Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘While listening to a dharma talk by Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, I encountered what I now call White Spiritual Bypassing. Elizabeth went into the ‘relativity’ of race, by stating that her skin could get tanned enough that we might consider her brown. This made me deeply uncomfortable, but until I read Zenju Earthlyn’s book [The Way of Tenderness], I wasn’t capable of articulating the issue beyond knowing, in my gut, that it was harmful and ignorant.
In The Way of Tenderness, Zenju has an entire chapter on “the multiplicity in oneness”. The work of waking up is not to see oneness as sameness and blend into a monolith, but to let go of the belief that certain ways of being human are superior to others. To be human is to be diverse. The Ultimate is not superior to the Relative, but mutually dependent with it—like a box and lid or two sides of a coin, they go together. Both/and. Not either/or.
When anyone talks about skin colour as a relative thing, and therefore ‘unable to be found’ and so not Ultimately true, they are missing how race functions in the world. This kind of Spiritual Bypassing skips over interconnectedness, avoiding how our whiteness, in relation to others, causes harm. Racism is not about skin colour, but about power and control and an attachment to ‘white’ being the default and everything else being deviant and therefore inferior.

We must look at the ego-clinging nature of whiteness on a personal, interpersonal, and collective level. The issue is not someone naming themselves as Black or disabled or transgender/non-binary or queer. These are all valid expressions of being human and examples of the multiplicity of oneness expressing itself. The issue is a cultural attachment to white, able-bodied, cis-gender and straight as the ‘norm’ or ‘default’ measuring stick for humanity.
Our relative experiences matter. They can’t be ignored just because we can’t ‘find’ them. Racism will not go away just because you ‘can’t find race’ while you’re meditating. Racism will not go away if BIPOC folks ‘practice better’. Racialized identities only exist because of whiteness as the measuring stick of humanness, and so the work of letting go of race is not the work of Black and brown practitioners, but of white practitioners…

I have dealt with a lot of frustration towards other white people as I’ve attempted to create spaces for conversations centred on anti-racism in our practice. I am met with dragging feet, platitudes, and outright hostility. This has been disheartening, particularly as this is a spiritual modality that seeks collective liberation, and gives us all the tools we need to dismantle racism.
Racism will go away when we learn to see our multiplicity, that there isn’t a default human by which we measure all other kinds of human. Racism will go away when we see that whiteness is a form of ego clinging. Whiteness will go away when we can see how it is interconnected with class, with wealth, and with maintaining power for the few at the expense of the many. Whiteness will go away when we cut through the ignorance that prevents us from seeing how we have been duped into a system that actively harms our Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx and mixed-race kin and sangha members. White body supremacy will go away when we use our practice to sit in the discomfort of our complicity within the systems of white supremacy on which our society was built. Only then can we stop planting the karmic seeds of oppression.
As someone who is queer, it’s been easy for me to see straightness and heteronormativity. I can converse with my chosen QILT2BAG+ family about straight culture and heteronormative weirdness, pointing out the baffling things straight people say and do from my rainbow hued lens. I appreciate that this gives me a lens for understanding how dominant identities function, and the suffering that comes from being ‘othered’ when you have an identity that doesn’t align with a dominant embodiment.
It is partially because of the pain of being othered that I am so dedicated to seeing whiteness in myself and in the texts and talks I consume. I do not want to participate in or uphold the messages of whiteness. I want to see whiteness because that is what it is to be actively anti-racist—to be constantly looking to see all the ways we are all being indoctrinated into this oppressive system, so I can first block and then dismantle those messages. To me, committing to anti-racism is just another way to commit to awakening.’ (from the Diffi-cult blog)

Further to last Saturday’s post, I wanted to highlight this one, as I remember Zenju’s book also helping me to get a clearer view on this issue. If you have the stomach for it, follow the link to the article and read the comments, where a number of people seem to fall into the trap described in last week’s post.