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Buddhism and Whiteness

Critical Reflections
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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.
George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Emory University. Emily McRae is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico.
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., Thich Nhat Hanh, 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 Choed 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
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 * 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 * 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, Smith College 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, Harvard Divinity School 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, author of Seeking the Beloved Community
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