Test It As You Would a Piece of Gold
A quiet settles over the small group as we adjust ourselves on our cushions and turn our attention to the teacher. We have created an intimate circle in the centre of the shrine room, an ample space, easily able to accommodate fifty or more people. We are invited, by the teacher, to share our name and where we were born. She motions to the woman to her right, who smiles softly, looking around at each of our faces, before starting us off.
I bring to this circle my current practice: to examine and interrogate my whiteness and the whiteness of these spaces.
I have been a practitioner since 2008, attending various centres throughout the UK, Canada and the United States since 2012, and always they are dominated by white faces. In this group, there are two people of colour out of a total of ten. I note, as well, only one man, which is not unusual.
But my inquiry is not about how few men sit in the audience versus how many often sit in the role of the teacher — although that is my inquiry too, always, in the back of my mind. In the forefront, for months now, I’m working on race, my relationship to it, and the way these spaces have become dominated by whiteness.
As I listen to each person’s introduction, I note that three individuals in this room are immigrants, but that I fail to name them as such right away because they are also white. I see this implicit bias, the way my brain associates immigration status with a skin colour, and make a note to examine this more carefully in the future. I set an intention to name it when I meet another immigrant of white European or white colonial descent.
I also note my surprise at discovering this bias in myself.
I lived and worked in the UK for six years. A white individual would complain to me about immigrants ‘coming over here, taking our jobs.’
“What,” I’d retort, “Like me?”
They would sputter, trying to explain, that no, not like me. They didn’t mean me. I was different.
“Why is that?” I would ask, my eyebrow raised.
As a white person, I know how uncomfortable it is to have my racism pointed out. Particularly as a white person who is also a woman and also queer and therefore all too familiar with what it feels like to be marginalised, tokenised, and thought of as less valuable as a human being by my embodiment and birth.
But I see no benefit in not looking at my unendorsed racism — the things that act subtly in the connections my brain makes so the world is simpler to navigate. I look to Dharma to support this practice, as the entire path of Buddhism is built around a willingness to examine and interrogate. Whether it’s testing the truth of the four noble truths or endeavouring to understand emptiness by seeking and not finding inherent qualities, this is a path of opening up, questioning and curiosity.
My wife asks me what it is in the four noble truths that I think white people need to connect with. I don’t hesitate to say, “The causes of suffering. Or more specifically, that we cause suffering.”
It is not a problem to come to the dharma because we want to alleviate our own suffering. Indeed, this is why I found this path. The problem arises when we use the path as yet another layer to help us avoid letting life touch us.
It is not enough to understand that there is suffering if we do not take the added step of examining the causes and conditions for it, and therefore how we contribute to suffering.
This is where meditation is a wonderful tool. Meditation is a practice of sitting with our experience, no matter what is going on. We are training in making friends with ourselves, which is to say, we are training in learning how to show up for our full selves.
As a white person, I learn to sit with the discomfort of my racism. I sit with the ancestral knowledge of genocide carried out through systemic ethnic cleansing. I sit with a lineage of white supremacy that has damaged or destroyed the lineage of so many of my fellow human beings. I sit with the awkwardness of having my racism pointed out to me by a loved one. I sit, and I examine, as I would a piece of gold, in accordance with the instruction of the Buddha.
I do this out of love and a longing to heal, to liberate all beings from samsara.
And from this, compassion blossoms. When I encounter unendorsed racism in another, I do not label them ‘enemy’ or ‘bad’. I see their humanness and let my heart break for them. It is not pity but a sense of being ‘one with’. I know what it feels like to justify or reason my way out of taking responsibility for the part I play in causing harm, and for the work I have yet to do. Self-deception is layers deep and invested in protecting an ego that repeatedly asserts itself in sneaky ways.
I think of the times when someone has firmly, but lovingly, pointed out flawed reasoning or a lack of critical thought in something I have said. I have learned to take such criticisms as opportunities, rather than threats. I understand the difference between who I am and what I think — my thoughts are ever-changing, ephemeral, and therefore not definitive of who I am.
I understand this to be true of a fellow white person who is locking down, using vitriol to mask that wounded part of themselves that comes from an ancestry of colonialism and the destruction of nations established long before European contact. I ache for how this wounded part cannot heal without examination, without application of the right sort of medicine, and until it does, no part of the wound of inequality will heal anywhere.
It may sound trite or even full of woo, but this response is grounded in my understanding of our interconnectedness. When I connect with the understanding that no one and nothing exists objectively, it stops being about me and starts being about ‘us’ and ‘we’. From this place comes the realisation that your well-being is as important as my own, and my well-being is dependant upon yours as much as yours is dependant on mine. Whether we are white, or Black, or Indigenous, or use a wheelchair, or are transgender, or queer, or bisexual, or born into poverty or born into wealth or any combination of above, our happiness is dependant upon the care we show to one another.
I don’t always get it right. Confronting racism in another is difficult to do, and not comfortable at all. But I cannot remain silent as silence is too easily interpreted as agreement. So insert myself. I step up and speak out, firmly, but lovingly. Because no one is just way, and people can change, and no one does anything because they want to feel worse.
~
Originally published on Medium.
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Thank you!