It is easy to condemn racism but difficult to see how we internalize its prejudices, myths, and assumptions. I like to think I am not racist because I'm politically progressive and a meditator. But one day, new to working as a Buddhist teacher in South Africa, that self-perception came undone at a supermarket in the town of Ixopo in KwaZulu Natal. An elderly Zulu man was struggling to free a shopping basket and finally wrenched it loose from the pile of metal just as I walked past. I took it, like the white madam erroneously assuming he was a worker rather than a fellow shopper. My nice Buddhist veneer had not managed to halt the insidious internalizing of the racist system I was in.
Privileging "whiteness" has been internalized by everyone. It maneuvers us all along the scales of "good" self/people (privileged) and "bad" self/people (oppressed), generating a complex value system rooted in a grievous falsehood: that one racial group has more rights and worth than another. The Buddha clearly rejected this premise of racial superiority by ordaining all castes equally. In doing so, he demonstrated that equity and freedom are not just internal realizations but also integral to the structure he constructed for awakening: the sangha.
Read Full Article »