Thoughts on Decentering Whiteness - Part 2

A while ago a wrote about epistemic violence and how it's used to deny Buddhists access to their own experience. Given the sporadic racial attacks levelled at heritage Buddhists here and on r/Buddhism, I wanted to revisit some of those reflections and unpack them a bit more here.

[WARNING: this will be a relatively unstructured post. These ideas have been knocking around in my head and I've been meaning to collect and share them here anyway. It's also it's worth noting that, for me, racial justice/social justice, for me, would sit within a decolonial framework, since I don't believe they can, on their own, dismantle whiteness/white supremacy and colonized understandings of Buddhism(s).]

So, my central concerns/reflections are:

Who gets to define their experience as simply neutral "facts" about the world.

Who gets to define for others what Buddhism, really is.

Who gets to be invisible, opaque. The default.

Who gets to have their emotional needs centered by silencing historically marginalised communities.

Let's start with this idea I like to call: The default human

A crude observation: white people deeply cherish the myth that they simply see the world as it really is: unfiltered by biases, culture, socialization etc. Things like "culture" (culture, for white people is shorthand for: what holds those other people back from "progress") etc, all belong to the "Noble Savages". The European enlightenment has allowed them to evolve, like Pokemon, into their current transcendent form.

This myth is so pervasive, it allows them to create and use terms like cultural baggage without a hint of irony. (or racial awareness) They genuinely believe that term describes an actual phenomenon. They see color nowhere and see yet see color everywhere.

Racial stress and "Buddhism"

One of the common afflictions befalling those committed to whiteness, is a heightened sensitivity to racial stress, racial anxieties, fears and rage. When whiteness is rendered visible and is called out when it puppeteers Buddhist principles into its service, the response is: rage. Leading to a doubling down of sutta quotations, moral shaming, racial abuse and other, colorful histrionics.

So, a few weeks ago, when a white Buddhist asked if it was OK for him to teach/correct Asians about Buddhism (without causing offense, like a good liberal), my first thought was "that's an interesting question." Can someone, who refuses to acknowledge their commitment to whiteness, be called upon to represent the Dhamma in its full, liberatory power? Now these are the really interesting questions that animate me.

What does whiteness gain by conflating it's own fears and biases with Buddhist moral authority? It gains, with our permission and consent, the ability to come between us and our own experience.

Those committed to whiteness, become the arbiters of what is true and false. For everyone.

Who do we privilege?

My theory is, that at the heart of all of this, lies a kind of white epistemology. A theory of knowledge built on the evershifting myths of whiteness. At baseline, it regards racialized others as incapable of producing knowledge. So the illogical and magical claims to knowledge about Buddhism make sense when I overlay this framework. And understanding this myth, i believe, will be pivotal to dismantling the stranglehold that whiteness has on Buddhism in certain spaces.

See, when I say that there are Isaan temple boys and temple kitchen volunteers who can wipe the floor with people like Stephen Batchelor or Doug, I don't say that as a slight or insult, I'm making a literal claim there. As decoloniality in practice, I'm shifting the authoritative voice to Buddhists, to those who are historically dismissed and silenced in their own religious tradition, in our current colonised understands of what Buddhist traditions are.

Colonial consciousness and academia

Collapsing the roles of 'secular' scholarship and religious practice is not always going to have beneficial outcomes for heritage Buddhists. Especially when we consider the amount of white scholars in that field. Buddhist religious scholarship is one thing (a centuries old tradition) and western academia is entirely another.

We know that in colonial states, education and academia were pivotal in ensuring that indigenous populations turned against their own cultures. Colonial consciousness and self hate were part of the 'civilizing' project. And today, we can see the devastating effects of that in South and Southeast Asia, Africa and the Americas etc.

Ways forward

At the end of the day, social justice projects will remain limited in their efficacy, up and until we understand what we're up against. And it's not people being mean to each other. This requires theory formation. The development of language to talk about the racialised Buddhist experience. This would be decolonial work, decoloniality in practice.

At this point, the fresh, complex questions we formulate are going to be more important and game changing than lapsing into the same social justice grooves that haven't made room for the really dangerous and calamitous work that could seriously endanger whiteness and it's stranglehold on Buddhism in certain spaces.

The benefit of a decolonial practice is that it does not, in some respects require cooperation from those invested in whiteness. When we are already free to shift who we lend ear to and what forms of knowledge we privilege, we don't need to delay access to our own experience to some far off future.

We know that racism is not people being mean to each other based on xyz traits. That's part of it. Racism is the ability to have ideas around (the construct of) race encoded into law, language and culture and have that enforced on racialized communities. But dismantling or reassembling these structures will require more than just redress of historical oppressions.

At the root of all the buffoonery of McMindfulness, Secular Buddhism/s, cultural appropriation, the Orientalism, the fetishization and othering of asian bodies lie racialized theories of knowledge that are just sitting there, waiting for us to bring our intelligence and creativity to bare on them.

[edited for copy duplication]