This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome, everyone. We are here at Green Goat Farm on the foggy coast of California, which more and more these days seems like a tremendous blessing. And speaking of blessings, I am so grateful and happy to welcome my dear friend and longtime dharma comrade, Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams. And I want to begin introducing Reverend Angel by reading to you the introduction that she was given by Krista Tippett back in 2018 on her program called On Being. Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams is one of our wisest voices on social evolution,

[01:01]

and the spiritual aspect of social healing. And for those of us who are not monastics, she says that the world is our field of practice. She's an esteemed Zen priest and the second black woman recognized as a teacher in the Japanese Zen lineage. To sink into conversation with her is to imagine and experience the transformative potential of this moment towards human wholeness. Long before that interview, as far back as I think the year 2000, another very good friend, Sala Steinbach, who for many years was the only black Dharma student at Green Gulch Farm, told me that I needed to read a recently published book called Being Black, Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace by Reverend Angel. Sala didn't think that I should call myself a Dharma teacher until I was better informed about racism, starting with my own. So as a Buddhist, acknowledging my own racist conditioning and vowing to end it, being the great source of suffering that it is, brought me to follow up on Sala's request, and then some years later to follow up again when I was introduced to Reverend Angel, who was a guest teacher down at Tassajara.

[02:17]

That was probably around 2016 or so, which also marked the publication of her second highly acclaimed book, Radical Dharma, Talking Race, love and liberation so when angel and i were talking about this gathering here this morning we thought it was important to acknowledge the arc of our own efforts to bring the discussion of race into our buddhist communities communities which were and still are quite behind in recognizing how our own lives are rooted in a white supremacist culture how it is no accident that students of color had not found a welcoming environment at the center or any of the Zen centers around the country, and how that really needed to change. Our initial offerings of Radical Dharma workshops at Tassajara over five years ago brought a few dozen people into the conversation and also allowed us to invite the students who were present in the valley to join us for an evening discussion as well. After a number of summer workshops, the thread of Radical Dharma remained somewhat modest until the traumatic events of these past two years, the first being the murder of George Floyd,

[03:28]

and the second, the pandemic. So from that time on, the interest and willingness to look into the mirror of our racial conditioning has become a national necessity to say nothing of the commitment within our own Buddhist communities to do so as well. And yet our conversation this morning as a Dharma offering will be addressing the very same primary concerns that the Buddha addressed over 2,500 years ago when he said to his own human followers, I only teach two things. the cause of suffering, and the cessation of suffering. As dedicated Dharma teachers in the Zen Buddhist tradition, and by virtue of our vows, Reverend Angel and I, along with a great many of you, are determined to continue the work of our founding ancestor, and for today in particular, in the field of our racial conditioning. So, Angel, I know these two big events, as we've discussed, the killing of George Floyd and the pandemic,

[04:29]

which you referred to as a massive timeout, have been part of your thinking for quite some time. And I wanted to invite you to share with all of us how you see the waters that we are swimming in now. Thank you. And first, I just want to express my gratitude for always your warm welcome here and the welcome and invitation of the larger San Francisco Zen Center community and all of the... faces and peoples that I'm seeing here, I had an opportunity to scroll through. And while some folks are off camera, I recognize a lot of people from all over the country, in fact, all over the world. And so in many ways, I think that that is what I see at this time is there is, as you pointed to Fusan, an increased awareness of the necessity to to to grapple with this, you know, to grapple with, you know, particularly certainly as a as a nation, certainly globally with the I want to say that the illness, the sociopathy that racial categorization and domination is all over the globe and particularly in the United States, our

[05:55]

hand in exporting this particular frame and shaping of racism around the globe, even when the British escaped and left it, and the Dutch who began the transatlantic slave trade put down enslavement of peoples, our country, the United States. continued to not only keep it, but to build an entire country on it. And that it makes it unique in that way, and our ways in which it's embedded in the institutions and history and laws are far too little known by most of us. But our country, this country, United States, that you and I share, Fu, was really built on not only... the enslavement of people, but its economic system is one of racial capitalism. And that has been true for a really long time.

[06:57]

And so that we're here 400 years later, 401 years later, after the understanding of the first enslaved person on these shores, that we're still grappling is a testimony to the entrenchment of white supremacy. You know, Many of us know that you couldn't even say white supremacy. I remember having a conversation with another dear Dharma brother, Reverend Greg Kosin Snyder. And he said, you know, he said, and he's and he's feminist and he's anti-racist and he is a socialist in all the ways. And he and it was several years ago. And he said, but the one thing you can't do is you can't say white supremacy to white people. They'll just fall out. They freeze, they disappear. And that we've come this far in that many years, and this was maybe four years ago or so, four or five years ago, is also a testimony to how the quickening has happened in terms of the recognition for all manner of reasons, which we can touch on.

[08:02]

The quickening has happened and there has been nothing that has been a greater quickening than... the twin pandemics, as people have many called them, of the death of George Floyd, the murder of George Floyd, and the ensuing uprisings, the Black Lives Matter, they've been called Black Lives Matter uprising. But I want to say the response to the deep recognition of racialization and the harm and pain that it is causing us. And I think that that has been brought about, that was brought about in particular, not just because George Floyd was murdered, because as we know, many black men and black women were murdered and have continued to be murdered, Latino, indigenous peoples. And I think had we not been in a pandemic, that we would not have seen the response that we saw. That the pandemic, in essence, is some form of our own practice as Zen practitioners, as Buddhist practitioners. We were on retreat. We were in a forced retreat.

[09:05]

That the purpose of our own retreat and our practice is precisely to create a condition in which there's sufficient quiet... in our minds so that we can actually hear ourselves in sufficient stillness in our bodies so that we can feel ourselves. And I think that those conditions coming together on a national and global basis created for us unknowingly an opportunity for people to actually feel, right? To not just know or hear or get a whiff of, yeah, there's racism and it should be dealt with, but actually to feel it. And to feel it not in just a moment, but to feel it in a sustained way because there was no place to go. We were home. We were in our own retreats. Certainly not all of us, but enough, they would call a tipping point. A critical mass of us were still enough, quiet enough, so that we could allow ourselves to feel, right?

[10:08]

Or sometimes even not so much allowing ourselves, but really it was... We were compelled to feel and to keep hearing and to keep hearing it again. And in an embodied way, which is much of what our conversation about is in terms of practice, in an embodied way, to have a direct experience and touching of the suffering that exists in us, to feel the pain and the compassion that arises out of a response to suffering. to go and take to the streets, to, you know, to take to conversations. I have seen and been a part of and continue, I know there will continue to be part of more conversations about race than, you know, certain, I think, I'm sure anytime in the history of this country and the history of, therefore, the history of the world. So I think that that's where we are. And we are at a...

[11:11]

critical point at this particular moment as some form of trans pandemic, I like to call it, is emerging for us where we're not post-pandemic, but many of us are making our way through to back into spaces in which we're sharing physical spaces again. And it is a critical time to see if we will be able to specifically as Zen communities, specifically as Buddhist communities, as Dharma communities, as human communities of peoples committed to justice and to the relief of suffering throughout the world, if we will do what the Buddha called for us to do in his essential teachings, which is to remember. If we will remember that sati, that mindfulness means remember, that the core of the practice is is about remembering what matters so that we can respond in a way that is appropriate, that is measured, and that does not situate itself in creating more suffering because that action is not yet seated in...

[12:30]

a relationship with ourselves that really allows to see the ways in which these forms of suffering have inhabited our own bodies and our own ways of being and our own culture. So that's a long introduction, but I hope comprehensive enough to get us going in a good, complex conversation. I have some more for you. Thank you for that part. Because one of the things that we were talking about as kind of the frame, this statement by the Buddha, I teach two things. I teach the causes of suffering and I teach the cessation of suffering. And so the causes of suffering, the one we're talking about right now, racialization, white supremacy, that's just kind of come up. And like you said, we can talk about it now. I remember again saying to you maybe four years ago, the lid's not off. I think you might recall that audience we were with at Tasahara the first year we did Radical Dharma.

[13:33]

And it was awkward. People were not comfortable using the term racism or white supremacy. Any of those things were like, you know, very quiet. The people who were mostly the guests who came. And then the second time, a few years later, everyone was talking. It had become like, it's okay now. It's okay for us as a collective to begin to acknowledge our own role, our own part in this. So another thing you said, which I really appreciated. May I add something to that? Yeah, of course. I think that certainly, and many of us here, I'm sure, are leaders in all manner of ways. And I want to say that was in no small part, not just to the conditions out in the world, but also to the modeling that you did as not just leadership, but an abbess. And someone that has been with the Zen Center system, and has been deep in practice for many decades, that you modeled a willingness to not only just to talk about it, but to be an inquiry in a way that was transparent.

[14:38]

We played at some point a kind of game, which comes from the work of Radical Dharma called Name That Whiteness. That was awful. And you were there willing, and I think it did a great deal to give people permission, which is something that we require. We require permission to break with the culture that we have been stewed in and steeped in and that has been so deeply embedded in our ways of being and seeing and knowing and feeling. And so there is something that is required because it's not just, you know, many people would think, and this is part of the white supremacy idea, that it's just an ideology, you know, and then you either believe in it or you don't. And, you know, good, well-meaning people don't believe in it, and there it is, end of story. And many times we've called race a...

[15:41]

a construct, a social construct, but I submit that it is not just a social construct and that it's not just an ideology. It is an embodied, inhabited reality for us that it takes over our brains, our hearts, like literally it can be measured on scientific devices, that it affects our physiology, that our brains respond differently to the suffering of of people's, of marginalized races, blacks and brown people in particular. And so for me, I consider this is evidence that it is not just an ideology and it's not just a construct that we can think our way out of, but really that it is a mass sociopathy that we are producing and advancing antisocial behavior on a massive scale, on a massive scale, something that we have been reluctant to acknowledge or disabled from acknowledging because we're so steeped in it that that sociopathy has actually become our culture.

[17:04]

Which is enormous. And if anyone is feeling a moment of like, whoa, did she just say that? Like, yeah, it's that serious. And it's that big. And those of you that are... you know, Googlers and sort of Google therapists and psychologists in the way that I am. You can go and look up what sociopathy is about, what it means to be a sociopath, and you will find consistency with the behaviors that we spoke about in that game. Name that whiteness. That the culture of whiteness has created some of the similar conditions and behavioral reactions in our bodies. And the biggest cosmic joke, if you will, is that we then go about mistaking those behaviors and cultures and learned ways of being for who we are. And what our practice does is gives us the opportunity to have some insight as to that not being the case.

[18:09]

Do you happen to remember a few of those white characteristics? I remember perfectionism and standards of beauty and, you know, who's pretty and who's chosen and all that kind of thing. And certainly it was true in my growing up, who we saw on TV, you know, and so on and so forth. The one I remembered vividly came from the audience. One of the BIPOC students who was there raised her hand and said, did we leave anything out of the whiteness list? And she said, yeah, they're whiny. I remember you had such a good laugh of that. Bingo. And some of those characteristics are manipulation, right? They'll go on the order of, so manipulation, so that correspond with sociopathy is manipulation. Manipulation so that one appears above others. one appears more important than others, including lying, including taking over the space, right?

[19:20]

Like asserting oneself in a way that takes over the space and makes oneself important, if any of these are sounding familiar. lying or, and, or, you know, and I know that lying is a strong word that might have a lot of trigger energy for many of you, but you know, active manipulation of, of, of reality of shared reality in such a, in such a way to advantage yourself. And. To do that in a way that even when you know that those things are not necessarily the case with those things that you believe that you're expressing as true to create the appearance of them being true. Those were also some of the things. And those are in the manual, if you will, for what it means to be a sociopath. And one of the distinctions about sociopaths

[20:22]

is that sociopaths are made, right? That they're made rather than born, at least as, as far as we can understand the difference between being a psychopath and sociopath. And so that's why I advanced that, that notion because we are, it's produced right by, by, by social conditioning, right? Particular instances, namely trauma, namely trauma. Yeah. And so as a reaction to trauma, and if the racialization of people, if the tearing apart of people from their natural impulse towards compassion and care and connection, if dismantling their physiological responses to compassion, care, and connection is not traumatic. I don't know what is. I don't know what is. And if we looked at it on an individual basis, we would understand it.

[21:25]

We would look at someone and we would say, oh, look at this way that you're responding, kind of taking over the space, keeping those people behind, asserting your superiority, manipulating situations so that those people can't get ahead. And then creating a whole belief system, media, machine, laws. And so if we did that and we said, oh, well, this is what this person was brought up in. They were brought up in conditions in which it was told and that was okay. We would understand that they were traumatized. And so as a result of being traumatized and being in a situation in which this kind of behavior was encouraged, we would say, oh, yeah, they need help. We need help. Yeah. Yeah, one of the things you also said that I found extremely helpful and important, I remember a lot of the things you say, they come in as, you know, like banners. That was really helpful to me.

[22:26]

And we try to remember this, you know, due to my own conditioning, which is forgetful. Like you said, remember, you have to remember. We were talking about some of the people at Zen Center, BIPOC students, who are, you know, expressing their... experiences of racism. And, you know, it's a little shocking. I mean, like, we're just good people, right? You know, this is sort of like, well, where is that? Or how do we spot it or whatever? And you said something so good. You said, well, the... I think this is right. You can certainly add your own words. But the lid is off being able to express such a thing. There was a time you couldn't say that, that that hurts me or that's racist or that's not fair. You're doing that to me because of my color. There was so long when that wasn't allowed to happen, you know, ever. You couldn't speak up on your own behalf or on behalf of your friends. So it seems to me that, and this is the best part, the lid is off. And you said something about the relationship to trauma and how when the lid is off, the expressions that come from that unlitting are really passionate.

[23:37]

And anyway, I really appreciate your sharing that, which I found so helpful. Yeah. And I think that's important because often, you know, one of the features, if you will, of the culture of whiteness is this politeness, right? And a politeness that supersedes even, well, that goes to the extent of negating the reality that is actually present in the moment. And so there then becomes an adding insult to injury of wanting the people that have been traumatized and are now touching that trauma and expressing it to get it right, you know, and to say it all in the right ways and to be polite and to do it in a way that doesn't cause friction or upset or make people uncomfortable because that's another one of those features, right? Comfort, right? Yeah. that the culture of whiteness. And when I say whiteness, I'm not talking about white people.

[24:41]

White people are obviously part of whiteness, right? But I'm actually talking about the constructed, crafted culture over now centuries, right, that conditioned people to behave. I was at a Zen center once out in St. Paul and... I was giving a talk and, you know, this is going to be full of lots of, you know, cultural cues. And so it is often considered, you know, timeliness, right? Like in like sort of clock time, fixation on clock time is one of those other features. And so because of the clock time thing and it was this long space and people entered in from this side... And because of clock time, largely, I was sitting in the middle of the room in the front, largely the white-bodied people, right? And so white-bodied people were on this side of the room because of clock time, right? They'd arrived earlier. So they went in and they were largely on this side of the room, not 100%, but overwhelmingly and noticeable.

[25:48]

And on this side of the room, closer to the door, when you came in later, was overwhelmingly people of color. Now the Midwest, which was, it was amazing to me, is fascinating because many places I go, there's a, you know, there's a quite striking, like it's, you know, white folks and it's black people, or you go in the Southwest and it's white folks and it's Latinx people, or, you know, and so there's, you go in certain places and there's like strong numbers of a particular racial ethnic category. In the Midwest, so many people came together because they have each other as people of color. And so on the one hand, you had all sorts of different heritages of white people. You know, there were Italian, Jewish, Scandinavian, a lot of Scandinavian, Irish, you know, Irish-Scottish, you know, lots of different backgrounds there. Polish. And for the first time, actually, that I had seen, also the same. There were people, there were Hmong, there were South Asian, there were Caribbean folks.

[26:53]

Black folks, Latinx folks from Latin America, Cuban, like really different people. So here this is. White folks on this side. People have come to this side. And I made a joke. And the joke, whatever the joke was, was so inconsequential in my mind, not a big deal, that I don't even remember the joke to this day. And I hope that somebody will tell me what the joke was. But I made the joke. And this side of the room, it was like crickets. There was like a little tittering. This side of the room with the people of color, like, wow, uproarious laughter. And immediately everyone noticed this. And I paused for a moment and I looked up and I said, that was awkward, wasn't it? And I was, yeah, particularly the white folks were like, yeah. And I said, well, if you need any evidence that whiteness is a culture that has been constructed, there it is.

[28:01]

Because there is nothing more similar about you folks that inhabit so-called white bodies than these folks that inhabit brown and black bodies, different cultures, different ethnicities, different backgrounds, different ways of being raised. And yet... There was some invisible cultural alignment that happened that just doesn't, that defies, it defies everything there is to defy about what it means to be different people. Other than white-bodied people have been indoctrinated and inculcated into a way of being that even made it a joke, not perceptible to them. Wow. And it's phenomenal. And I said, I promise you, we didn't plan this. All of the people of color and black people didn't go in a room ahead of time and plan it and say, we're going to play a joke.

[29:04]

It was completely innocuous in my mind. And it was so telling in such a striking way that it affected not only... ways of people moving around, but actually the way they perceive, right? It actually affected the perception of being able to cognize and integrate a joke. I think that is more evidence to why, how important it is for us to have these conversations together. I mean, you know, for black and white identified people to be able to talk together about, instead of like, well, you know, It took me, it was, I don't know how many years ago, not long ago when I for the first time recognized I had been talking, giving lectures for 20 years to all white people. I never even saw that. Like that's how bad it is. You know, holy cow. So the fact that we have gotten this so completely separated conversations to me is also evidence of not getting the joke.

[30:12]

We can't get the joke if we don't come together and notice. What happened there? You know, it's so powerful when we, when we're together, how much we can learn so much quicker than when we're on our islands, you know? Well, and I think there's also though the case for at what point we can be together too. Yes. Because, you know, for many people of color and black, black people. And so the, the term that is used for those of you that are not familiar is often these days BIPOC. which means Black, Indigenous, and people of color. And the reason that there's that breaking apart is to acknowledge that there are different histories, right? There are significantly different histories in those coarse groupings of people that Black peoples, for the most part, have a... have a unique historical background in relationship to the United States. There are different terms used in different countries. But in the United States, that is different and distinct and significant from indigenous peoples, that indigenous people are not people of color in the same way.

[31:20]

And then, of course, people of color are not all the same, Asian, East Asian, South Asian, Japanese, Chinese, Latin. They're not all the same. But the locationality largely of people having been immigrated to the country is a different historical reference, except for those Chicano people who the border crossed over them. Their history is unique as well. So just to name that for folks so that we're not kind of throwing around the acronyms and terms without an understanding. The fact is that for most those people, and particularly for black people, because of their unique location, we live, we don't necessarily get trained in race realities. We live them, right? We live under the burden of and the impact of race realities. And as a result of that, like anything that kind of keeps pelting you, right?

[32:23]

Right. you can grow, on the one hand, a resistance, right, a resilience in it to be able to keep functioning because socioeconomically we often have to function amongst white people regardless of how we feel about it for our economic survival. And on the other hand, the tenderness of that wounding is just under the, that armor is palpable. And so to enter into spaces in conversation, as you spoke about earlier, about when, as the sort of trauma, the recognition of like how much armoring there has been and how much wounding, right? You sort of like, any person that, you know, we talk about trauma that you know that functions in trauma, you can function it for a really long time without being aware of how deep the trauma is. And then when it's opened up. It's like a kind of re-traumatizing. The experience of the pain is out there and it's heavy duty.

[33:23]

And so people are not necessarily always equipped to be in spaces in which, on the other hand, people that are just becoming aware are kind of like, you know... stumbling around, groping in the dark. In many instances, and this is where the term microaggression from doing the exact same thing, that the Black and Indigenous and people of color have been learning to armor themselves when they've dealt with their armor. And so I definitely appreciate the need for coming together. And there is also a really important and essential need for you know, I call it caucusing or being in spaces in which people can, and white people included, right? To work some of the rough edges out, right? And to get some rules of engagement in spaces in which we're having conversations, you know, about race that are more intimate.

[34:30]

This is what kind of safe... Right. And we're safe enough to be able to hear things. And you and I in dialogue, I think, creates this unique opportunity that invites everyone in. Right. It says we're all welcome here. It's not just me and it's not a black space or people of color space. It's not just you and just a white space. So this is there's a kind of relative safety. I always tell people, if you're in a black body in America, there's no such thing as safety. That's a fact. But inside of that, when it becomes more intimate in your sanghas, in your communities, in your workspaces, driving into like, let's all have conversation together, is also actually a feature and a habit of white folks often because it's uncomfortable. to not, you know, have command of it and know what's going on.

[35:30]

And so you will have many, many instances in which you will find that people of color will be like, no, we need to have some of these conversations by ourselves. We need you to go have your conversation yourself and work out some of those edges. Yeah. So that you even realize that your way of speaking, your way of asserting yourself, your way of that you understand as yourself. Right. And so it's not it's not personal. It's social that you may understand. Like, this is just my personality. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe it's your personality. Maybe it's whiteness. Yeah. Right. Maybe it's your personality. Maybe it's ego. This is not different. Right. Maybe it's your personality, but maybe it's the way your ego has reacted to certain causes and conditions. And through practice, when you are still enough, you can recognize, oh, there's something that I have that's available to me that I can offer here.

[36:38]

Or conversely, there's a way that I have hardened here that I didn't realize. was the result of the way my father treated me or my mother treated me or, you know, I was teased when I was a child. So this sort of relationship between the personal and the social, it works all the way up the line. I really remember very vividly when you came to Green Lodge to speak to the residents there, there was one young gay black man who was a guest student at the time, and he was so... He was very shy when he spoke. And then he said to you, well, I don't know why my friends, his white friends, he was in college, won't let me talk to them about my pain. They don't want to hear it. They dismiss it or they make it small. They reduce it. And you said to him, you can't talk from your wounds. You have to talk from your scars. And you said about yourself, I've done that work of healing myself.

[37:41]

And until you do that, you're going to be reopening these wounds, as you were just saying. So that idea that first you have to do this inner work, you have to prepare yourself for this work that we all need to do together, the collective work. And that's a big part of why you and I are both so grateful to the sitting practice and to having this opportunity to actually spend time with ourselves in silence. And really find all those things you're talking about, all that conditioning, it starts to bubble up like a, you know, I felt my first years of practice were like putting the garbage disposal on in reverse. You know, everything was just coming up, all those things, all those lies and all those things. And, you know, oh my God, you know, the horror of what humans, how we grow and what we do while we're growing. So anyway, I feel like a lot of that cleansing has to take place for a while until you're ready to receive some new conditioning, you know, some different way.

[38:43]

So I really wanted to thank you again for that insight about scarring, you know. And, you know, I'll just say, you know, particularly to people of color, to BIPOC folks here, You know, many of us, we're not in the era of, you know, whatever, you know, hundreds of years ago where we don't have relationships with white folks. We work with them. We play with them. We love them. We're married. We have children. You know, so we're in the stew together, you know, many of us. And more often, that is true more often for BIPOC folks than it is for white folks in that BIPOC. often cannot have a life without some relationship with white folks. White folks can have a relationship, have a life without any real relationship with people of color. And that's often not the case for us. And as a result of that, as these conversations are arising, many of us may rush to try to help our people, help our kin, help our white kin figure this out.

[39:56]

And then we get wounded because they're not ready. You know, they're touching in to their own sifting apart, peeling apart the layers of like, what if this is me? I mean, first, you know, the denial. I mean, you know, just the denial alone of like, no, I'm a good person because we have come to... view the way that we operate move in the world as as who we are which our practice is about peeling apart and going no you're you're not a you're not a you're not a it or that you're a arising and an ever arising and arising again and arising again and there's some momentum to the way in which you have this the fabrication that you you tend to refer to you as me And that momentum is potent and it's powerful so that we do have this sense of like, oh, this is how I am, who I am, and the way that I am.

[41:00]

So that when race in the conversation about race or white supremacy or whiteness come up, we take it personally, right? We attach those ideas to the fabrication called me, right? To that momentum of fabrication. And we take it personally. We feel it personally. And so, of course, who wants to be? considered a racist. So the immediate response, of course, is like, not me. Of course, not you in the sense of I don't, it's not what I'm wanting for. Of course, not you in the sense of that's not my wish from, and certainly not you. And that's the way that I want to see myself. But yes, you in the way that you have been dipped into the, the icing, right? The, the stew, of course you, in a extraordinarily long-standing, constantly nuanced, ever-refined set of instructions about how to be and relate to yourself and relate to this color of your skin, even those of you that came to this country later as a people persecuted from

[42:20]

from other lands. You didn't necessarily come with a racial category. But this country, you sit down and somebody turns around and they give you attention first. You go to apply for a loan and the loan comes easier. You go to apply for a job and the job comes easier. I had this wonderful conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn and he said, you know, he said, I went my whole life thinking all that, All that I got was because of me. Because I'm so great. Because I'm so smart. Because I'm so wonderful. He said, and then I started to do this work. And I realized that there were instances in which things came to me maybe a little too easy. They were just laid there at my feet. I didn't have to work as hard. Not that he didn't work. Not that you didn't work. Not that you didn't do things. And not that everybody's life is a bowl of roses. And that you don't have difficulty, trauma, economic challenge.

[43:25]

That's not what we're saying. But that the overarching shaping of the notions of the privileges that you're entitled to are overwhelming and impossible to that kind of conditioning. And so it's not personal, right? No one picked you and said, like you, Justin, right? I want to pick you and lay this trip on you. And that's the nature of this racialization for no other reason than the fact of the color of your skin and how you came out of the womb. You have this lot to bear that is the result of this culture. And so it's not your fault. And as I always say, but it is your responsibility. Because if you're here, you're people that are committed to relieving suffering.

[44:28]

I can't imagine why else you'd be here listening to me anyway. I can't imagine why you'd be here for the Dharma. I can't imagine why you'd be here for practice. Even if you're not... you know, at the point at which you're ready to fully articulate it, that yearning is in us, that yearning is, is there, you know, and, and in contrast to the Buddha, I would say like, I teach one thing, which is liberation in the, and the path to liberation. And I didn't, I wasn't interested in race. I wasn't interested in having that conversation, except that it inhibits the path to liberation, except that it is an obstacle to, to people that I have known and love that I think are extraordinary teachers, Dharma teachers, spiritual teachers, Eastern teachers. And man, are they stuck around race. And the reason I know they're stuck is because they contract. The reason I know they construct is because they can't even be at ease in the presence of the conversation, that they can't even have a conversation without backing up and obfuscating and

[45:34]

Becoming aggressive and denying and distracting and redirecting. We're not doing that because it's not part of the Dharma. Tell me, what of the 10,000 things are not the Dharma? I want to ask you, may I ask you another question? It's kind of a practical one. I'm going to ask you questions too. You can. This one was such an honor to have you. I think you know I feel that, and we all feel that. So you said something else about your own personal way of handling assault aggression, which, again, has stuck with me, another one of those banners. In fact, you exercised with me at Atasahar. We played it. I got to be the hostess, and you were a visiting guest. And I said, oh, can I help you? And you said, no, I'm fine, thank you. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to take care of you. I'm trying to take you over. You're going, I'm just fine. Thank you.

[46:34]

And I was just, I got nervous. I was like, wait a minute. What is this relationship? What's happening here? You know? And you said, I, you learned, I hope I got this right. That when someone throws stuff at you, whatever it is, I think it's called shade. When they throw something. Yeah. That you say inside yourself, that's not mine. That's not mine. That's yours. That isn't mine. You can't hit me with your stuff. I mean, of course, you can hit me with some weapon, but you can't hit me with your words because they're not mine. That's you. That's your hatred or that's your disrespect coming out of you. And I was thinking the corollary of that is for those of us who are the aggressors, whether intentionally or not, that is mine. I need to own that and I need to be responsible for it and say, I'm sorry. You know, as soon as I recognize it and then learn that lesson again and again. So I hope I got that right. But I thought that's not mine was a great shield for anybody who feels that kind of oppression from hierarchs or whatever it is, you know, wherever it's coming from.

[47:43]

Yeah, you know, I would say it's even more than a shield. It is an expansion. of the space that you inhabit so that things that happen, things that are said don't land on you. They land in the space. And so it's not mine. And it's yours, and it also is collective. It's yours. It is yours, but it is also collective. It's inherited. I mean, it's in your... You know, it's in the way your parents, you know, taught you. Maybe the little funny look, you know, someone gave you when you had a black friend. The way that somebody's like pulled you away or just the message you get in the media, you know. A man does things, but a black man does other things, right? What does that mean? All these deep encodings.

[48:45]

And, you know, I think it's really important for me to share. that you and I had this conversation, and I hope I get this right, and you were asking me about how I came to this. And I said, you know, this is the Dharma. I've been part of this practice and considered this my practice long enough that it wasn't like I came and I'm going to bring this race conversation to the Dharma. It's like... I discovered the very same things that I'm sharing, not because I'm a race professor, I'm not a scholar, I didn't go and, you know, try to get a whole bunch of studying. I mean, I've done, you know, checking in, of course, you know, and learning since then. But it was from the inquiry of the practice, you know, to be able to be sensitive enough and attuned enough and also honest enough.

[49:47]

And the discovery for me was not like, oh, look, white people are doing something. That's not my practice. That's not my inquiry. My discovery was like, oh, look at this bias against Black people in me. Look at that in me, right? And that I had to acknowledge that. I could get a pass. Everyone would give me a pass. Of course, you're not holding racial bias. But my inquiry, my practice allowed me to acknowledge, first to feel it, to notice there's some funny thing going on there in my body. When I would say certain things and could feel the untruth in those words. You know, like, oh, all black people, I'm good with. Maybe not.

[50:49]

Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe not so true. And to feel that, right, and to be sensitive enough and say, like, oh, I know that. That's my I'm not being honest with myself feeling. And then to take that to my cushion, right, to take that to my yoga mat, to take that to my... to my practice, take that to, you know, I would say, take that to my Jesus, whoever your Jesus is to, to take that and say, let me sit with that. Let me be with that. And let me, let me face that. Right. Let me face like, and like that discomfort, that noticing of the, the, the discordance, right. Of, of my words. Yeah. even to myself, even if no one else saw them. I mean, this is the courage of the practice, right? Even if no one noticed it, even if no one else could point it out and say, oh, I saw you did that. For me, that was the gift for me in my practice was to say, oh, I can develop the courage to, not to face you, but to face myself first.

[51:58]

I mean, that is the real, real work. That's the real. Deep, deep work, you know, is not to figure out how do I come out, you know, smelling like a rose to other people, but how do I, forgive my French, you know, learn to own my own shit and to smell it and not to smell it and then go run, like to smell it and sit with it and go, oh, let me get used to this aroma. Mm-hmm. so that I can recognize it when it's surfacing in these other places, so that it's like I'm familiar with it. So that's what we mean when we talk about doing the work. And, you know, foo, Sanji. So I remember you were sharing just so openly about your journey of saying, and please correct me if I'm wrong, like, oh, I thought we had done it. It was the 60s. Like, I thought we had done it.

[53:00]

We took care of that. You know, check. You know, that race stuff, we took care of that. And then back to sleep. Yeah. You know? And so, you know, not that you just were running around being an avowed racist all your life, but rather how deep it is, you know, and that the slumber just comes over you. And, you know, there it is, 20 years. I know. I know. Would you share a little more about just that? Well, yeah. Let me fine tune the question. Because we can get caught in the idea that, like, oh, I have a spiritual practice. There is Fu, and Fu's got a long history. Is it more than 40 years? Right? So it's climbing up there. And she's talking about race. So, you know, she must like have it down, right?

[54:04]

Like that, you know, that must mean we're kind of like over the hump, right? Because we have a practice, which in some ways can be a snag to telling ourselves the truth. And so I felt so moved by your willingness to share this at that stage, you know, these years ago when we... we met and we were in conversation. So if you would share, cause I think it would be helpful for those of us that may be a little shy about saying, well, wait a minute. I'm, you know, I've had a practice for 10 years, 20 years, 50, you know, 30 years. And how do I own, you know, that, that the polishing ain't done yet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I, for my own personal perspective, pilgrimage through myself through my mind and my body and my history you know there's so much that goes back to when we're children and and you know you have your memories of your parents i have my memories of my parents and grandparents and i think i told you the other day i mean i remember very well having my grandmother with her white gloves on take my hand in the bank of america and walk in front of the line like in front of all these working people who were there to deposit their

[55:17]

You know, she said, we don't need to wait. I said, what are you talking about? I was very young, but I remember being stunned and the looks on the people. But not just white folks. No, no, no. Yeah, that's the important. No, no, no. That's the important piece of the story. Not just white folks with hats on and gloves. No, that was my grandma. And she had me by the hand, you know, and I was like, I don't, I already knew there was something really wrong. And I'm grateful for that. Something about me knows there's something really wrong, even though I might not know what it is. But I think there's something really wrong when there's those hateful looks on people's faces about my grandmother's behavior. Why do they hate us? So I think there was a kind of a growing up of the communal relationship that I was growing into a society which had some really crazy, harmful stuff. And it... I'm grateful I grew up in San Francisco, which is kind of liberal thinking and talking, although we know there's a lot more going on under the floorboards.

[56:20]

And also going to San Francisco State, which for me was the closest to heaven I've ever been because it was completely the world. Everybody was there. Everybody was there. And it was not majority white by any means. And I really loved being there. And I thought, oh, this is what it's going to be like. It's the 60s, right? We're done with it. We've integrated. We're all together now. And, you know, it's the Starship Enterprise. And here we are on the, you know, we're going to fly through space together. And, you know, the falling back to sleep, I think, is the part that, as you mentioned, really hurts. Because I stopped noticing or I stopped feeling there was something terribly wrong. Because I'm in this Buddhist little enclave out here. Yeah. And feeling like only really nice, good people could possibly be anywhere. And everyone out there must be like that. Some kind of delusional state of forgetting about there's a lot more going on here than meets the eye.

[57:21]

And I think I also told you that within my own family system, there was the whispered name my grandmother, also my grandmother, made about someone in our family called the Sanchez woman. You know, she was a relative of some sort, but that was all we knew. You know, this name. And I thought, what is it I'm being taught? What have I been taught? And I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to unlearn it. And I think it's with having good friends like you and like Sala and others who are here. We have some good friends growing up in our community right now. We hope we can be good friends to tell us their own pain and suffering when they're ready. so that we can listen. I feel like listening is my task for a good long time to come. I need to hear you and others talk about things that I didn't know or I didn't see, I didn't look at.

[58:23]

So no, 40 years of Zen practice is 40 years of Zen practice, but every day you sit on that cushion, you'll notice something within yourself that is grist. Some gristle that needs softening. Thank you. I want to share just one piece from the work of Radical Dharma that our conversations and we're planning a workshop. The one we were going to do is being postponed until we're not sure yet, but when yet, but stay tuned. because we'd love to have you. But one of the things that I discovered from a process that I developed in the Radical Dharma work, we do these camps, we bring people together in physical space. We're actually doing one in October in New York at Omega Institute. But one of the things that I have come to discover is that when we essentially walk people through experiences such as the one that you just shared about your grandmother,

[59:32]

And we speak about it as your first experience, the point at which you were racialized, right? That you were racialized, which means like, okay, we have skin color, right? But that skin color and the meaning and association with the skin color is where the notion of race comes in, right? So we're different. We have... It's the technical term is different phenotypical expressions as the result of our background, heritage, geography. If you go further back, like geography, so our bodies form differently and the shapes of our noses and hair, texture and so on as a result of going way back as a result of geography. And then the human species ran all over the place and we form different ways. But, you know, it is much to some people's chagrin. well acknowledged that everyone came out of South Africa as far as we currently know.

[60:34]

And so this race thing, though, is assigning value, right? Particularly value, right? Associations and value. And those associations get under our, you know, mental skin as well as our physical skin. So that's what race is, right? It's like this... It's the connotations that we make associations with when I might look at someone and immediately I've told the story of moving to California. I wasn't so young and I moved to California and I walked into a Mexican restaurant and there was a young white guy, blonde, blue-eyed white guy, and he had a broom in his hand. I thought to myself, without wanting to think it to myself, what did he do wrong? Because it would have been okay if there was a Mexican guy or even a black guy with the broom in the restaurant. But it wasn't okay that a bright, blonde, blue-eyed, white male, young white man, had the broom.

[61:41]

That wasn't his location. It wasn't his status. That wasn't the right location for him, in my mind, especially in a Mexican restaurant. Turns out white folks own the restaurant. But that's a whole other story. So that's the challenge though, right? And so is that these connotations get built in. So we have people visit the point at which not they recognize that they were different, right? That, you know, people's eye shapes are different and skin is different, but rather when it became clear that those differences mattered, right? That... That they have some kind of an impact in the way that you recognized that something was going on there. And what we have discovered through this process is that when people revisit that, and it's a... It's not just remembering.

[62:42]

So you may try and that would be good and you might get something out of it. But I'll just say that it's not just like remembering when that moment happened, because many people have remembered like when they realized like something was up there. But through this process, it kind of walks you in a different way. What has happened, what we people realize, it's kind of like revisiting the original site of trauma as far as people remember, like that traumatic moment. The one thing that has been consistent, and this has been across hundreds of people now, is that everyone knew intuitively in just the way that you said that something was wrong. The word almost 58%, excuse me, 48% that the word that most people say all sorts of words, you know, shame, guilt, they share these things from the perspective of either a perpetrator of some kind of thing, a victim or a recipient or a bystander.

[63:43]

So it really, you know, it covers all the bases. And so whatever it is, whether they said shame or they felt like, you know, sadness, the word that most often comes out is confusion. Confusion, that they were confused. And confusion is a conflict. So when we have confusion, it's a result of a conflict. And the conflict is that something, you knew something already, and you have introduced something that doesn't jibe. What that tells me is that we fundamentally know better, that there is a deep intuitive wisdom of this is, something's not right here. And we're going along and we recognize difference and people are different and they look different. And then that point of racialization, we are actually confusing the natural human organism to just be curious and open and receptive to difference and to receive it.

[64:48]

And when something intervenes, we have this experience of like, whoa, confusion. And that is the most promising thing. Yes, yes. come to see is that down there under all the conditioning over and over again, different regions, different places, different locations, different races, different heritage, all of the immigrants, all the things that we know better, that at the core of who we are, we want to be connected and we want to be curious and we want to care for each other. And that racialization is a It is a corruption of our basic humanity. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma.

[65:54]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dorma.

[66:02]

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