America's Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal - Softcover

Ward, Larry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1946764744 ISBN 13: 9781946764744

Verlag: Parallax Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Immediate, illuminating, and hopeful: this is the key set of talks given by leading Zen Buddhist teacher Larry Ward, PhD, on breaking America’s cycle of racial trauma.
 
As an 11-year-old child, Zen Buddhist teacher Larry Ward was shot at by the police for playing baseball in the wrong spot. As an adult, he experienced the trauma of having his home firebombed by racists. At Plum Village Monastery in France—the home in exile of his teacher, Vietnamese peace activist and Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh—Dr. Ward found a way to heal. In these short reflective essays, he offers his insights on the effects of racial constructs and answers the question: How do we free ourselves from our repeated cycles of anger, denial, bitterness, pain, fear, violence?
 
“I am a drop in the ocean, but I’m also the ocean,” he says. “I’m a drop in America, but I’m also America. Every pain, every confusion, every good and every bad and ugly of America is in me. And as I transform myself and heal and take care of myself, I’m very conscious that I’m healing and transforming and taking care of America. I say this for American cynics, but this is also true globally. It’s for real.”
 
Here, Ward looks at the causes and conditions that have led us to our current state and finds, hidden in the crisis, a profound opportunity to reinvent what it means to be a human being. This is an invitation to transform America’s racial karma.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Larry Ward (pronouns he/him) is the author of the book America's Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal, and coauthor with his wife Dr. Peggy Rowe-Ward of Love's Garden: A Guide To Mindful Relationships. Dr. Ward brings twenty-five years of international experience in organizational change and local community renewal to his work as director of the Lotus Institute and as an advisor to the Executive Mind Leadership Institute at the Drucker School of Management. He holds a PhD in religious studies with an emphasis on Buddhism and the neuroscience of meditation. Ordained by Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh in the Plum Village tradition of Engaged Buddhism with the Dharma name True Great Sound, Dr. Ward is a knowledgeable, charismatic, and inspirational teacher, offering insights with personal stories and resounding clarity that express his Dharma name.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction: An Invitation to Heal
“Race has been a source of trouble in human affairs since the contours of the modern ways of thinking about it became dimly visible in the rise of new scientific ideas about human beings as parts of the natural world.”
―Kwame Anthony Appiah

My growing years took place in Cleveland, Ohio, on the East Side of the city near Lake Erie. It was a predominantly African American neighborhood in the 1950s, with a few European immigrants from Polish and Italian roots. Interactions between children and adults of different races, other than on the job or through commercial transactions, were controlled and rare. To my young eyes, members of the community moved about their days going to work, to church, and to school in a kind of stunned silence about race, as if hoping that by never acknowledging it, the bitterness just under the surface would not leak out. Even then, I sensed we were all wrapped in a blanket of fear and yearning.

The nightly news of my teenage years expanded its coverage to voices echoing the pain of centuries, determined to be silent no more. Many of these voices and their stories became focal points in the story of race in the United States, including those of Rosa Parks; Angela Davis; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X; and Dennis Banks.

As a Black man writing about race in America, I do not forget the first peoples of this land, their genocide, and their continued presence. Many of us tend to think of African American bodies when we think about America and race, yet the story of racial hierarchy in this country began long before the arrival of African people on these shores. Now, we find ourselves living in a racialized world that existed before we were born, and our minds have been conditioned to see race as real. This racialized awareness permeates us like a disease of the psyche, cementing our minds to a system of social worth and value by skin pigmentation. It animates our thinking, speech, and behavior individually and collectively. It influences our attitudes, emotional states, habitual dispositions, and social organization. How has this mindset become so powerful?

From my childhood in the fifties to the era of the war in Vietnam in the sixties, when Dr. King and Thich Nhat Hanh found in each other a source of spiritual friendship and political solidarity, and the many domestic and international conflicts in which race played a part, in my own lifetime the cycle of America’s racial karma has become very visible. As I grew into adulthood, I was fortunate to have the chance to observe many peoples and places around the world, with jobs that took me around the globe to factories, educational institutions, consulting firms, churches, and community development efforts, in rural villages as well as urban centers. On most occasions, I’ve noticed the presence of racialized consciousness in the thinking, speech, and behaviors not only in myself but also in the people around me.

The first time I went to work in Asia many years ago, I was part of a faculty running trainings in new methodologies for schoolteachers in Hong Kong. My first day on the job, I had someone come up to me wanting to know if I was the luggage carrier for the team. I said, “No, I’m the dean.” You could see their face working hard to try to fit that into their picture of the world. That’s when I knew this racial hierarchy system is global. I’ve been all over this planet a hundred times, and everywhere I’ve been, this is an issue. It’s such an issue that as an African American going to Africa, people in Africa consider me “white” because I come from the United States. In the sixties and seventies, being regarded as “white” under the yoke of white supremacy gave Black Americans in the Back to Africa movement the shock of their lives. Everybody was clear that white people rule.

Millions of years of adaptation have formed our discriminative intelligence into a complex classification machine that constantly evaluates threats to our safety and integrity. But the kind of thinking that elevates some humans and devalues others based on skin color is not baked into our neurobiology. Some call it racism and colorism; some call it the colonial mind; others call it capitalism; whatever we may call it, those of us who feel the oppressive edge of bias tend to recognize its presence.

I appreciate your opening this book because I know it takes a certain conscious courage to read anything related to the word “race” in the title, because there are few other words in the English language that can activate our autonomic nervous systems so quickly. I am also aware that it is no small task to attempt to describe America’s racial karma—what it is, and how to transform it—especially if, many days, it may feel as if there is little or no movement forward. Yet, I know once we recognize America’s racial karma as actions that continue to give birth to the notion of white racial superiority and its psychosocial consequences, we gain the necessary insight to change course. We will rage and grieve, but we will also begin to heal.

*

After living many years outside of the United States, in the year 2011, my wife, Peggy, who is white, and I relocated to progressive Asheville, North Carolina, to start a small business and develop a community of spiritual practice. After settling into our new home, we were invited by Gail Williams O’Brien to lead a meditation retreat in the college town of Chapel Hill on the other side of the state. This connection was made through our association with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism; Gail is a history professor emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South.

On the six-hour drive from Asheville to Chapel Hill to meet Gail, I was at first startled by the presence of Confederate flags flying from many homes and businesses along the way. My sense of shock gave way to an increasing uneasiness within my body and mind, compounded each time I encountered a Confederate flag on the decals of a vehicle in front of me. Visible through my car windows were subtle and not-so-subtle reminders of Jim Crow attitudes and America’s habits of racial dissociation and aversion. There seemed to be a rhythm of daytime integration and nighttime segregation. While some of the overt patterns of segregation had changed, it was clear to me that the psychological wounds of the past remained unhealed.

Stopping at gas stations, the politeness Peggy and I did experience seemed constrained, with furtive eye contact. The air was filled with discomfort, and I felt like an alien in my home country. My sympathetic nervous system went on high alert. My heart raced; I had knots in my stomach; and memories rose up within me of past trips South in the 1970s, in which my life had been threatened. My mind was filled with concerns for our safety. I had left the United States to work abroad for decades, but on returning, I was filled with the same fear from my childhood and teen years. Why did I, a grown man, not feel safe in 2011—three years into the Obama presidency—in my home country? On election night in 2008, the moment we saw the televised results I'd turned to Peggy and said, “Shit’s going to hit the fan,” because I knew that the election results would activate the hatred that had sent me outside of America for so many years. 

The anger, sadness, and disgust I was carrying revealed themselves to me later during our community meditation. My body and mind began to calm down. I looked deeper into my experience and realized that I was witnessing the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Parallax Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1946764744
• ISBN 13: 9781946764744
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland