Buddhism and Whiteness

George Yancy is professor of philosophy at Emory University.Emily McRae is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico.

• ForewordJan WillisIntroduction Emily McRae and George Yancy1. “We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming to Bring You This Very Important Public Service Announcement . . .”: aka Buddhism as Usual in the AcademySharon Suh2. Undoing Whiteness in American Buddhist Modernism: Critical, Collective, and Contextual TurnsAnn Gleig3. White Delusion and Avidya: A Buddhist Approach to Understanding and Deconstructing White IgnoranceEmily McRae4. Whiteness and the Construction of Buddhist Philosophy in Meiji JapanLeah Kalmanson5. Racism and Anatta: Black Buddhists, Embodiment, and Interpretations of Non-Self Rima Vesely-Flad6. “The Tranquil Meditator”Laurie Cassidy7. “Beyond Vietnam”: Martin Luther King, Jr., Thích Nh?t H?nh, and the Confluence of Black and Engaged Buddhism in the Vietnam WarCarolyn M. Jones Medine8. The Unbearable Will to WhitenessJasmine Syedullah9. Making Consciousness an Ethical Project: Moral Phenomenology in Buddhist Ethics and White Anti-RacismJessica Locke10. “bell hooks Made Me a Buddhist”: Liberatory Cross-Cultural Learning—Or Is This Just Another Case of How White People Steal Everything?Carol J. Moeller11. Excoriating the Demon of Whiteness from Within: Disrupting Whiteness through the Tantric Buddhist Practice of Chöd and Exploring Whiteness from Within the TraditionLama Justin von Bujdoss12. The Interdependence and Emptiness of WhitenessBryce Huebner13. Taking and Making Refuge in Racial [Whiteness] Awareness and Racial Justice WorkRhonda Magee14. A Buddhist Phenomenology of the White MindJoy Brennan15. The White Feminism in Rita Gross’ Critique of Gender Identities and Reconstruction of BuddhismHsiao Lan HuAfterwordCharles Johnson

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.