This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Morning. I'm Charlie. A bunch of years ago I lived at Green Gulch. Now I live in Sebastopol, and with my partner Sarah Emerson, we teach at Stone Creek Zen Center. And this morning, I want to look at how Zen practice can help us to work with what I regard as our collective moral failings or shortcomings. And particularly, I want to look at perspectives on racism and how our practice can support us, the challenge and uproot.

[01:08]

Some of the ways that racism continues to function in this culture. And in terms of looking at Zen practice, I want to bring up three ways of talking about our practice. being in touch with our vulnerability, not knowing and realizing the nature of self as changing and totally relational. And these three ways of talking about practice, I view them as, I kind of view them as virtues of a responsive ethics. They can support our deepest potential for ethical responsiveness. And so kind of the basic question is how do these virtues of a relational, responsive ethics, how can they support us to address the problems of contemporary racism?

[02:13]

And I'm going to focus on racism, but I think these are Virtues that can support our ethical life in general. I offer that. And our collective moral predicaments, global warming, other forms of oppression based on gender, sexual orientation, ability, and so on. And sometimes virtues are... in the realm of ethics, sometimes virtues are offered because rules or principles are not really sufficient. So we can have a principle or a rule that we try to live by, like racism is not okay, treat everyone the same. But these are not really sufficient to address the problems of our ethical lives.

[03:25]

they can provide some guidance, but they can't really tell us what to do. And our lives are too complicated for rules to work. And another problem with rules is even if we have a really great rule, like the best principle, we don't follow rules. That's just not how we work. can't just decide. And that's because we're socialized. We grew up in a culture. It profoundly formed us. And it's not accessible to us. We're not transparent to ourselves. We can't see our socialization clearly. We can't see ourselves clearly. And so our ethical participation is not just what we consciously experience and then decide to do.

[04:35]

Our socialization plays a huge part. Our unconscious patterns, the lenses through which we see the world play a big part. And the nature and quality of our awareness plays a big part. And I think this is especially the case with our racial conditioning. where the socialization is deep, complex, and for most of us, for most white people, largely unconscious. I had been repeatedly struck from a passage from Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail. He says, I must confess that over the past few years, I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate.

[05:38]

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizen's counselor or the Ku Klux Klaner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace. which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice. And that was April 1963, so 56 years ago. And I think still today, it can feel incisive. It can make us wonder what's been happening. you know, some positive steps have taken place, but when it comes to, you know, racial justice in this country, there's a kind of widespread stasis.

[06:43]

It's a collective moral floundering. So how do we address this? King speaks of a negative peace. I really like this term. An absence of tension. A peace that takes comfort in stasis. And it's based on denial. It's not challenging ourselves. It's not challenging our socialization. And... It's invested in the status quo. It's invested in being isolated, insulated, non-relational or individualistic. It's my piece. And it avoids critical engagement.

[07:46]

And it's not a positive force. interested in actualizing justice, actualizing love. And you could say a positive peace is a dynamic force. It's not a state of rest. It's ongoing. It's a living engagement of justice. And it's responsive, open-ended, and active. It's a living function of peace. The piece of Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva responding to the cries of the world. Our patterns of conditioning, of socialization, of enculturation are woven deeply into how we see the world. Our identities.

[08:56]

And they're formations, and they can be hard to see, hard to acknowledge, hard to address, and hard to transform. And all the while, have a profound effect, dehumanizing self and other. So our socialization is pervasive, but also it's hard to see, hard to name. Angel Kyoto Williams writes that not one single one of us escapes from perpetuating domination. We are born into it. It is the language that we all share. So what are practices that can support us to challenge our socialization? In her book, White Fragility, Robin DeAngelo writes, white people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.

[10:07]

This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort, while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as white fragility. White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. So as I prepared this talk, I could feel an urge to leave the stress-inducing situation. But I kept preparing the talk. And then I drove here because I have enthusiasm for working on this.

[11:16]

Maybe some of you have an urge to leave the stress-inducing situation. The doors are not locked. So I want to bring up these three, I want to kind of dig in now to these three ways of talking about our practice and look at how they can support us, the challenge and negative piece. and the defensive maneuvers of white fragility and support us to address our socialization and participate in enacting justice. So being in touch with our vulnerability is being open to our discomfort and the possibility of discomfort. It's being intimate. with our pain, our wounds, our suffering, the precariousness of life.

[12:27]

And this being in touch, I think I like the word touch. It's visceral. This is an embodied thing. It's showing up fully as an embodied feeling being. Being present in a fully embodied way. and developing a sense of being okay with not feeling okay. Fully owning our uncomfortable feelings. Giving up turning away, giving up pushing down, giving up blaming. This is my feeling. And this is kind of a basic ground if we're gonna challenge ourselves. Taking responsibility for ourselves. Developing a mature approach to our discomfort.

[13:33]

And not looking for others to kind of take care of our feelings. You know, systemic racism in part is maintained because white people prefer certain forms of comfort And so, you know, being in touch with our vulnerability is opening, relaxing, feeling, thoroughly feeling. This is being in touch with ourselves. And this being in touch, it's a gateway of empathy and compassion. And empathy and compassion can also be a gateway into intimacy with our own pain.

[14:39]

We're opening to pain. We're opening to suffering. And as we open in, we open out. As we open out, we open in. It's basically just opening. And being in touch with our vulnerability is becoming fully human. Dehumanizing self and other are intertwined. And humanizing self and other are intertwined. And I offer that being in touch with our vulnerability is a foundation of our ethical life. And it's a ground of our actual responsiveness. Vulnerability here, it's not a specific feeling.

[15:50]

It's more like a fact of our being. It's a truth of our being. We're totally relational. Invulnerability is kind of a fantasy. So this is not really about are we vulnerable or not. We are vulnerable. But are we in touch with it? developing a willingness to live with the truth of our life. And also, I would say this being in touch is not to become passive or be like a sitting duck or a punching bag. There's receptivity, but it's not submissive or passive. It's a vigilant and ceaselessly engaged receptivity. And I think we actually find a deeper strength and deeper resiliency in being in touch with our vulnerability.

[16:54]

We're responsive. We're not rigid. We're not totally floppy. We're more dynamic than that. It's creative, flexible. It's alive. We should surprise ourselves on a regular basis. And it's also, we're not kind of like trashing our defenses, but we feel our defenses. We feel through our defenses. And from a place of intimacy with the defense, we can let it go. We can let it go and we feel how small it makes our life. Not being in touch with our vulnerability is, I would say, preferring a negative piece. And it can feel safe, but it's a dead, fairly flat form of safety.

[18:06]

And we can give up the comforts of a negative piece. We can give up the defenses of white fragility. And as we open to the pain here, we open to the pain of others. And I feel it's not just because my suffering is the same as your suffering, that when I open to mine, I open to yours. It's actually opening, not just to how the suffering is the same, but also how it's different. And so we're connected deeply by how we're the same, and we're connected deeply by how we're different. And in Zen, we honor the harmony of sameness and difference. We honor the sameness of our shared humanity, and we honor the difference of how we're each unique.

[19:21]

And differences are... they're essential to the meaning of human relating. So seeing and recognizing differences is not the problem. The problem is how we relate to these differences that we see, and particularly, I think, what we project onto these differences. And I think part of the pain And suffering of racial conditioning is, you know, there's a dehumanizing projection involved in bias, prejudice, and it's reductive. And so, you know, getting in touch with our socialization is starting to attend to, it's very subtle, and we're usually in total denial, but it still actually plays out in our conduct.

[20:27]

valuations higher and lower better worse american other worthy unworthy normal different and you know in this you know we often associate white supremacy as a kind of extreme thing but actually you know to be white in this culture is that the basic proposal is there's some white supremacy there. It's unavoidable in this culture. It's in the air. There is some projection of higher and lower. And to the extent we're not in touch with it, we're not in touch with this dehumanizing thing we do on a daily basis. So the second way of talking about practice I want to bring up, not knowing.

[21:44]

So not knowing, you can see, it's not grasping our thinking as true. Not believing what we think. Our thoughts, they often strike us as true, as accurate. They can appear objective. And we often feel like we have a pretty good picture of things. And this is how knowing feels. And a key point with not knowing is not that we become blank or eliminate our thinking or bury ourselves in ignorance. We just release the grasping, the apprehension. The thoughts themselves are not really the problem. The problem is when we grasp them as true, and then we live in the kind of small world created by those thoughts.

[22:50]

So our thinking is never the whole story. What we know is never the whole story. It's always partial. It's a limited account. Or in a... A Zen metaphor, it's like a circle of water in the vast ocean. And not knowing is appreciating this. Not knowing is then inherently curious. So it's not an excuse to be uninformed. It's actually an heightened sense of being, I am uninformed. I'm interested in more information. I'm interested in being more fully informed, new insights, new data, different experiences, different interpretations. Always being interested in understanding ourselves more deeply.

[23:54]

It's non-reductive, or you could say it's anti-reductive. opening to the complexities of ourselves right here, opening to the complexities of our interactions, opening to the complexities of our socialization and how all of this is working together. You could also say not knowing is the practice of knowing. awakened knowing it's a curiosity endless inquiry deep investigation humility giving up certainty these are forms of awakened knowing or practices of knowing and so not knowing is also is vital to opening to difference to respecting real difference

[25:04]

respecting others you could also say it's a kind of it's a humility it doesn't come in knowing what's happening it comes in wondering what's the teaching here what can I learn here it's being a student of what's happening And knowing can be a kind of power trip. It can be a kind of assuming of power, asserting what's real, asserting what's happening. And if it's coming from the position of privilege, it can have that kind of power in a situation. Not knowing is a giving up certainty. We give up the privilege of certainty, of being right, of saying or doing the right thing.

[26:12]

And so anything we say, anything we do is open to question. It's always a question. What do we do? What do we say? And when? When do we be just quiet? When do we just listen? When do we stand up? And sometimes it can seem like uncertainty would paralyze us. But I think grasping after certainty paralyzes us. Because we're afraid to make a mistake. Or we need certainty before we can act. And knowing... And certainty and having the answers diminishes our living agency, diminishes the dynamic response that can arise in this moment.

[27:18]

And that depends on us being open and in touch, not having the answer before we get there. And I would say knowing the answer is not what the world needs. It's not what our lives need. So the uncertainty of not knowing approaches our ethical participation. It's a work in progress. It's an ongoing project. And we don't do what we do with some assurance that is right. I've got it right. It's an offering. It's an experiment. And we're not so concerned about getting it right. We're concerned with the quality of the offering, the quality of the experiment. Is it sincere? Is it loving and respectful? Is it alive? Is it challenging and negative peace?

[28:22]

Is it courageous? An offering is something we give. It's an expression of caring. And that in itself embodies non-grasping. And when we make an offering and care about it, we're ongoingly engaged. We care about the impact. We're naturally responsible for what we do. And so we welcome questioning, we welcome inquiry, we welcome feedback. We value it. We value hearing about how was that. When we do something as an experiment, we're interested in the results.

[29:24]

And we're willing to make mistakes. This is part of being uncertain. Not grasping that we're right. We're kind of open to the possibility that this is a mistake. And we might be especially grateful for critical feedback because that's where we can learn. That's where we can grow. We might yearn for praise. Sometimes we yearn for praise. Sometimes, you know, praise can be nice. But praise tends towards stasis. Praise just affirms our pre-existing patterns. It's not a challenge. You know, sometimes maybe that's what we need. But not just that. Not just support. We need challenge to grow. Critical feedback can interrupt our patterns and help us see stuff we don't yet see.

[30:39]

And because it's hard to receive criticism, we might need to consciously welcome it. You might need to say, welcome, critical feedback, and thank you. Thank you, critical feedback. A few weeks ago, I heard a joke, and I thought, was that racist? And it was kind of a fast-moving conversation, and I was wondering if I should try to interrupt this conversation. and draw attention to the fact that this joke sounded kind of racist. And then I said, well, maybe it wasn't racist. Was it racist? And I couldn't get clear about it in a moment. And I had this kind of feeling, well, it's kind of, can I bring it up if I don't know? And then part of how racist jokes work is they have a kind of...

[31:42]

They have a plausible deniability factor. They're jokes. But they still have this power to perpetuate racism. And so I didn't interrupt it, and I regret that. I regret that my lack of certainty held me back there. And also that there's a way that we can interrupt this kind of thing without being certain. And that might even be better. I can't say exactly how, but that's not sitting well with me, what just was said. And coming from that place of curiosity might lead to a more helpful conversation. And so acting from uncertainty can be uncomfortable. And so this one intertwines with being in touch with our vulnerability.

[32:47]

They totally go together. And they also intertwine with realizing the nature of self. So as we get in touch with our vulnerability, as we loosen our grasping our thinking and our knowing, we can become intimate with our ever-changing life in the present and appreciate that how we happen completely is through relationship. So this is emptiness. Emptiness is that nothing happens by itself. Nothing about us is happening by itself. We happen completely through relationship. And as what we're relating to, as the conditions and circumstances of our life are always changing, we're ever-changing selves.

[33:52]

We are multiplicities, many selves in many contexts. And this changing multiplicity of the self, it's a kind of internal complexity of how we're happening with everything. This is vital to our ability to even see that choice and freedom and possibility exist. But the way our life appears is separate. And so this is part of the challenge. The way things look, the way we look, the way the world looks is not happening in relationship, but as separate, unrelated. Our sense of being an isolated individual abstracts us from our relational embeddedness.

[35:07]

it abstracts us from our nonstop ethical participation. And we might feel like part of a negative piece is, as long as I'm not doing anything harmful, I'm innocent. And we might feel like, that's pretty good. There's a kind of a banner I've seen Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because you aren't affected personally. So this is like individualism. An extreme of individualism. And it obscures our participation in injustice. And it obscures our agency. When we don't see how we are related or connected, we don't see how our conduct is related or connected.

[36:15]

When we're in touch with our vulnerability, when we're in touch with the nature of our being, we're more in touch with the meaningfulness of our participation in this moment. in what's happening. So fully inhabiting our life is where we actually find our agency. And rather than an isolated individual, we can realize we're relational selves. We're ever-emergent. And our identity, our being, is always being reformed and reshaped. in relation to everything we relate to. And one thing in terms of the theme of racism here is that individualism can obscure or deny the depth of our socialization.

[37:29]

So part of our relationality is the extent to which we're socialized, the extent to which we're made up by the culture we grew up in. And our enculturation, it conditions how we see. It conditions the lens through which we see the world. If we don't take it up as an inquiry, we often don't notice that we're seeing the world through a lens and it's not an objective lens. It's not a lens we've chosen. It's a lens that's been given to us. And to the extent that we're not checking out this lens, we're living by it and from it. We're living from that perspective.

[38:33]

To be free, we need to see it, feel it, and develop a sense of how it works. Angel Kyoto Williams writes, our social conditions are what make our mind. You don't get your own mind. You only have a collective mind. You have only ever had a collective mind. And in this country, the nature of the collective mind is oppression. It is white supremacy. It is patriarchy. This is what we were born into. If we do not understand the nature of it, how it unfolds, then we can't see how it lives in us. We can't understand how we push the gears of it every single day. You know, so sometimes, you know, when we bring up this thing about socialization, part of one of the kind of responses of white fragility, kind of various forms of defensiveness, you know, is like, well, I don't feel racist. And I'm not racist.

[39:37]

And here's why, you know. Some of my best friends are people of color. I grew up in an integrated neighborhood. Or I don't see color. These are very common things that white people will say. And they miss the depth of our socialization. They miss how deeply racism inundates our social cultural situation here. Robin DiAngelo writes, we are taught to think about racism only as discrete acts committed by individual people rather than as a complex interconnected system. The way we are taught to define racism makes it virtually impossible for white people to understand it. So I feel like this, you know, in working with the nature of the self,

[40:42]

We have a support to realize the depth of our socialization and to clarify it and to work towards transforming it. There's not much in our cultural conditioning that gives us a nuanced understanding of the complexities of how racism works, how it functions. Part of this also is we have to kind of be more interested in coming to terms with our socialization than clinging to a certain idea of what we are. I'm a good white person. Seeing ourselves as good, seeing ourselves as ethical, these are forms of grasping and grasping at a fixed position of the self. So again, like if we're a relational self, we have no fixed position. It's always unfolding. And we can give up the fixed positions of good or bad, guilty or innocent.

[41:55]

I would offer, it's not particularly ethical to get mired in guilt. There's kind of a history of not addressing racism by getting mired in guilt. There's a history of dismissing anti-racist work as indulging white guilt. And guilt is a kind of discomfort, uncomfortable situation. And I think part of what, when we feel guilt, sometimes we're just like, well, how do I get comfortable? How do I get exonerated from this into innocence? Which is then just another fixed position. And so just wanting to feel less bad, negative peace. And responsibility, is different from guilt. And responsibility is not a fixed position. It's grounded in openness and connection and works towards actualizing justice.

[43:06]

And our responsiveness, it can be a force of liberation. So I think we're called here to something more active, more engaged, and more challenging than just not being racist. It's not particularly ethical to cling to the notion that we're ethical. In cognitive science, they talk about this thing of, we have this urge to reduce cognitive dissonance. So if we're really into the idea that we're good, we're ethical, that will actually impair our ability to acknowledge ethically problematic aspects of our being. And this keeps them in place. You know, when we deny it, we can't challenge it.

[44:08]

And it's ethical, I offer, to challenge ourselves ethically, to challenge and question our ethics. on a daily basis. We want to inquire into a liberating response to our circumstances. And we actually want to expand our sense of responsibility and this more expansive sense of responsibility is not exactly a burden because it's coming from love and being fully human. And the responsibility itself is lively, it's dynamic. It's interested in justice as this deep, vital form of activity.

[45:12]

So I offer these kind of virtues of Zen practice as integral to our potentials for ethical living, ethical participation, dynamic responsiveness. They can provide, they can offer a liberating challenge to ourselves. They can support us to enact a non-reductive approach. to living together every second we challenge our socialization we change this culture a tiny bit and this is a some of this work is internal but it's also collective it's collective work it's communal Realizing the self as relational is to see that our ethical participation itself is relational.

[46:25]

It's interactive. It's a co-creation. It's a collective work in progress. And so we also practice this in conversation, in giving and receiving feedback and criticism and supporting and challenging each other. And this is ultimately about how we all wake up together. And transforming ourselves and the society involve many kinds of work. And I offer this, our practice can support these many kinds of work. And engaging myriad skillful means. a myriad creative responses. The suffering caused by racism in this country is immense.

[47:34]

As in 1963, race still has a major impact on the quality of education, health care, employment opportunities, housing, political representation, and treatment in the justice system. And this injustice, injustices have historical roots, and they're being maintained right now. And collectively, we're a part of this. And as a white person, I want to clarify my complicity and work for change. And to the extent we don't take this up, we maintain a negative peace. And the individualism of a negative peace is turning its back on humanity. It's being okay with tremendous injustice.

[48:42]

And so this is heavy, but it's also, it's a realm of possibility. there's tremendous potential for liberation. A lotus blossom opens in the midst of fierce flames. Our practice lives in fierce flames. So can we take heart in this potential and develop enthusiasm for uncomfortable work? and avail ourselves to love, to be real about the bodhisattva vow, the vow of all-inclusive liberation. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[49:49]

Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[50:15]

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