Event date:13:00-15:00 (UTC) Monday, January 24, 2022
Organizer: Oxford University
While confronting whiteness is often seen as the work of progressive social justice, Buddhist practice and philosophy offers a rich framework for, and imperative to do, such work. Methodologically combining ethnographic and philosophical approaches, this paper aims to show both what contemporary Buddhists have done to alleviate the suffering caused by whiteness and what resources the tradition offers for extending such work. It begins by situating Buddhist approaches to “waking up from whiteness” within the larger movement for racial justice within American Buddhism.
Next, it shows how the Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy provides helpful tools for practitioners in recognizing and being liberated from whiteness, which from the perspective of Yogacara is an historically conditioned, socially embedded identity structure that has the power to shape our worlds of experience and that can and should be made an object of inquiry, understanding, and relinquishment. Finally, we reflect on the responsibility of Buddhist scholars in Buddhist racial justice work.
Lecture Report:
“Whiteness is a Sankhāra”: Racial Justice as Buddhist Practice
Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism
Lecture by Dr. Ann Gleig (University of Central Florida) and Dr. Joy Brennan (Kenyon College).
24 January 2022
Report by Qingniao Li and Huynh Quoc Tuan (both at University of Oxford)
February 5, 2022
Screenshots by Qingniao Li and Huynh Quoc Tuan
On January 24, 2022, the fifth lecture in the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism 2021–2022 was hosted by the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, in cooperation with the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation. The title of the lecture was “‘Whiteness is a Sankhāra’: Racial Justice as Buddhist Practice.” It was jointly given by two guest speakers, Dr. Ann Gleig (University of Central Florida) and Dr. Joy Brennan (Kenyon College), and was responded to by discussant Dr. Jessica Zu (University of Southern California Dornsife).
The lecture was conducted online via Zoom webinar and live streamed via YouTube with two audio channels in English and in Chinese. The lecture was delivered in English with simultaneous Chinese interpretation.
Dr. Matthew Orsborn, Departmental Lecturer of Buddhist Studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, was the chair and moderator of the lecture. He opened the event with a welcoming address and introduced the guest speakers and the discussant.
Before getting into the lecture proper, Dr. Orsborn invited Dr. Rey-Sheng Her, Deputy CEO of Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation and Associate Professor at Tzu Chi University, to say a few words on behalf of the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, the sponsor of the lecture. On behalf of the Tzu Chi Foundation and Dharma Master Cheng Yen, Dr. Her expressed his gratitude to all the participants and speakers.
In this lecture, Dr. Gleig and Dr. Brennan combine ethnographic and philosophical approaches to show both what some Buddhists have done to alleviate the suffering caused by whiteness and what resources the tradition offers for extending such work. According to the two speakers, while confronting whiteness is often seen as the work of progressive social justice, Buddhist practice and philosophy offers a rich framework for and imperative to do such work. The lecture begins by situating Buddhist approaches to “waking up from whiteness” within the larger movement for racial justice within American Buddhism. Drawing from Critical Whiteness Studies, the speakers identify whiteness as a contingent historic sociocultural category that maintains oppressive power relations. Situating it within the wider context of racial justice work in American Buddhism, here they focus specifically on white awareness work that also articulates whiteness as a form of conditioning that impedes Buddhist practice, community, and liberation. The lecture was delivered in two parts. The first part was given by Dr. Gleig and the second part by Dr. Brennan.
Lecture Part 1
In the first part of the lecture, Dr. Gleig first briefly introduced the topic, then explored the methodology and main contents of the talk.
Before moving to other issues related to whiteness, Dr. Gleig asked “What is whiteness?” To answer this, she emphasized the historic and contingent construction of whiteness for which the field distinguishes “whiteness” as a social practice and as white-skinned people. While white-skinned people are conditioned by whiteness and benefit from it at the expense of those deemed non-white, they are not reducible to it. She found that, as Eric Tranby and Douglas Hartman note, some of the key analytic insights of Critical Whiteness Studies are the recognition that (i) the Jim Crow era of white supremacy in the United States has been replaced by a subtler legitimation of structural dominance; (ii) the construction of white identity as normative, ahistoric, and universal; and (iii) the centrality of individualistic ideals to whiteness.
Dr. Gleig noted that recent years have seen an increase of primary literature and secondary scholarship documenting and contextualizing the racial justice efforts of American Buddhists of Colour across heritage and convert communities. One major area has illuminated the exclusion of Asian American Buddhist heritage communities from mainstream narratives of Buddhism in America. Another major area has been to trace how Buddhists of Colour in white majority saṃghas have attempted to make their communities more inclusive.
Dr. Gleig drew our attention to the significance of white awareness work for white practitioners. She added that, within this broader field of racial justice in American Buddhism, Buddhists of Color have increasingly called on white practitioners to confront their white conditioning. This is articulated both as a practice of inclusive community and a practice of liberation. For example, La Sarmiento, the founder of the People of Color (POC) Affinity Group at Insight Meditation of Washington said that: “Talking to white folks is pretty exhausting. They need to do their own work.”
In addition, a number of pieces by white American Buddhists that interweave data on structural racism with Buddhist teachings have appeared in primary literature such as community documents, the mainstream Buddhist press, and Buddhist blogs. These narratives name whiteness as a form of conditioning that is a barrier to Buddhist practice, community, and awakening. The last few years have seen the emergence of white awareness Buddhist groups in and across American Insight and Zen communities. One of the most noticeable ones is the New York Insight Meditation Center, founded in 1997.
Lecture Part 2
In the second part of the lecture, Dr. Joy Brennan showed how the Yogācāra school of Buddhist philosophy provides helpful tools for practitioners in recognizing and being liberated from whiteness. According to Dr. Brennan, early Yogācāra thought offers an account of the nature of the mind, the mind’s relationship to the world of experience, and the mind’s role in perpetuating delusion that can diagnose key delusive features of whiteness.
In modern whiteness studies, whiteness is often understood to have three major features: individualistic, ahistorical, and transparent to itself. However, as Dr. Brennan pointed out, when situating this diagnosis within a Yogācāra Buddhist framework, whiteness is a historically conditioned and socially embedded identity structure that has the power to shape our worlds of experience. According to Dr. Brennan, this identity structure can and should be made an object of inquiry, understanding, and relinquishment.
In addition, Dr. Brennan suggested that Yogācāra offers a Buddhist path and practice-based set of responses to the delusion intrinsic to, and suffering wrought by, whiteness as a collective identity structure. There are three Yogācāra teachings that can be applied to the problems of whiteness. First, it is possible and necessary to gain insight into the historicity and intersubjectivity of the mind, nondualism between subjective awareness and its objects, and the collective aspect of karma. Second, Yogācāra names the state of awareness that occurs beyond the delusive state that fails to recognize the nature of the mind as historically conditioned, intersubjective, and nondual. Third, Yogācāra recognizes that the practitioners’ aspirations to themselves are reality-forming. We must constantly cultivate insight, relinquish our delusions, and aspire toward a new world not constructed based on those delusions. Therefore, Dr. Brennan believed that the Yogācāra texts support the idea that right understanding of their concepts entails actualizing them, and in turn, actualizing them entails seeing how our own constructed psycho-social identities work in relation to our shared worlds of experience.
By way of conclusion, Dr. Brennan reflected on the responsibility of Buddhist scholars in Buddhist racial justice work. Dr. Brennan pointed out that, as scholars such as Joseph Cheah and Natalie Quli have shown, orientalist constructions of what does and does not count as real Buddhism have resulted in the marginalization and exclusion of Asian American Buddhists. When alt-right white Buddhists claim that Buddhist antiracism work is illegitimate as there is no textual precedence for it, they are also reflecting and reproducing that history. Indeed, alt-right Buddhists explicitly draw on Buddhist Studies scholarship to support their white supremacist and deeply misogynist interpretations of the tradition. Therefore, Dr. Brennan urged that Buddhist scholars should take Buddhist antiracist work more seriously. She remarked: “Our choice is not whether or not to have impact, but rather what impact we will have. Will our scholarship merely reproduce and re-center preexisting social and religious power dynamics and demographics, or will it give voice to those at the margins?”
Response from Discussant
Continuing the discussion from the question Dr. Brennan raised above, in her response, Dr. Zu thought that post-orientalist study urged scholars to take seriously Asian Buddhist thinkers as equal co-producers of knowledge, instead of passive informants, and take seriously their insights as knowledge, instead of anthropological, philological, or historical data. According to Dr. Zu, these thinkers emphasized the importance of making knowledge serve humanistic values and they also vehemently debated on what should be the core values. In addition, they also asked themselves, their contemporaries, and the few Westerners who cared to converse with them the same question raised today: “what is scholarship for?”
Returning to the theme of the lecture, Dr. Zu stressed that: “Whiteness is NOT about which identity box we check. Rather, it is a psycho-social structure in which we are all conditioned by and implicated in. We all need to unlearn this harmful conditioning.”
Q&A:
This thought-provoking lecture invited many excellent questions from the audience, for example:
(1) “Is this phenomenon of ‘White Identity’ unique, since ‘culture is hidden from its owners’?”
(2) “Dr. Brennan has clearly made the case for how and why Yogācāra philosophy can contribute to this discussion. Do you think that Yogācāra philosophy is uniquely suited to engaging in these conversations, or are there other schools of Buddhist philosophy that can also engage in productive conversation with issues of whiteness?”
(3) “Has Prof. Gleig found any attempt by anti-racial awareness Buddhists to link their own stances to ancient, ‘traditional’ (so to speak) Buddhist texts, besides adopting ‘antimodernist,’ conservative, and alt-right themes? In other words, did such communities put any effort in presenting an essentialized Buddhism which rejects critical race theory on (supposed) ‘inherently Buddhist doctrinal basis’?”
Take-home Messages:
To conclude the event, Dr. Orsborn invited the speakers and discussant to say a few last words, a kind of “take-home message” to the audience. Dr. Gleig quickly replied with a smile: “Racial justice work is Buddhist!” Dr. Brennan emphasized that “collective identity structures are also identity structures as the Buddha-dharma analyses them. That was true at the time old texts were written and it’s true now, and we have to take it seriously.” For Dr. Zu, “We all need to do both individual and collective work.”
Dr. Orsborn wrapped up the lecture by offering his final thoughts:
“This is obviously a critical topic not just for Buddhist studies or even for humanities at large, but this is something where we see that Buddhism can be applied in this era of racial tensions and issues that we seem to be seeing increasingly occurring in this globalized world and in society that we live. It’s some really important material here and it’s really powerful food for thought.”
Bibliography
Brennan, Joy. Mind Only on the Path: Centering Liberation in Early Yogacara Thought. Forthcoming.
Gleig, Ann. American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Gleig, Ann, and Amy Langenberg. Abuse, Sex and the Sangha. New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming.
Gleig, Ann, and Scott Mitchell, eds. The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Zu, Jessica Xiaomin. Liberation Buddhology: Lü Cheng (1896–1989) and the Birth of a Yogācāra Social Theory. Forthcoming.