Celebrating Black Buddhist History Month, III

personal liberation, social transformation

Vesely-Flad’s discussion in Ch. 4 “Turning toward External Conditions: Political and Psychological Freedom in the Black Radical Tradition” examines the interplay between personal change and social change. “In Black Radicalism, the courage to turn toward degrading conditions and struggle for justice is foundational to political freedom” (136).

The history of Black oppression in the United States worked in large part by creating a sense of inferiority by repeated explicit and implicit assertions of White superiority. These are the behaviors of an abusive, domineering husband writ large on the fabric of society as a whole. Indeed, the absence of Black people in the representation of America and American history, of normal American life and American culture worked to silently reinforce a message of inferiority, of irrelevance.

At the same time carefully constrained areas were acceptable for expression of excellence—music, but not medicine, athletics, but not administration. And when figures such as Muhammad Ali stepped outside an acceptable definition of their identity to declare political and socially radical messages, they were, like President Obama, reviled for “getting above themselves.”

Throughout the Black radical tradition personal, psychological transformation and social change were understood to be indelibly linked. Marcus Garvey, for example, emphasized both “psychological freedom and communal uplift” (138), the community in this case being the Black community itself working to create alternate institutions founded, organized, run by members of the community in service to the community. Community based programs—groceries, health, education, and free breakfast programs—became an essential part of the activities of the Black Panthers in Oakland, and similarly in New York.

Deep in the roots of these movements were Black revisionings of Christian teachings. The authority of the Bible had been a source by which White enslavers in Antebellum South justified the practice of owning another person, including all of the abuse and degradation that went with that ignoble institution. Despite this some key messages from the Bible spoke to the enslaved populations—particularly Exodus, the story in which an enslaved people are set free, though they must journey long in the wilderness before coming to the land promised to them. And also the message that Jesus walked with the people most rejected and cast out of society.

Doctrine is indefinitely malleable, and the same Bible that was used against the enslaved, also became the source of a message of freedom and indeed of being God’s chosen. The history of the Black church is one in which it not only provided an alternative interpretation of the Christian teachings, but also provided a safe haven, a place where it was/is okay to be, to exist, to be recognized and acknowledged, to be known (just to be clear, I’m not pretending that this is a report of my own experience, either racially or religiously, but rather to paraphrase Vesely-Flad and amplify based on conversations I have had).

Some of the Black teachers that Vesely-Flad discusses continue to feel a strong and supportive connection to the Black church, even though their own path of practice and teaching is Buddhism. This also reflects the broader complexities of lived religious pluralism in contemporary US popular religious culture—despite the authoritarian impositions of White Christian nationalism that would only validate a singular understanding of what it means to be a religiously committed person.

Likewise, the complex balance of social and individual liberation points a way forward for American Buddhism more generally. The emphasis on individual, silent seated meditation has often appeared to be in opposition to socially engaged Buddhism, while the latter often appeared as simply a Buddhicized version of 19^th century liberal Protestant thought. But one of the important aspects of how Buddhism has matured in the United States over the last century and a half has been the construction of Buddhist institutions, which necessitates an awareness not only of the breath in meditation, but also of one’s relation with other community members and with society at large.

Vesely-Flad summarizes this relation arising out of the Black Radical tradition, saying,

“. . . alongside political liberation, Black Radical thinkers have correspondingly emphasized psychological—and in some cases spiritual—liberation through Black Liberation Theology, Black Feminism, Womanism, and Buddhism. In proposing new ideas of Black agency, nationhood, international political solidarity, female bodies, and queer identity, adherents to the Black Radical Tradition also uplift the central commitment of healing intergenerational trauma. For many contemporary adherents of Black Radicalism, such healing is rooted in spiritual practices” (137).

Intergenerational trauma of the Black community is a blind spot for the White supremacism now increasingly explicit in society, but which has for long been an unrecognized, unacknowledged theme of American culture. In parallel much of the convert Buddhist community has been blind to the intergenerational trauma of the Japanese American Buddhist community growing out of the anti-Oriental racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but culminating in the experience of mass incarceration during World War II.

It is uncomfortable and even painful, but let us allow ourselves to be aware of the suffering of other living beings—since beginningless time.