This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Just so delighted to be hosting Angel Kilda Williams back at Casa Hargan. She's come for many, many years to the Zen Center and also to Casa Hargan. As many of you know, we have a couple of her books available in the bookstore. If you haven't had a chance to look at them, Rattable Dharma being the topic of our retreat in these next few days. Wait for people to come in. There he is. Great. So I think I'll let Angel invite you to ask what you like, but I think that's pretty much what we were thinking, is that please offer your questions.

[01:02]

I'm sure you have lots of thoughts about radical dharma, about racism, and about all of the other issues that are not only present in the world, but certainly present in our community, and that we're really trying to get that conversation going and not ever ending. So, again, welcome to all of you, and more people. There's a siege up here, and quite a few in the front. Thank you. Just four chairs. I've had the privilege of asking her all kinds of questions. We were all the drive down here as well as meals and I feel really so deeply grateful to have a resource person and a friend. So welcome to Tassaharad. Thank you.

[02:04]

I also feel very grateful to be here. Really at the invitation of Greg all along to continue to invite me and encourage and sometimes push and make sure that I get here and... And I think the question's also open to love and liberation too, which I learned a great deal from. And so I'm really blessed to be able to have many opportunities to have those conversations as they kind of colorize these three things of race, love, and liberation. And so I think really this year we're talking very much about how important it is to root the conversations about race, about oppression, about marginalization of all of these things, to really root them in our practice, that they're not separate from our practice, that the investigation and interrogation of them and the how we do that is not separate from our practice, that the approach that we're hoping and

[03:21]

this idea of embodying race, love, and liberation, is to not create separation and division, but rather to interrogate it as part of the Dharma, not to say, oh, let's bring this thing to the Dharma, but rather this is what it is. And so we don't have to fight about it. We don't have to make another camp or another school or another something separate. But... How do we make space for that which, for many different reasons, the course, most of the history of our practice in the United States in particular, managed to get away with not including these things. And it's just sort of like, oh, it's like cleaning a space, and we missed that corner, that huge corner. It's a huge corner. But we missed it, and so we don't have to... you know, have a great battle over it.

[04:23]

Just say, oh, we missed that. How do we bring that in? How do we move that, recognize that there was a table covering that area? A table called privilege, a table called lots of things, and we didn't move it and get into that space, and now here we are. So it's not a fight. It's sometimes a struggle, but it's not a fight. And I think really that's why I wanted to rest in and hope we could see what is emerging, what's present for people in regard, particularly in regard, you know, anything really, but particularly in regard with how we hold it in the seat of our practice. How do we not create a new separation? Not let the... This necessary conversation becomes something that divides us or confuses us away from the cornerstone of this is seated in our practice.

[05:28]

This is the Dharmatu. they're happy to just have air conditioning, are they?

[06:57]

Would you say, so, oh, I should let people know that this is being recorded. And if, and if, when you speak, if you please say your name and your pronoun, that would be helpful to me. Yes. Specifically in your own personal practice, how have you opened your heart to miss that spot and have it be a place where you can rest and have the struggle but not the fight? For me, it has been very much through the practice that I am I feel very in contact with, we're just human beings. We're human doings trying to be. And if I situate myself in as I do the notion that we're basically good, then any ways in which we manifest that are confused or unclear, divisive,

[08:12]

sometimes even hateful, are a matter of confusion, of things that get in the way of seeing from our most true nature. And then I say, okay, and then what is that? And then you just chase it down. Like, oh, there are systems. Oh, there are structures. Oh, people are acculturated to certain beliefs. Those beliefs are reinforced. implicitly and explicitly through their conditioning. We are all arising out of conditions. Every single one of us arises out of conditions. No one is exclusively or individually harmful or hateful, right? That we have all learned what we are, what we are, what we do, how we be. We got our cues from somewhere, someplace. that doesn't suggest that we don't hold people accountable because we also got cues about not harming and not being murderers and the use and sexual transgressors and all of those things, but we got mixed messages.

[09:30]

And so if I can make space for that, then I'm actually able to hold a space for myself That is more clear. So ultimately it's not some kind of altruistic thought of like, oh, they're human beings too, but rather how do I not lose my fuse and diminish my own sense of clarity and spaciousness so that I move through my life in the way that feels seated and rooted. In order for me to do that, I have to be able to see people in their complexity. I have to be able to see that. So it's not like, oh, I feel so bad for you, you've been conditioned, and I want to feel so great about myself that I see you as just human with all your flaws. But rather, I don't want to lose my stuff. Replace stuff with another word if you'd like. I don't want to lose it, and so what do I need in order to do that?

[10:32]

Well, I need to shift my view. And I think in our society, we don't often do that because we're so organized around being individuals, right, that everything centers around me and how the world revolves around me rather than how is it that I'm seeing that is not conducive to my own liberation. Yeah, seeing other people's complexities, I have definitely in this time practiced for myself in here to also hard work. my own complexities and really finally I think understanding oh let me try to take care of what is like I have to understand the complexities of myself and really tend to them because it's always easier to tend to them outside of what I think is outside of myself Can you just say your name again?

[11:48]

My name is Shannon. Shannon. What if or when it feels like the core of practice is maintaining harm. If I come in forward with the experience that I'm having and I'm asking for reflection or change and in practice it's to come back to me and yet I'm in a situation where the things that are in control of me are not working to support me in a racial context is what I'm trying to say It feels like practice is being a figure in that situation, and yet I know practice is not.

[12:51]

So how can I receive that feedback? I think I need to look at myself and figure out what's going on with me, and yet I'm wanting reflection on the system that I'm in and changes. Am I clearing that question? Okay. Yeah, that's why I wrote a book. I was like, hey, this come back to me thing doesn't always quite do it. So, yeah, because it's not practice per se, but it's rather the people are vehicles for how practice is done, how practice is held, and whether practice is held in a way that is confused and is... takes away from our capacity, steals away from our capacity to be in truth, or whether practice is held in a way that is uplifting and affirming of being accountable to, like, what is there and what is true, whether harm is being done or harm is not being done.

[14:02]

So, you know, we have human beings there doing that thing. So it's not the practice per se, right? It's not dharma. It is how human beings and that are part of systems and structures and they're subject to their conditioning. And so this is when we get together. This is why we don't do things in isolation. This is when we get together and we say, do you notice the way that that's happening is causing a great deal of harm to all of the female body people here? Do you notice the way that this is happening is causing harm to all of the brown bodies body people here which is why diversity is important because it's hard to hold oneself out all alone and say yeah all the brown body people something's happening to us especially when we have a culture overall that says well if you are complaining about it you must have something to get out of it and so immediately you're shamed or ostracized or

[15:07]

You're suspicious at the very least because you must be getting something out of that complaint. And then we need our allies. We need to be clear with our relationships that it is our role, those of us that are not in the positions in which we are being oppressed in some ways and marginalized in some ways, then my role is to step in and say, Well, I don't have anything to gain out of it, and I see that that's happening. So we don't get to just... Ooh, iPhone. Journey. We don't get the... This is a very significant aspect of what's challenged about a practice in the West is a sense of individualism. in which we're not co-responsible for each other.

[16:08]

And if we were co-responsible for each other, none of the harm that goes on and continues could happen because it wouldn't be happening in isolation. So it really is all of us together that have a collective responsibility to bear witness to harm being done and be responsible for stepping up, not just to wait and say, well, you know, that's not my problem. Catherine, she, her. Please don't just ask me questions just by the way. Well, yeah, I'd be happy for either of you to answer this. I'm curious, or I'd like some advice or just some words on how to practice and live skillfully with anger. Who would be better with that?

[17:09]

Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, I'm beginning to learn that, like, it's not helpful for me to, if anger arises, to be unkind to it inside my own body. And yet at the same time, I feel scared of doing harm if I just allow that, the anger to arise. And so I was just, yeah, be curious for some. guidance or clarity around how to be kind to both my anger and to others while the anger is there yeah sitting in the flames i think that's where we sit you know all of those emotions and um and for me you know sitting has been i mean you can call it things but it's patience practice can i can i get through this well yeah i can you know 40 minutes is a long time And I can do that, and I can do it again, and I can do it again.

[18:14]

So it gives me a resource in order to meet whatever the emotion is that's realizing, to be considerate rather than reactive. So if I'm reactive out of my anger, it's just like anybody else's reactivity. It doesn't go so well. It doesn't get an outcome that I really want. We were talking about that earlier. It's like, yeah, this is my protection for you. I promise not to hurt you. steal from you or kill you. So I've made a promise to care for my internal life so that you're safe from me. And I think that's how this wonderful practice brings us into a space where we can live together and we can care for each other and we can bring everyone into the circle. So I just trust in continuing to practice with my patience and honesty. So once I'm cool, then I can maybe say what I need to say in a way that's not destructive, but hopefully would be clearer and more useful.

[19:23]

Can anger be utilized in a skillful way? Can it be used as a tool ever in any sort of productive or beneficial way? Have you had any luck with that? I mean, it would be up to you to remember or to be able to testify. And I don't know about being angry, because usually it's... I mean, my emotion is around harming happening, either to me or to someone I care about or to someone else, whatever it's like. My anger comes from seeing harm happening. So I don't know why that's true. It's just... That's how I'm wired. So, you know, if I act out of anger, it's actually... Probably I wanted to stop something that's happening that maybe I'm not so skillful. I went and stepped in front of two rather large gentlemen who were about to hit each other, and I went in the middle of them, and I said, oh, and my friend pulled me out and said, are you crazy? So, yes.

[20:23]

It's a kind of way to be crazy, and there's another way, which is to kind of bear witness and also be skillful. What can you do to end harm? Not by being harmful. We have a few diversity groups. We have a few diversity groups here at Tassajara. There are discussion groups and some action groups. I guess my question is, I feel like I see the same group of people going to these groups, and the same with the other centers, I encounter the same people, and I'm sure everyone has their own different approach.

[21:27]

Maybe their approach is not going to groups of dealing with these issues. My question is, what do you feel is the best way to approach, let's say, Tassajara as a whole, as far as like education and diversity and how to approach how we're going to act in the future and kind of have everyone on the same page? I guess so that we can move forward together. And I'm just not sure if this can be like a mandatory training for people that are in positions of control or if that approach would be too much of a negative reaction.

[22:39]

I guess I'm just asking for some advice on how to move forward. Help? I am thankfully not in the position to have to... anything other than what I think, so this is what I think. Institutions have to, they're slower to move, and they have to take seriously the harm that is caused by not doing whatever, making whatever steps, taking whatever steps are necessary to shift culture, to rely on individuals or to rely on groups. And sort of like, well, you labs just hang out there with the wolves and have a conversation about it.

[23:48]

What about what you're going to do about the wolves? And I don't think that that's sufficient, which is why I do the work that I do, is to try to essentially create, generate enough pressure, a wellspring of pressure from... people such as yourself and those people that keep going to those groups, where it becomes, the conditions are such that it becomes clear that we can't continue this way, that we have to put the kind of investment and energy into it as if our lives depend on it, because they do. Lives do. And institutions are slow to see that. They continue on at the whatever they're doing, they sort of regard themselves as successful generally. That's why they continue. As long as they're continuing, they regard themselves as successful as doing it that way. And the status quo or conservatism tends to win out because people hug safety, right?

[24:55]

So if we change things, if we make the people that are everybody required to take a training, then what will happen? It's happened before. It's happened in many institutions and many fields, and we're waiting for our sanghas to catch up with that and not think that this is something that is just, well, if people decide it and they want it, then we can do it. People are dying. People are losing their life in the streets, in the world. People are being harmed, and white-dominant institutions and communities are losing out on a great deal by not making these shifts. And when they can admit that to themselves and admit the cost, then it will begin to shift.

[25:57]

But it's quite difficult to make institutions, especially ones that have a history, shift. with any kind of speed that seems satisfying at all. So that's what I think. They have to come to terms with the harm and the misalignment with their own values of not taking the steps. If we felt that Tassajara was burning, we would put all the resources we had to making sure that it didn't burn. Tassajara is burning. It's just in a different way. So we have to commit the resources to make sure that it doesn't burn down to the ground. And it's up to people such as yourself, unfortunately, at the cost of emotional labor, to keep saying it. And that feels annoying and stressful. Did you tell me, Fu, that they say in the military you have to say things 17 times?

[26:59]

I don't know. Say things 17 times for people to get it. So I'm with you. I feel the cost and the burden and your pain of feeling like you have to repeat it and maybe you're alone or that group of people is isolated. But if you keep pushing and we keep pushing... The pressure will build. I think all of our sanghas will have to shift, otherwise they'll face their own irrelevance. Yeah. Definitely the hot seat. Yeah, I hear you. And I think we, whoever we are, I hear you. And I know other of the leadership here, you hear everybody. And I don't like the word trying, because my therapist used to say, you don't try, you do it.

[28:04]

So what it means to do it, the various trainings we have had, don't do it, because it's a lot of conditioning to uncondition people from. We're all conditioned from decades, from when we were little. So that commitment to reconditioning ourselves is Dharma. And I feel as though it's around gender, it's around all of these things, right? So it's intersectional, that we need to be reconditioned. We need to help each other, demand that we keep addressing all these parts of ourselves until it doesn't feel like parts of ourselves, that we feel whole. So angels... One thing to do is invite people who love to come and talk with us and help people feel welcome here by seeing people who might be the same color or the same, I mean, women practice and practicing together and all of that.

[29:06]

We have to just keep grinding. I am really grateful that you're doing that. And there are people doing that. And mandatory is a really tough thing. It's end-centred, as you may have noticed. You've been around Zazen. we could try it see how many people are left so it's hard it's hard to push without pushing you know invite you have to invite people keep inviting them to make it worthwhile this is a good place to be you all are here because this is a good place to be this conversation it's exciting and it's right where it's supposed to it's right prophetic this prophetic Press if you can.

[30:07]

I have another question about anger. I try to bring awareness to the fraughtness of asking this question with the experiential distance that I have from this content. But I won't know if they're right, what you both think about of the usefulness of anger in situations and social injustice, whether there's just no place for it. This question comes out of a discussion in my sangha that got going at the beginning of the Me Too movement, about whether it was the right response to move quickly to a sort of condemnation the inutility of anger. And I think I have to start to have thought about this, but maybe I should just leave it.

[31:21]

I think for me, we were talking about this in a way, that so language is so inadequate, English is inadequate, it's not very subtle, So I think of the thing that I think you're both speaking to about anger as wrathful, and that there is very much a place for wrathful energy. The difference with wrathful energy than anger, from what I understand and feel and experience and wield, is that the root of it, the motivation for the wrathful, is love. And so the fire of it, the heat of it, is not about burning people up and especially not burning myself up. And this is the problem with anger is that it eats us, it can eat us up if we don't get the thing that we want out of it. I think at the root of our anger is disappointment, is a sense of failed expectation.

[32:24]

And one of the beautiful things about getting to a place in which you can manage wrathful energy, or you can have wrathful energy, what emerges from you is that expectation is not in the picture, which is not to say you don't have expectations, but you don't hook yourself onto the notion, by expressing this, I'm going to get what I want. But it needs to be expressed, perfect. It needs to be expressed, but I'm not hooking myself into, and it has to happen, because then that's your ego, right? Then you're locked in. But if you're committed to the expression, and it's really out of a sense of love for, like, I don't want you to be in this place in which you are failing to inhabit the fullness of your humanity.

[33:26]

Because you choose to see other people as less than you, which is actually a really confused state. And it's out of that love for you, not like kumbaya love, but the big, broad love for the human being, the human self to say, I don't want any of us to be in that state. What a loss. What a loss that your perspective, your view, your... the way you hold yourself is limited and contracted, that you would recoil from other people. So I think that there's a value to it, but it is a different permutation than what we think of ordinarily when we think of as anger. And that said, sometimes, as all people have got, so... If people are really being held in bondage and anger is what gets them out, who am I to say?

[34:30]

You've got to wait and hang out in bondage until you can get your emotions together and properly and appropriately communicate them before you set yourself free. I don't have a sense that I could stand there. And... Unfortunately, those are not the conditions under which most of us are having these kinds of conversations. We're not having them in the extreme reality of, wow, somebody's holding my body in bondage or assaulting me. I'm saying, somebody's assaulting you, take what you got. Shoo, anger, use it all, right? Because if we don't love ourselves into liberation, then we have no opportunity. That's complicated. Yeah, I guess along those lines that you were just talking about, I spent the past year living in the East Bay and...

[35:49]

I was kind of getting involved in social activism and found a lot of the radical people I was surrounded with were really interested in the role of violence. Yeah. As a tool. And I found myself just really confused and not sure. Yeah, not wanting to, like... exactly kind of how you were just saying, because that's all you've got. I didn't want to fall on the side of judging, but I also didn't want to be a part of it. I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on that. If it's premeditated, then it's rarely right. If you plan out some violence... then more than likely you have another, you have space enough for patience, you have space enough for more sophisticated strategies.

[36:54]

So I can't be absolutist because I'm not in every context, in every reality. But I think predominantly for the conditions we're in, not only is it not right, it's also incredibly naive to think that whatever violence we could plan, that the state will not open up a can of... Yeah. Somebody fill in the blank for me. It's just sort of naive for social activists to think that violence is actually going to make it happen in this reality of the war machine that we live within. The greatest weapon that we have is our presence and our love. It has no means to deal with that whatsoever. the state can lead any amount of force we think that we can muster. So it's really a failed proposition to suggest that violence is going to be useful. It'll be a distraction, it'll be inconvenient, but it won't be successful. You know, sort of like some, they'll let like a little tiny bit of it go on to a certain point and then they'll just clamp down on it.

[38:07]

At great cost and great pain to many other people. that did not actually take part in the violence. So I think it's naive. And I think, you know, once somebody really tries love and it doesn't work, you know, then we can have a different conversation, right? But once we really like live into it, as Van Jones says, a love army and meet the burdens of oppression with that as not the soul, the soul strategy, a very significant... where we are seated and rooted, if that doesn't bring the system down... Because it lives on our division. It lives on the fact that the weapon that we reach for is the same weapon that it fashioned for us. We reach for violence because those are the weapons that have been fashioned for us. And we can't dismantle it by using the same weapons. And so we have to find...

[39:09]

I think the one weapon it hasn't given us is love. And so if we use that one thing that hasn't given us presence, not drifting off into distraction, being able to cultivate our capacity to be present with what is, then we have somewhat of a chance. I'm willing to be wrong, but let's try it. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to talk about you for two answers. You kind of shared about how to see the human being, the actual human aspect of the other, especially the oppressor, how it's such a beneficial aspect, actually, to get there. to actually, while we are in the aspect of victim, by me being as solid as victim, the oppressor is very solid too.

[40:18]

He's as solid as I am as a victim. How do I cultivate to actually soften, actually take care of myself while at the same time I can cultivate this to see this oppressor as a lack of condition and acting from that? Let's say, if I even were able to do that, how do I bring that? Now, first question is, how do I actually take care of myself doing this so that I don't get burned up? And then how do I bring awareness? What is the skillful way I can actually bring awareness to that? Now it's even difficult because now I don't even see a person, let's say, if I get there. Like, how do I bring awareness where I'm conflicted, where I can empathize with myself and at the same time empathize with this condition? How do I bring a very innocent project? I don't know where we got the idea that we have to do them at the same time. Which is why we do practice, right?

[41:21]

Is that actually if we cultivate the self-care and we care for our inner lives. When I say self-care, I'm not talking about pedicures. That's good too. But if we cultivate, if we have care for our inner lives, then the other question becomes moot. You wouldn't, it's your ask, the question is being asked from a location that can't conceive of that because that's not the location. So when you take care of yourself, this will not be a question of how do I then see the other person in this way. That's not a, for me, that's not an answer, it's an experience. There's not a like, oh, you do it like this. No, you just be that, and you'll see. I had glimpses of that, and I just wanted to see how is it sustainably we can look like that presence. I don't think we have a choice. They're cute.

[42:33]

I'm just realizing that it's, speaking for myself, it's privilege that allows me to decide whether or not to participate in these kind of trainings, whether I want to look at this. And sometime last year, I was introduced to this term, the good white person. And then it got unpacked more at a training I did at the Santa Cruz, inside Santa Cruz on studying interconnectivity and whiteness. It was just for white people. And part of what's come up is this realization of how much, you know, I wanted to be a good white person, a good person, but that included my whiteness.

[44:06]

I did, uh, I took four and a half years in Africa and Peace Corps inspired by giving back something we've taken. And yet, I've come to see how many subtle ways my privilege is propagated and I continue to act without, just from the conditioning that you mentioned. And... then there's often this sense of either I never saw it functioning in the first place, so there was the oblivion. Some people don't realize there's anything to work on. Oh, I'm not a racist. I'm not a sexist. I don't need to go to that. That's not me. And then when we see it, there's shame that comes up. And I think shame has been... taken over our culture in a way that it's much more, it's become much more toxic shame, where shame becomes something that then we turn it on ourselves and we think there's something fundamentally wrong with us, as opposed to in Buddhism where shame is a wholesome dharma.

[45:27]

If it's shame for causing harm, right? It's good to feel shame. And we can feel that shame because there's this inherent trust in our integrity, in our wholeness. that's underlying as opposed to this fundamental flaw fundamentally um so i think it's got to be a way to somehow okay to look at this and to feel shame so that we're motivated to look deeper and part i don't know what i want to ask is and this is where it gets difficult and i don't know if there's any other way to do it than for me to do it myself but um it's that metaphor of a fish swimming in water, right? Being a privilege. And it's really hard at first to hear, you hear about it, but you're in it and say, I don't, what do you mean? I don't see it. I don't feel it. And you have to, you know, are there ways to expedite that or to support us in this?

[46:33]

Or is that just another, privileged person asking for an easy way out or a solution. I just invite you to, you know, the word remorse might be the most useful distinction between shame so that you have a sense of, like, toxic shame versus an inappropriate response that recognizes the gap between how you would like to understand yourself and how you have shown up, the reality of how you have shown up. The gap lives in, there's remorse about that, wanting to come back to oneself. And that gives us a little bit more room, at least in language. And language is so powerful to take the word shame and say, well, can we make this good shame?

[47:36]

But if you give it remorse, I think that we would call that remorse. Shame is more navel-gazing. It's really more I got caught being away, but I don't want you to receive that. It's not turned towards how do I reconcile the heart? How do I bridge the gap? So shame is organized around turning itself on the individual. And it's quite powerfully wielded in white supremacy and the culture of whiteness to keep people from being able to examine the culture by turning things on individuals instead. So it's you. Maybe you're the bad white person rather than conditions. Wow, what kind of conditions am I? that have allowed this to arise, that is dividing me from the organically good human being that I am, in fact.

[48:45]

So shame is a powerful tool of how this has stayed in place, because if people focus on themselves and what happens to me, rather than, oh, what kind of conditions am I in and how did this happen? Which doesn't divorce itself in how do I play a part? How am I colluding? How do I disrupt being colluding with it? So it's important to recognize that not only does shame feel bad for you, it's designed to actually keep the thing itself in place. And it's a powerful mechanism of I don't mean white people. I mean the culture of whiteness. It's how things have kept in place because no one wants to be in the seat of shame. So I'd much rather be quiet. I'd much rather pretend that didn't happen than to have to confront being in a sense of shame.

[49:52]

And, yeah, you went easy way out. That makes sense too. It's occurring to me that there is a practice we do all the time here that is around shame that I think we don't appreciate as much as we could, which is, did someone take the wheelbarrow that belongs to the garden? I've never seen anyone answer that question. Oh, I take it. I took it. It just reappears somehow, magically. So I think there's an opportunity for us to actually show each other I did that, and that it's okay. Nobody's going to, you're not going to be hurt. But you might feel some embarrassment. And I think bringing that embarrassment or that sense of responsibility forward as a practice, it's okay. I did that. I did that. And I'm not overwhelmed by it.

[50:56]

I'm not feeling like I'm going to be punished. It's just more like I'm in there with that. And I want to be part of that exchange of responsibility and accountability. I think we can make more of that work meeting. as a practice opportunity. It just occurred to me. Great practice. It's really hard. Not me. Really hard. Yeah, I didn't do that. Greg told me to do that. I didn't do that. Once you're an abbot, it's really hard to find anyone else to pin it on. Ruthann, she, her... I don't know if this is taking this conversation too far, but I'm having a really hard time with the hate speech that has this great avenue in our culture and in our government right now, to the point where I don't want to hear what our government is doing because it makes me want to be a reckless.

[52:07]

And I don't know how to put it into my life. I don't want to. It's too painful for me to listen to her. And there are even people who are on the, you know, maybe the right side, but their speech is so like, oh, do you know what happened today? And I just can't hear it anymore. I don't know how to deal with it. My head is saying, you're not alone. You're not alone. There's so many people who are really hurt right now by what our government is doing, or what the world is doing, and has always been doing, and maybe we're seeing it more. I think that's pretty much what's going on.

[53:09]

We're seeing a lot more. There's been a, you know, we shook up the snow globe, and it's really visible. And I think that part's good. I think we need to see it. we're doing I don't feel asleep I think I've been sleeping my years at Zen Center around that level of accountability so I don't feel asleep and I'm trying to deal with the rage that comes along with that not being asleep I asked my teacher I said so when you see people walking down the street carrying Nazi flags what do you want to do? And he said, I want to punch him in the face. And I said, yeah, me too. And so then, what do you do then? And he said, I have another voice. It's my practice voice that says, I don't want to live like that. And that's the secondary. The primary is, I want to punch him in the face. I want to enter into the violence myself and win.

[54:10]

But that's not my practice. My practice is to find another way. So it's okay if you take a break. We'll carry it for a while. Maybe come back when you're ready. About five more minutes for those of you who need to go back to bed. Did you have that? Oh, sorry. No, excuse me. I just wondered if she had a response. Sure. Maybe you're pushing it. Thank you. My name is Claudio, he, him. You used the, I think you answered a question by, you referenced white supremacy, and I am curious, I really appreciate hearing some unpacking of, because I think of white supremacists as associate with,

[55:15]

and I've seen the term used in this context, and I think it's different, and it would be very helpful to me. It's yours. So there are formal white supremacists. That's what you were thinking about. Formal. That's like formal practitioners. People that come and they're, you know... And they have, like, taken their vows and, you know, they kind of have Chikai in white supremacy. And then there's this sort of, like, bland way that many of us are just swimming in the waters of a construct that was the founding of this, that was embedded in the founding of the nation and its laws and its practices and its economic engine and all of these things that situated white people at the top of the heap, if you will, for the purposes of maintaining power and privilege.

[56:22]

So that's white supremacy. And that comes, and it has reshaped itself so that it was, at some point, it was class. Everything was class. You know, class, religion, and where you came from. And so white supremacy said, oh, no, that's, and Wright sort of coinciding with capitalism, said, oh, that's too complicated. We were talking about that, too. Well, we were talking about everything. It's like just too complicated. How will I know? I look around this room, and how will I know who should be valued and who should be devalued? Well, I can be you, you, devalued, devalued, right? There's a... ability that coincides with the demands of capitalism and productivity and quickly delineating people and making sure that the people of lower economic class, which there are a great deal more of than people that are wealth holding people, don't align with each other because if they align with each other as they did early in the country's history, they aligned and they burned James Adams down to the ground and they said, oh, this does not work.

[57:43]

we know what the Irish and the blacks and the indigenous, the African enslaved peoples and the indigenous peoples like teaming up together around class because they'll take us out. And so they started pulling people apart. And that's white supremacist. So they actually put in, and this wasn't specific to the United States, but we're the ones that sort of situated and embedded in our legal structure. So it's in our laws, it's how we're founded, and it made white special. You could only become a citizen if you were white and in good standing, which meant you were fornicating with the natives or the blacks or anything like that. And so that began to unfold as white supremacist thinking, right? That white people sit, white-bodied people, and then different people of different nationalities heritages were folded into it based on the color of their skin rather than their nationality.

[58:50]

And so then white is codified as being better than all the other everythings, right? Everything else is less than. So that's what we mean by white supremacy. It's an ideology, right? As opposed to a formal practice. All of us are, me too, right, are participating in white supremacists unless we're undoing it and disrupting it, right? Constantly, I have to catch myself. I'm like, it's sort of like, you know, reaching for candy, like, oh, nope, that's white supremacists. No, don't do that. Don't do that, right? Because we're so, like, dipped into the waters. We're swimming in the waters. You're not the only one that's swimming in the waters. You know, brown-bodied, black-bodied people, we swim in the waters of white supremacy, too. So we get a little, you know, we get a little of that on, and we act as gatekeepers. We're like, whoa. No, no, no, can't get in. I'm holding the gates and making sure that nobody does to the white, but everything is just... Deconstructing.

[59:51]

Right? So we're all participating in it, but necessarily we are at different... We are sitting in different locations in the entire construct of white supremacy. It's an ideology, right? It's an ideology that has been... It's sort of... fascinating because it's sort of self-repairing. It keeps reshaping itself and keeps reorganizing itself to continue to maintain itself. And one of the ways it does that is with shame. So people take it on themselves rather than go, what is this thinking I'm doing? Why am I doing this? Why do I think I should be able to figure this out faster and make it happen really quick and make it take care of itself rather than... recognize that it has like, you know, 350 years of momentum behind it. And so maybe it's going to take a little while. And maybe I will have to take a little while. Maybe I'll have to give some extra time and put some extra skin in the game to undo something that has that much moment. Why do I fake like this?

[60:53]

Oh, white supremacist thinking. Okay. So now I'm not undoing and figuring out just me. I'm understanding and looking at the matrix and going. Yeah, I can't survive in here alone, so I have to start to deconstruct the matrix. It's not just about me becoming a good white person. It's about me deconstructing the conditions that keep disassembling my capacity to be in my wholeness as human beings. Are you sure of that vocabulary word that you told me, which just kind of blew me away? Yeah, I was almost going to say it. I know, I thought you might. Yeah, I might. Yeah, the other thing is, so this is really like nutshell. So in the white supremacist structure, who do you think is at the furthest end of that? Oh, black people. Right. So anti-blackness is like sits at the core of it. And so there's basically this sort of constant threat of being symbolically made black, right, to be put up, to be denigrated.

[62:01]

Right. Take it apart. It's quick, right? Oh, right away. Denigrated. Out black. Right? Put out with blacks. Denigrated. And so that is, it just lives. We're just always under this implicit threat of like, what will happen if I say anything about that thing I just saw? I knew that was not right. I knew that was not okay. What will happen? I'll get put out. Patriarchy works in the same way. Right? dominate or be dominated. So if I see domination happening, if I see a woman being denigrated, ridiculous, if I see something happening to a woman, I subject myself to domination because then all of the alpha males will come after me. So the code of silence, silence is a really powerful thing mediator of behavior and keeping the cultures in place.

[63:04]

So when we use our voices, when we speak up, when we have those groups, it feels like it's glacial, but we invite people in and our voices get bigger. It will always feel like it's just way too slow, like way too slow. And in my lifetime, I see same-sex marriage, and that was impossible. black president impossible when I was coming up impossible. So it feels terribly slow and we can move it. The reason I've been nodding is because I think about my own experience of a young gay man being complicit. I mean, I'm actually fighting back to tears because I'm remembering being complicit with other gay men in overt homophobia, like overt. And exactly what you said, if I speak up, What is the consequence? And I only mention that because you set the changes that you've seen.

[64:05]

So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Unfortunately, we're out of time, but tomorrow, same time, same place. Angel will be back tomorrow. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[64:36]

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