Session 12:
Materials
Buddhists march in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, 2020
1) Grounding our liberation in love.
Your Liberation is on the Line, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, 2019 (6 pages)
(Excerpt) Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy, by Chris Crass, 2013 (8 pages - if little time just read excerpt 1)
Optional: Love as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks, from Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 1994 (5 pages - This is the seminal text the two others above are rooted in).
2) Understanding anti-anti-racism in Buddhist communities and beyond.
NOTE: The article below is not yet published, yet the publication is immanent. Please do not share it until it is public. It was generously given to us for the purposes of this course by the authors. It’s a meaty 20 pages that describes the backlash to DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion") efforts in Buddhists sanghas. The authors draw 3 types of concerns/hostility. The 3 types are:
Reactionary Centrism and Performative Transcendence
#TheBuddhistRight
Alt-Right Buddhists
If you do not have time to read this in totality, pages 24-36 describe the 3 types.
"The #BuddhistCultureWars: BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas," by Ann Gleig and Brenna Artinger, Journal of Global Buddhism, 2021
3) Love and liberation: in body, speech and mind.
Buddhist Leaders join Tsuru for Solidarity and other marchers at Fort Sill Protest, July 20, 2019 (4 min). (optional - more about this initiative for solidarity from Rev. Ryuken Duncan Williams here)
Reverend Matt Hamasaki, Resident Minister, Sacramento Buddhist Church. (7 min video).
Glasgow Buddhist Centre Statement on the Black Lives Matter Movement, June 2020
A Statement From Pan-American Chairs of Triratna (PACT) Regarding Black Lives Matter, June 2020
Moving through the Mandala…
Resources to Go Deeper
Faith leaders articulate / express / embody their understanding (more examples)
Rev. Kerry Kiyohara, June 7, 2020 at Makawao Hongwanji Buddhist Temple on Maui, Hawaii (20 min)
Remembering Black lives taken by police in the United States, a ritual by the nuns of Aloka Vihara, June 2020 (4 min)
Faith leaders walk more than a hundred miles to join fight for racial justice at March on Washington, news report, August 2020 (2 min)
Understanding the push-back and the anti-anti-racist movement
Tracing the lineage of thought in current discussions about race can help us to navigate the issues and examine our own views and where they might have formed. This also helps us to better understand others, namely those we might disagree with.
Since the early days of slavery and then abolition, there have always been a variety of conflicting perspectives on what liberation from racism looks like, both within progressive circles and between progressives and conservatives. Two contemporaries of Dr. Ambedkar, civil rights activists and thinkers Booker T. Washington and W.E.B Dubois famously clashed in their outlook on this question at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. In many ways the debate continues today in the US and in Europe, most recently apparent the UK government’s report on racism. A similar debate ensues in India about caste and “reservations”…
More recently, there is an active and well funded campaign to malign anti-racism efforts, demonizing “critical race theory” and attempting to legislate how history is taught. It’s been working. Support for BlackLivesMatter is now lower among white people in the US than before the murder of George Floyd.
The UK political and cultural landscape is (sadly) influenced by what is happening in the US, and similar culture wars are on-going.
Lastly, the expression “cultural marxism” has been used quite easily in Triratna circles in the UK. Below is a primer on this conspiracy theory with anti-semitic significance.
'Cultural Marxism' Is a Far Right Conspiracy Theory (11 min short version), by Novara Media, 2020
The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility, by John McWhorter, June 2020. (In this pushback to anti-racism work, note the lineages of thought going back to Booker T. Washington, and the arguments made).
The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession, Adam Harris, May 2021
The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness, Michelle Goldberg, Feb 2021