Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections

by Charles Johnson (Afterword), Jan Willis (Foreword by), Sharon Suh (Contribution by), Ann Gleig Ann Gleig, associate professor of religi University (Contribution by), Emily McRae (Contribution by)

Overview

The motivation behind this important volume is to weave together two distinct, but we think complementary, traditions – the philosophical engagement with race/whiteness and Buddhist philosophy – in order to explore the ways in which these traditions can inform, correct, and improve each other. This exciting and critically informed volume will be the first of its kind to bring together essays that explicitly connect these two traditions and will mark a major step both in understanding race and whiteness (with the help of Buddhist philosophy) and in understanding Buddhist philosophy (with the help of philosophy of race and theorizations of whiteness). We expand upon a small, but growing, body of work that applies Buddhist philosophical analyses to whiteness and racial injustice in contemporary U.S. culture. Buddhist philosophy has much to contribute to furthering our understanding of whiteness and racial identity, the mechanisms that create and maintain white supremacy, and the possibility of dismantling white supremacy. We are interested both in the possible insights that Buddhist metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical analyses can bring to understanding race and whiteness, as well as the potential limitations of such Buddhist-inspired approaches.



In their chapters, contributors draw on Buddhist philosophical and contemplative traditions to offer fresh, insightful, and powerful perspectives on issues regarding racial identity and whiteness, including such themes as cultural appropriation, mechanisms of racial injustice and racial justice, phenomenology of racial oppression, epistemologies of racial ignorance, liberatory practices with regard to racism, Womanism, and the intersections of gender-based, raced-based, and sexuality-based oppressions. Authors make use of both contemporary and ancient Buddhist philosophical and contemplative traditions. These include various Asian traditions, including Theravada, Mahayana, Tantra, and Zen, as well as comparatively new American Buddhist traditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498581035
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	05/13/2019
Series:	Philosophy of Race
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	695 KB

About the Author

George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Emory University.

Emily McRae is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico.
Leah Kalmanson is assistant professor of philosophy and religion at Drake University.
Carolyn M. Jones Medine is the inaugural All Shall Be Well Professor of Religion and a professor in and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.
Jessica Locke is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland, USA.
George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. Yancy has published over 250 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, books, and at various news sites. Yancy is known for his numerous essays and interviews in the New York Times' philosophy column The Stone, and Truthout. He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including most recently Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future and In Sheep's Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (coedited with philosopher Bill Bywater. Yancy is editor of the Philosophy of Race Book Series at Bloomsbury.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Jan Willis

Introduction

Emily McRae and George Yancy

1. “We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming to Bring You This Very Important Public Service Announcement . . .”: aka Buddhism as Usual in the Academy

Sharon Suh

2. Undoing Whiteness in American Buddhist Modernism: Critical, Collective, and Contextual Turns

Ann Gleig

3. White Delusion and Avidya: A Buddhist Approach to Understanding and Deconstructing White Ignorance

Emily McRae

4. Whiteness and the Construction of Buddhist Philosophy in Meiji Japan

Leah Kalmanson

5. Racism and Anatta: Black Buddhists, Embodiment, and Interpretations of Non-Self

Rima Vesely-Flad

6. “The Tranquil Meditator”

Laurie Cassidy

7. “Beyond Vietnam”: Martin Luther King, Jr., Thích Nh?t H?nh, and the Confluence of Black and Engaged Buddhism in the Vietnam War

Carolyn M. Jones Medine

8. The Unbearable Will to Whiteness

Jasmine Syedullah

9. Making Consciousness an Ethical Project: Moral Phenomenology in Buddhist Ethics and White Anti-Racism

Jessica Locke

10. “bell hooks Made Me a Buddhist”: Liberatory Cross-Cultural Learning—Or Is This Just Another Case of How White People Steal Everything?

Carol J. Moeller

11. Excoriating the Demon of Whiteness from Within: Disrupting Whiteness through the Tantric Buddhist Practice of Chöd and Exploring Whiteness from Within the Tradition

Lama Justin von Bujdoss

12. The Interdependence and Emptiness of Whiteness

Bryce Huebner

13. Taking and Making Refuge in Racial [Whiteness] Awareness and Racial Justice Work

Rhonda Magee

14. A Buddhist Phenomenology of the White Mind

Joy Brennan

15. The White Feminism in Rita Gross’ Critique of Gender Identities and Reconstruction of Buddhism

Hsiao Lan Hu

Afterword

Charles Johnson

Editorial Reviews

With essays from more than 15 thinkers, including Tricycle contributing editor Charles Johnson, this book offers new scholarly ideas on Buddhism’s equal access to liberation in the context of the persistent racism experienced in America and beyond. The editors write in the introduction that “racism or white supremacy is like the water in which we all swim”—though only some of us notice that we’re submerged. Contributors from across traditions, who also draw on feminist and cultural studies in addition to race theory, ask whether we can use Buddhist philosophy to put an end to racism and white supremacy just as we apply teachings to cut through our sense of “self.

Tricycle: The Buddist Review

It is high time for a book like this. For too long the story of the transmission of Buddhism to the West has been told without attention to the ways that transmission is inflected by race and racism. This carefully curated collection of essays opens that question, and offers a rich set of perspectives on the complex interaction of Buddhist transmission, ideology, and practice with race and racism in the West. A must read for anyone interested in contemporary global Buddhism.

Jay Garfield

Buddhism and Whiteness is highly recommended to anyone interested in modern Buddhism, as well as an interesting alternative lens for those studying the development of racism in North America and Europe.

H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online

This volume opens with a foreword by noted scholar of religion Jan Willis in which she observes that although there is only one race, Homo sapiens, racism still thrives. The collection documents views from the peripheries that reveal that LGBTQ people and people of color are challenged in white US Buddhist communities as if they have no place. Often they are not seen at all. The way forward, Laurie Cassidy writes, is to listen deeply and take responsibility for the shared reality of all people. In his essay Bryce Huebner argues that “races are not biologically real” and “race is a conceptual fiction.” This book is about modifying practices as well as changing minds. This reviewer was impressed by the program—recommended by Jessica Locke (following Patricia Devine)—of implicit bias intervention. Metta ("lovingkindness") meditation to develop a competing and positive narrative to the racist one about blackness is also effective. This important book offers ideas and values that could change how meditation works. In an afterword Charles Johnson writes that what is new here “is the effort to find common ground between ancient Buddhist ideas and principles with feminist theory, existential phenomenology, and Critical Race Theory, and Critical Whiteness Studies.”

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

Choice Reviews

It is impossible to read Buddhism and Whiteness and not experience an itch for action. This timely—and indeed, “futurely”— volume challenges all of us to reflect creatively and imaginatively about how we can best make a politics of the possible a constitutive contour of our religious lives, our efforts to learn about and from Buddhism, and especially our everyday lives, even as all of these are deeply conditioned and distorted by structural racism together with other oppressive and exclusionary structures.

Charles Hallisey

Buddhism and Whiteness instructs with the spirit of Thich Naht Hanh— “Freedom is not given to us by anyone, we have to cultivate it.” Composting ignorance and violence, this volume seeds peace for local and global care from US to Rohingya and Yemen communities.

Joy James

This volume opens with a foreword by noted scholar of religion Jan Willis in which she observes that although there is only one race, Homo sapiens, racism still thrives. The collection documents views from the peripheries that reveal that LGBTQ people and people of color are challenged in white US Buddhist communities as if they have no place. Often they are not seen at all. The way forward, Laurie Cassidy writes, is to listen deeply and take responsibility for the shared reality of all people. In his essay Bryce Huebner argues that “races are not biologically real” and “race is a conceptual fiction.” This book is about modifying practices as well as changing minds. This reviewer was impressed by the program—recommended by Jessica Locke (following Patricia Devine)—of implicit bias intervention. Metta   ("lovingkindness") meditation to develop a competing and positive narrative to the racist one about blackness is also effective. This important book offers ideas and values that could change how meditation works. In an afterword Charles Johnson writes that what is new here “is the effort to find common ground between ancient Buddhist ideas and principles with feminist theory, existential phenomenology, and Critical Race Theory, and Critical Whiteness Studies.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

Choice

Part of the importance of this collection of essays lies in its multipronged approach to both naming the white supremacist bedrock of whiteness and describing Buddhist models for understanding how it arises.. . Authors in this volume bring to light a number of attitudes that help the reader “see” white ignorance in action.. .. Relinquishing the privilege of being the authority on what constitutes “real” Buddhism, who is a “real” American, and what counts as “real” practice involves giving something up. That act, and all the myriad ways whites can practice giving away unearned privilege, can itself become a powerful method of merit-making, of dana as a form of moral development in the pursuit of benefiting others. In this respect and others, Buddhism and Whiteness offers gifts of insight that constitute a wise and compassionate act of merit.

Buddhadharma

This volume opens with a foreword by noted scholar of religion Jan Willis in which she observes that although there is only one race, Homo sapiens, racism still thrives. The collection documents views from the peripheries that reveal that LGBTQ people and people of color are challenged in white US Buddhist communities as if they have no place. Often they are not seen at all. The way forward, Laurie Cassidy writes, is to listen deeply and take responsibility for the shared reality of all people. In his essay Bryce Huebner argues that “races are not biologically real” and “race is a conceptual fiction.” This book is about modifying practices as well as changing minds. This reviewer was impressed by the program—recommended by Jessica Locke (following Patricia Devine)—of implicit bias intervention. Metta   ("lovingkindness") meditation to develop a competing and positive narrative to the racist one about blackness is also effective. This important book offers ideas and values that could change how meditation works. In an afterword Charles Johnson writes that what is new here “is the effort to find common ground between ancient Buddhist ideas and principles with feminist theory, existential phenomenology, and Critical Race Theory, and Critical Whiteness Studies.”

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

CHOICE