The alt solves---Activism cannot solve the internal suffering of racialized trauma---Only sitting with the pain and psychological suffering can we overcome the white myopic

Buddhism and Black Liberation A plethora of publications and a few organized gatherings on Buddhism and Black identity illuminate how Buddhism serves the liberation of Black people. Since 2000, with the publication of Rev. angel Kyodo williams’s Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, Black Buddhists have reflected on their embrace of Buddhism as a path toward freedom. Part personal reflection, part advocacy for healing through Zen practice, williams writes, “the Zen principles . . . can give us direction for addressing our innermost spiritual questions and experiencing their relevance to our lives.”82

Williams’s focus on spreading Zen teachings among Black people was joined by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Lama Choyin Rangdrol, who wrote Black Buddha in 2001, and by Tibetan Buddhist scholar Jan Willis, who also in 2001 published Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey. 83 Willis’s memoir chronicles her travels in India during her college years, when she encountered Tibetan monks. Willis eventually embraced a Tibetan monk, Lama Yeshe, as her teacher, feeling that he understood the parallels between being exiled from Tibet and the oppression experienced by Black Americans. Willis writes, “I should have told him the truth . . . that I suffered; that I was often frustrated and angry; that slavery and its legacy of racism had taken their tolls on me; that I had come seeking help in coping with feelings of inadequacy, unworthiness, and shame. I should have told him that I felt a certain kinship with the Tibetans because they, too, had suffered a great historical trauma and yet seemed able to cope very well and, indeed, even to be quite joyful.”84 In witnessing the resilience of Tibetans, Willis was inspired to heal an internal suffering that was wrought, in part, by the conditions of racism in the United States. Indeed, Willis was keenly aware of the social conditions that led to Black people’s suffering. She could become peaceful and still experience a deep anger triggered by white people who exhibited racism

Yet even in a racist context, Willis concluded, the suffering of Black people could not be overcome only with marches and activism; she was deeply aware of the resentment and anguish that resided in her heart. The way forward for her was in meditation practice: sitting with painful feelings and, over the course of time, befriending them. Silent practice under the guidance of a skilled teacher was a means to heal the mind and heart.

Willis describes particular forms of suffering that are personal, interpersonal, and systemic. Like many Black dharma teachers and long-term practitioners, she embraces practices that speak directly to self-hatred: thus the importance of cultivating a practice of stillness and a sangha rooted in love. In 2002, Willis joined a multilineage group of Black dharma teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center to uplift the presence of Black teachers in American Buddhism. Led by Marlene Jones and Lewis Woods, numerous teachers from the Theravada/Insight, Zen, Vajrayana, Pure Land, and Soka Gokkai International traditions joined the gathering. 85 Many of these teachers participated in two later retreats—in 2018 and 2019—for Buddhist Teachers of Black African Descent, at Union Theological Seminary and at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, respectively.

A number of publications by Black Buddhists have picked up and expanded the themes discussed in Black Buddhist retreats and in personal narratives. In 2003, the Buddhist magazine Turning Wheel elevated the perspectives of Black dharma practitioners. A 2004 anthology edited by Ryūmon Hilda Gutiérrez Baldoquín, Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism, includes several personal narratives by African American practitioners. In 2010 and 2016, Acharya Gaylon Ferguson published Natural Wakefulness and Natural Bravery, respectively.

Since 2015, a plethora of literature by Black Buddhists has illuminated racialized traumas that induce enduring psychological suffering. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, in her meditation The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender, writes evocatively of the trauma inflicted on Black children in state institutions: “When I got home [from school], I asked my mother why I wasn’t chosen [for a program], and watched her eyes drop. That night, I cried in my bed until it finally became clear to me. I wasn’t white. I had moved from the black school where my identity was closely tied to our culture. My innocence vanished, and I learned that for some, love is conditioned. Once a talkative child, I grew quiet in the struggle to regain my balance. I felt a keen sense of loss, living in a world that favored white people.”86 Through rituals and concentration practices, Manuel deconstructed the derogatory social messages that shaped her earliest cognitive experiences. She was able to recognize that the hatred directed at her was part of a larger, oppressive social consciousness. Rejection was a response not to her personal deficiencies but rather to the ways in which she was constructed within the white myopic and cognitive dysfunction of systemic white supremacy. Manuel’s 2018 meditations Sanctuary further illuminate her journey from externally driven actions to internally grounded solitude.

For Black practitioners, the social meanings of the Black body must be acknowledged, reconstructed, and embraced. This process is deeply internal and solitary and overtly external and communal. These Black teachers and practitioners emphasize the primacy of the body: a material body composed of flesh and blood that is socially constructed in degrading ways. For Black people, these social constructs lead to enduring psychological and often physical suffering. Buddhist practitioners must reckon with the forces of racism that denigrate the body and that have led to rejection, misery, and selfhatred. Manuel writes, “I am a survivor of the same hatred my parents experienced. The body I inhabit has experienced nearly every category of hatred that exists within this society, directed toward the various unacceptable differences that characterize its appearance. Perhaps it is a result of these experiences that I have paid fierce attention to liberation.”87

The Black Lives Matter movement surfaced insidious targeting and exploitation of Black people at the hands of police officers and state officials and a level of systemic oppression that, as a pervasive force, causes relentless suffering of Black people. In their coauthored 2016 book Radical Dharma, Rev. angel Kyodo williams and Lama Rod Owens, with scholar Jasmine Syedullah, illuminate “profoundly liberating teachings and practices that have the power to sever at their very root the destructive behaviors and thought processes that we inherit by way of our birth into human bodies.”88 But, williams argues, the liberatory message of dharma must be applied to systems: The police force is the state institution carrying out a specific mandate. . . . That mandate is to control Black bodies. . . . Your compliance maintains the system. You are policed, too.89