being that continue as patterns in our world, internally and externally. Though the title of the books suggests and American specificity, we suggest it is of value of a global audience, despite the specificity of the title.
Racial Karma - short interview of Larry Ward (short article)
OR
Healing Racial Karma (excerpt from his book, provides more detail on his model of racial karma)
If you prefer to listen to Larry Ward versus reading this summary, there is a link further below to a conversation he had with Pamela Ayo Yetunde about his book, as well as a public talk.
3) Optional: “whiteness” as sankara?
Joy Brennan, a Soto Zen priest and scholar, makes the case that Yogacara teachings can help reveal the ways in which whiteness operates and reproduces itself. She contends that the Yogacara approach to karma and the nature of mind, with its notion of “storehouse consciousness,” can offer a liberating pathways to counter racism. This is slightly academic presentation of the “mind only” school of Buddhism and it relevance to issues of whiteness, that some of us may find helpful.
You can read her article here (8 pages), OR listen to a talk making similar points here (the talk starts at 42:30 minutes).
Gratitude
We are grateful to learn from the authors whose works we are engaging with here. If you wish to support them, you can do so at the links below:
Larry Ward, America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal (Berkeley, California: Parallax Press, 2020).
To purchase and share the film Traces of Trade by Katrina Browne, find out more here. You can also find out more about her work on that site.
You might find it interesting to read about what the Episcopal Church has been doing with regards to its history, drawing in part from Browne’s work. There is also a report from the Church of England that can be found here. Later in the course, we will exploring community and organizational responses to racism and the history of race.
Additional Resources
‘History’ is now: karmic momentum
Database of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery.
The Jolly Family (a family story from Scotland / England) (10 min) - This is an excerpt of a longer documentary called “Britain And The Global Shame Of The Slave Trade“
Genealogist Who Tracks Down Modern-Day Slavery Practices in the US (20 min)
Modern day practices of quasi-forced labor in Maharastra, for the production of sugar for large global corporations, an investigative report published in March 2024 by the New York Times.
Healing Racial Karma: more from Larry Ward
This is a rich interview of Larry Ward by Pamela Ayo Yetunde about his book.
Also, in this public talk he discusses his book and the work of healing what he calls racial karma.
Resources on Buddhist teachings about karma:
Sangharakshita, Lecture 23-Karma and Rebirth. Audio link here.
Nagapriya, Exploring Karma & Rebirth (Windhorse Publications, 2004).
Vadanya, “Conditionality, Karma and Rebirth” - Module 1.4.2 from the Triratna Mitra Study Series
Dhivan, This Being, That Becomes: The Buddha’s Teaching on Conditionality (Windhorse Publications, 2011).
Collective or Group Karma in Early Buddhism? a balanced and well researched video essay by Doug Smith on debates related to this topic.
