Imagine my delight to discover a Buddhist centre walking distance from my home. It was only ten minutes away and that weekend they were starting a book club to discuss a book I had recently read.
I head over on Saturday morning, a bit early, as I like having time to socialise if possible. I am pleasantly surprised to arrive and find that socialisation is built into their schedule. When they say it starts at 11:00 they mean it starts with a chance to mingle for a half hour before the book club begins. It’s an opportunity to connect with those who were there for a Mahayana course that morning as well as those arriving for the book club, and for new folks like me to feel welcome.
People approach and offer a hand, their name, and curiosity:
Have you been here before?
What’s your background?
Would you like an orange?
I answer questions and offer my own:
How long have you been involved with this centre?
Are you here for the book club or from the Mahayana class?
How are you enjoying the class so far?
Today is special as there is a cake to celebrate someone’s birthday. We all move around the recipient and then around the cake. I’m offered a slice and politely decline but stand with the group where it is being dished out, catching snippets of conversation, eager to join in.
The group is shifting, changing. A few people from the morning class leave, and a few people arrive, there just for the book club. Like so many dharma centres, the majority of people are women, and almost everyone is white. In fact, there is only one person of colour out of the fifteen to twenty people coming and going in the small space.
A white woman strikes up a conversation with me. It starts around Buddhism. She asks what community I practice in, and how long I’ve been involved here in Vancouver. When I say I’ve only lived there about six months, she asks where I was before.
This is always complicated, but I do my best to explain with brevity my situation and the headache of immigration paperwork. I explaint that I’m married to an American who I met while I was living in the UK. She expresses surprise, as so many people do, to learn that being married does not really make immigration that much easier.
“Oh yes, it’s a myth that marriage makes immigration easier.” And then I add, as I always do, that this is coming from me as a white, English speaking middle-class woman. “We don’t need physical walls. We have walls in the form of paperwork. I can only imagine how much more difficult it would be if I didn’t speak English or if I wasn’t white.”
She nods, her brow furrowed. She agrees this is unfortunate. That she was just thinking the same thing.
I tell her that getting my UK citizenship was not that difficult compared to what I’ve gone through with the US and Canadian systems. She nods again, expressing understanding. And she comments that I got out of the UK “…just in the nick of time, then.”
I laugh and tell her, “Yes, but the irony is that we finally do have a legal right to live together as I’ve got a green card on its way — but of course that involves living Stateside, which isn’t very appealing with the current Republican president.” I shrug and tell her, “I remind myself that the Bodhisattva practices in the middle of the fire.”
She congratulates me on this view and says she really doesn’t understand what is going on down there. “But at least,” she says, “it’s temporary.”
This lands interestingly for me. I think of the day of the election results and how many people said ‘It’s only temporary’ when I expressed my distress and fear. It reminded me of the way most adults did nothing about bullying when I was in Junior High, telling me it would get better and it was just “a few more years”. It’s true that eventually, it did get better, but being told it was temporary when I couldn’t see an end in sight and didn’t know how much worse it might get before that end, was little solace. It was dismissive of a genuine problem actively affecting not just me, but most of my peers.
This is in the back of my mind, as I tell her about my observations when I went to Montreal for my green card interview. “I realised that French-Canadian culture is rooted in colonial pride. It was very uncomfortable for me.”
“Oh yes!” She says. “It’s so true. They are so racist there.”
She proceeds to tell me a story of a French-Canadian man she worked with and the outrageously racist things he would say. Her energy is increasing, as is her volume. She is emphatic, the way I often am when I’m passionate about something. She tells me about calling him out, confronting him for his unchecked beliefs.
“I get it,” I say. “It’s such an ingrained part of their culture. Especially what I saw in the Catholic church there.”
“Not just the Catholics,” she says. “The Protestants too!”
I’m nodding along, agreeing, thinking Here is someone who gets it…
And then she says “And I hate when people tell me that Residential Schools were just about Native kids. White kids were taken into them too. It affected everybody. So many communities. Not just Native ones.”
My practice so often involves sitting with anxiety and so I watch, as I have countless times, as my body responds to what she is saying.
“It’s not like the Americans.”
My thoughts start racing and I am flooded with cortisol.
“We were trying to be helpful, to do something good. The intention was there and it was right.”
My stomach is fizzing as digestion shuts down and I can feel my hands and legs begin to tremor.
“And I hate when people call it genocide. Ethnic cleansing, maybe, but genocide? That’s taking it too far. I think of the whole thing as Bodhichitta.”
My thoughts are stacking up but she’s speaking faster than I can respond. I touch on what she is saying, noting all the moments of self-deception, the wall she’s built, the strength with which she is holding onto her rightness. I wqnt to say something about impact versus intention. I want to ask how ethnic cleansing is not a form of genocide. I want to understand how she can look at the colonialism of the U.S. and the colonialism of Canada and not see all the equivilencies. I try to interject, to point to historical records, to what was called and written down as ‘The Indian Problem’.
“Well, it was a government mandated…” I try to say.
“No, it wasn’t.” She cites someone she’s read, a man’s name I immediately forget, telling me how he explains that it wasn’t targetting Native kids at all. “And I read a lot,” she says, her words coming in a flood of righteousness now. She’s stabbing her finger at the table in front of her, waving her arms, her voice raised. And then she says, “I have native friends and family members…”
I find my voice.
I don’t think as the words come from my heart directly, “I don’t choose to use those I know to justify my ignorance. My social circle doesn’t have any bearing on the legitimacy of my opinions.”
She stops, looking at me directly. “You’re saying whether or not I’m friends with Native people makes no difference to whether or not I’m a racist?”
“Yes.” I say.
She sputters, protests that she is not racist.
Thankfully, people are moving towards the shrine room. The book club is going to start. I can leave it here, I think, grateful, shaky, anxiety still running high, turning away from her.
She, however, is not done, and proceeds to say that she is unwilling to feel shame knowing that her ancestors brought infrastructure, roads and the railroad to the land. I tell her I think it’s important to acknowledge one's ancestry, and it benefits no one to deny or minimize the harm caused. “I choose to own the colonial aspect of my lineage and that I benefit unfairly from that.”
And then I walk away.
I worry that I haven’t responded very well but as I enter the shrine room and sit down I am aware that I responded from a loving heart. It saddened me to see this woman so convinced of her own rightness and so unwilling to engage with her own racism. She was capable of seeing it in another, in a man she used to work with, but unable to see the connection. I empathized with her, as I know what it’s like to go on the defensive in order to set myself apart from ‘those’ people. I’ve done it before. What person hasn’t? It’s part of the impule to prove our goodness.
I was also thinking: This is why so many Buddhist groups in the West are so white. She ‘thinks of the whole thing as Bodhicitta’ and yet she is unwilling to let her heart break for the separations we cause by ranking human worth and distorting human value. She can’t see how she’s still sold on European and white superiority.
When I engage with teachers these days my questions are often about how to deal with this kind of situation. Ignorance runs so deep, so strong, and is so willful. How do you respond to another’s ignorance? How do you do so with compassion? How do you do so in a way that doesn’t shut them down but invites them to get curious and work with self-deception? How do you invite them to curiosity without just telling them what you think they should or shouldn’t believe?
I am always told to only engage in this sort of conversation with someone I know and someone who is seeking to free themselves from ignorance. I’m also told to let people own their own minds and just mind my own business. I’m also told, when encounters with people who share a privileged identity, to step up and break the silence so I’m not complicit in the systems that benefit us.
I worried that it wasn’t my place to say anything, but at the same time, I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had just smiled and nodded. It would have made me feel worse to say nothing. I thought of how passionate she got about it, and how she said ‘Don’t get me started’ before she got started, and how much of what she said implied she has gone on such a tirade before, almost like it was rehearsed. And I thought about how many other people, because of that threat of violence, would have said nothing. Smiled. Nodded. Agreed while not internally agreeing. Perhaps because they embody the very identities she was so dismissive of.
So no, I didn’t ‘know’ her, but she’s a white woman, middle-class, and therefore a peer, albeit one with an age difference. Besides that, she was in the Mahayana course and a regular of that centre. I take that to mean she does want to free herself from ignorance, and so I wasn’t crossing a line. I couldn’t have justified silence in the name of social niceties.
Could I have handled it better? Probably, yes. I could have asked more questions to help her better engage in critical thinking. I could have asked if the books she’s read were written by Indigenous people or white people. I could have asked her why she felt that the infrastructure brought over by Europeans was superior to the infrastructure already in place amongst the many nations of this land pre-contact. I could have asked if she was aware of what were called the ‘Assimilation laws’ that mandated that there be ‘not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department’. I could have asked if she was aware that Hitler admired and wanted to emulate the work of white colonialists of North America to erase the original people of this land.
I did not have these questions to hand, but I don’t think I responded entirely unskillfully despite this. She named her racism herself at the end of our exchange, even if she also said she wanted to ‘agree to disagree’ as I walked away from her. I didn’t feel hatred or anger towards her, although I was fearful about ever going back to that centre afterwards. What I felt was tender — a tender heart of sadness — at the momentum of ignorance and the harm it causes.
I did end up going back, one more time. I brought a book with me, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. The anxiety came back as soon as I left my house for the centre, but I went anyway because it wasn’t about me. Even though I was afraid to encounter her again, my fear was worth abiding with for the sake of our collective liberation.
She wasn’t there that day but one of the other book club participants said they were going to see her that week. I gave them the book, told them it was a gift for her. I don’t know if she ever read it, and it’s not really my business if she did. That wasn’t the point and how she works with her mind really isn’t my business.
I gifted it to her as a reminder to myself that there was a time when I held similar beliefs; I too am a product of a colonial, white supremacist culture and school system. There was a time when I would have sided with her on many things or not been able to name so explicitly the flaws in her reasoning. I gifted it to her as a way to keep my heart open, to ensure I didn’t demonise her or write her off, as a reminder to myself that we all have the same potential for waking up and freeing ourselves from ignorance. I gifted it to her as a way of remembering I still have my own work to do and part of that is not trying to fix or change people, but just meet them where they are at with grace, equinimity, and a genuine belief that we can all be better and that doesn’t mean we aren’t already good.
Originally published on Medium. Edited from original.