Black Buddhism K - Michigan 2024 HHIRS

Notes
Thanks to Darren Lau (Cogito) and Jo Adams (GURL😭) for their hard work on this file.
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Whiteness is a social ego, devoid of inherent identity, that constructs and reinforces systems of control and attitudes that maintain its primacy and sense of solidity, necessitating intentional intervention for liberation
Williams et al. 16, [angel Kyodo Williams (angel Kyodo williams is an American writer, activist, ordained Zen priest. Williams is the Spiritual Director of the meditation-based newDharma Community and founder of the Center for Transformative Change in Berkeley, California), Lama Rod Owens (Lama Rod Owens is a Black Buddhist Southern Queen. An international influencer with a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School with a focus on the intersection of social change, identity, and spiritual practice.), Jasmine Syedullah (Jasmine K. Syedullah is the Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and is a black feminist political theorist. She holds the first Assistant Professor line in Vassar College's Africana Studies Program), " Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation," North Atlantic Books, https://blackbooksdotpub.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/angel-kyodo-williams-lama-rod-owens-jasmine-syedullah-radical-dharma_-talking-race-love-and-liberation-north-atlantic-books-2016.pdf, accessed 7-19-2024, 7-14-2016] Cogito
THE SOCIAL EGO
To lean into this aspiration, you must confront the fact that “whiteness” is a social ego as void of inherent identity as the personal ego, and you have identified with it as much as your very own name, but without being willing to name it. Just as the ego-mind is a construct that constantly reinforces itself— building structures and systems of control and developing attitudes and views that maintain its primacy and sense of solidity so that it can substantiate its validity—so, too, does this construct of whiteness. One could call it the Mind of Whiteness. The construct has been designed so that white America—and by extension white teachers and practitioners—lives inside the prison of that small mind, such that without intentional intervention, you cannot see over the wall of the reinforcing perspectives that affirm and perpetuate the White Superiority Complex. The complex would disintegrate if the vastness of your own racial bias were illuminated. So you remain in ignorance, blind to the reality before you, which is necessary to escape the sheer anguish of how pervasive it is, how you unerringly participate and how seemingly inescapable it is. But just as the ego-mind cannot be used to work its way out of its own construct, so too can the Mind of Whiteness not be used to see through the veil of its own construct. On the one hand, this is where a practice that illuminates the nature of mind comes in. We are gifted with precisely the tools and methodologies needed for the project of deconstructing. But that lens of awareness must be placed outside of the construct. As a direct result of privilege, white practitioners (and teachers) have mistakenly entitled themselves to place the lens of awareness inside of whiteness, hence they are unable to see its machinations. But once we choose to live dharma in a radical way, a motivation toward complete liberation, our work can begin. So we sit. And we feel. And we let what arises do so until the resistance is worn down, or moved through, or even seems to overwhelm us. On the other side, we see a glimmer of something that we couldn’t get a handle on for our desperate need to avoid it. We begin to see Truth. And when we catch a hold of it, we can finally see the patterns of our participation in notTruth emerge. With the clarity of a steady mind and courage of a true heart, what has always been there begins to reveal itself, emerging from behind the fog of this social ego: the Mind of Whiteness. The white practitioners of Dharma who cannot stand firmly in acknowledging the pain caused by the decades of resistance to addressing this misalignment will be exposed as using a veneer of the dharma as mere window-dressing while milking the benefits of the system. Our wise words will land with a thud henceforth. The veil of mindfulness will be seen through as thin. No one entity has the answer, but rather it is the willingness to offer our best, claim responsibility for our worst, and fold it all into the continuous moment-to-moment practice of simply being present to what is that promises to deliver our future.
Durable fiat is an embodiment of the white delusion that uses epistemic maneuvers to try and hide the White ignorance
McRae 19, [Emily McRae (Associate Professor of Buddhism at the University of New Mexico), " White Delusion and Avidyā: A Buddhist Approach to Understanding and Deconstructing White Ignorance," Lexington Books, https://philpapers.org/rec/White%20Delusion%20and%20Avidy%C4%81:%20A%20Buddhist%20Approach%20to%20Understanding%20and%20Deconstructing%20White%20Ignorance, accessed 7-17-2024, 2019] Cogito
**Avidyā is a Buddhist concept of ignorance and blindness to the ultimate truth**
WAYS OUT OF WHITE DELUSION?
Buddhist ethics presents several ways of addressing and eliminating the delusions that cause suffering. I will focus on two antidotes to delusion: the contemplation of causation and the cultivation of equanimity.
As may be clear by this point, knowledge, on its own, is not sufficient for liberation from suffering on the Buddhist view. It may seem strange, since a philosophical system that claims ignorance to be the fundamental source of suffering seems required to also say that knowledge is the fundamental source of liberation from that suffering. But, clearly, knowledge by itself does not always liberate us from suffering, a fact that David Burton has referred to as a “conundrum” of Buddhist philosophy.22 After all, we may already know that everything is impermanent, and it is not too difficult to understand the arguments for no-Self or even emptiness (we teach them in college classrooms). But this knowledge alone clearly does not liberate us from suffering, at least not completely. (If it did, philosophy departments would be much happier places than they usually are!) But if we understand avidyā as delusion, rather than ignorance, the claim that knowledge cannot alone liberate us from suffering is less perplexing. Delusion cannot be eliminated just by exposure to, or even acceptance of, the facts. For example, I (irrationally) experience driving as very dangerous; every intersection, every turn and stop light seem to me to be an opportunity for disaster. I know that this perception is false; driving is risky but not that risky. I know that people much less attentive than me drive successfully and without anxiety. This knowledge is helpful, but it has not uprooted my delusion of danger and, for that reason, has not eliminated my anxiety. To uproot this or any other delusion, knowledge needs to be integrated in the right ways, remembered and applied at the right times, and, perhaps most importantly, must be supported by and harmonize with emotions, desires, and perception.
REFLECTING ON CAUSATION AS AN ANTIDOTE TO DELUSION
One way to integrate our knowledge so that it is efficacious in our lives is through practices of repeated contemplation and reflection. In Buddhist philosophy, one of the most common antidotes to delusion is the frequent contemplation of cause and effect.23 Although no one would deny cause and effect—and it is not a difficult concept to grasp or assent to—we often fail to properly recognize, remember, and make logical use of certain causal relationships. We fail both to recognize and remember how our current mental, emotional, and physical state is the effect of various causes and how it is itself the cause of future states. For example, we fail to understand, or remember, how our habit of comparing ourselves to others contributes to our suffering. Or we may refuse to appreciate how our habit of prioritizing ourselves over others will lead to loneliness and unhappiness. We maintain the delusion that we can continue to prioritize ourselves over others and compare ourselves with others and that this will lead to our happiness. But this delusion fails to understand fundamental cause and effect relationships between our attitudes about others and our own happiness.
It is not reflection on any case of cause and effect, or cause and effect in general, that will uproot delusion on the Buddhist view. Rather, specific causal links are selected as proper objects of contemplation because of their relevance to understanding and overcoming human suffering. These specific causal links, the twelve links of dependent origination, are designed to show how our delusion predictably leads to our own suffering. The twelve links connect basic delusion (avidyā) to the structure of our psychology and embodiment, showing how delusion conditions sensation, perception, and other mental phenomena. (That delusion could condition perception will not be surprising to scholars of race and bias, as studies show that whites are more likely to “see” a weapon in the hand of a Black man than a white man.24) These sensations and perceptions create craving and grasping that lead to suffering. In the contemplation of the twelve links, then, delusion is featured at two distinct levels: delusion is a causal link in the chain, and it is by contemplating this causal chain that delusion is claimed to be eliminated.
It is not enough to learn these twelve links once, or to even memorize them, since they can be conveniently forgotten, especially in times when we need them the most, such as during powerful emotional experiences or when we are distracted. These causal links should be contemplated frequently and sincerely, over a lifetime. This frequent reflection forces us to do something we are not usually inclined, or well-positioned, to do: consider how our delusions may be conditioning our perceptions, desires, aversions, and judgments. The hope is that we can create a habit of thinking that fully recognizes the causal relationship between our delusional assumptions and our (and others’) suffering and, by doing so, we begin to deconstruct and eventually eliminate our delusion.
There is, I think, deep insight in the claim that delusion is maintained through a failure or refusal to recognize certain cause and effect relationships. We could accurately characterize white delusion as a failure or refusal to recognize certain racially significant causal relationships. In a recent study by sociologist Jennifer Mueller, 105 college students were asked to write analyses of their family’s intergenerational wealth transmission using concepts they had been taught in class, such as the racial wealth gap, historically discriminatory asset-building policies, and racial disparities across different kinds of capital.25 That is, students were asked to write an explicitly racial history of their family’s wealth transmission. In her analysis of their responses, Mueller identified four “epistemic maneuvers” of white racial delusion. The first, evasion, is when a student completely fails to make racebased understandings of her data. Students who used this maneuver would present their data but avoid using any terms relating to race or racism.26 This was striking, especially considering that the assignment (which was graded) explicitly required a race-based analysis.
The second epistemic maneuver is “willful colorblindness,” which “introduced alternative factors to neutralize evidence of white privilege.”27 For example, one student, who in her paper had acknowledged the benefits her white family received from discriminatory housing policies, ultimately rejected the claim that white privilege contributed to her family’s wealth because her family were immigrants who did not know English. She used an alternative factor—lack of English proficiency—to neutralize the evidence of white privilege. Tautological ignorance, the third epistemic maneuver, “produces racially conscious logic, but embeds morally laden assumptions of whites’ sincere, passive ignorance.”28 Students who used this maneuver would admit their family’s race-based privilege but insist that their family members and ancestors could not have possibly known the moral implications of the policies from which they benefited. The final epistemic maneuver is mystification, which produces “racially conscious logic, but embed(s) doubt and mystery about logically related solutions.”29 After producing cogent racial analyses, students who used this maneuver would then claim that they did not know what to do about racism, that it was too embedded in society to change, and doubted that there were any practical solutions whatsoever.
These epistemic maneuvers show a deep unwillingness on the part of whites to recognize and take seriously the causal connections between their own (and their families’) privilege (as assessed in terms of wealth in Mueller’s study) and the racial injustice suffered by people of color. Mueller’s analysis shows some of the common places in which logical reasoning about causation can break down: we can refuse to acknowledge any causal connection at all (evasion) or we can acknowledge some causal connections but fail to continue, by either refusing to apply what we know (willful colorblindness), applying what we know but refusing to acknowledge the implications of it (tautological colorblindness), or applying what we know and recognizing its implications but failing to admit our own agency in altering the causal chain in the future (mystification).
The epistemic maneuvers that maintain white ignorance are cognitive errors, often surprisingly obvious ones. In this sense, they are similar in kind to the errors that Buddhist ethicists are keen to point out: my refusal to acknowledge that my habit of prioritizing myself over others contributes to my suffering is, at least in part, a cognitive error; it is failure to fully apply consistent reasoning to my situation. Similarly, white delusion, as Mueller’s study illustrates, is a deep cognitive error, a failure to be fully rational and to apply knowledge in a consistent, logical way. So, although it is not the case that white delusion (or general delusion, for that matter) can be eradicated by simple exposure to knowledge, Mueller’s analysis suggests that interventions in critical reasoning about the specific causal relationships between white privilege and racial injustice could be helpful in addressing white delusion. To borrow from Buddhist philosophers, such reasoning about specific causal relations must be sincerely and repeatedly practiced in order to be remembered and applied in the right way at the right time. This is because the cognitive errors that are characteristic of white delusion are not so much failures to know something—recall that many of Mueller’s students were able to present all sorts of relevant facts and theories about racial injustice—but about failures to make the right (that is, logical) connections, to apply knowledge in an appropriate way, and to make rational predictions about the future based on that knowledge.
The alternative is Black Buddhist Meditation---Only the praxis of dharma offers a path to heal racialized trauma that transcends generations, transforming stored physical and psychological pain into resilience and liberation
Vesely-Flad 22, [Rima Vesely-Flad (Rima Vesely-Flad, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy and the Director of Peace and Justice Studies at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice.), "Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation," NYU Press, https://nyupress.org/9781479810499/black-buddhists-and-the-black-radical-tradition/, accessed 7-17-2024, April 2022, Edited for problematic language] Cogito
Trauma Stored in the Body: Black Radical thinkers, as ancestors and elders who promoted psychological Practices Psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem, in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, notes the wide array of physical illnesses that result from racialized intergenerational trauma: As many researchers now believe, the ongoing violations of the Black body and heart have resulted in widespread trauma. This racialized trauma shows up as an array of adaptive but dysfunctional behaviors, including hypervigilance, heightened anxiety and suspicion, ADD/ADHD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and addiction. It can also appear as dysfunctional and non-adaptive behavior such as disordered thinking, difficulty concentrating, panic attacks, learned helplessness, self-hatred, hopelessness, depression, and a survival reflex that tends to involve violence. As Joy DeGruy and others have noted, all of these are common symptoms of a pervasive and persistent stress disorder. In many African American bodies, this trauma has led to a variety of physical problems, the most common of which are high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, compromised immune systems, heart problems, digestive disorders, chronic inflammation, and musculoskeletal disorders. . . . For anyone to genuinely address these health issues, the person needs to address the trauma that fuels them. Without that foundational healing, all other healing becomes difficult or impossible, because the body is still stuck in the trauma. 90
A plethora of research illuminates how trauma becomes stored in the body. Several influential studies detailed by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk in his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma demonstrate that after traumatic experiences, bodies reexperience terror, rage, helplessness, and the urge to fight or take flight. 91 Van der Kolk notes that all trauma is preverbal and therefore is akin to the experience of a stroke when it is difficult to speak. He notes that the brain captures images that return as nightmares and flashbacks. Unprocessed sense fragments from the traumatic experience—such as sounds, smells, physical sensations— register separately from the story itself. Time, then, does not matter: the trauma can be experienced one day as if it had happened the prior day, even if the actual experience took place in the previous decade.
Van der Kolk’s research shows that images of past trauma activate the right side of the brain and deactivate the left. The right side of the brain, colloquially known as the “emotional brain,” develops first in the womb: it carries memories of touch, sound, smell, and even intuition. It is associated with art, visual images, spatial understanding, and tactile movements, what van der Kolk refers to as “the music of experience.”92 The left side of the brain, conversely, is associated with remembering facts, statistics, vocabulary, sequencing, and executive functioning. It is denoted as the “rational brain,” logical, analytical, able to name, compare, understand, communicate subjective experience. 93 When the left brain is deactivated and the right brain is activated, the right brain acts as if the traumatic event were happening in the moment. Van der Kolk’s research demonstrates that trauma causes the left, rational brain to deactivate and the right, emotional brain to become highly activated.
When the right brain is activated by trauma and relives traumatic experiences as if they were happening in the moment, the body responds by increasing its production of adrenaline—“fight or flight” stress hormones that are present in the body to help individuals respond to danger and threat. This increase in adrenaline results in attention problems, irritability, sleep disorders, and long-term health issues that are sometimes called “underlying conditions.” Much of the body’s energy focuses on suppressing inner chaos in the aftermath of trauma.
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