One Buddhist's View on Race
I can't speak for my faith, but I can from my faith
It gives me chills to watch this again. (Yes, I used to watch American Idol.) In 2009, this gay young man who had been raised Jewish, whom we’d identify as “white,” and who had recently been outed as gay, sang an inspired version of A Change Is Gonna Come and went on to win the competition and achieve well-earned fame.
I have not forgotten how proud and pleased I was that he had the chutzpah to take on the song. In 1964, when Sam Cooke wrote it, from the pain in his heart, protest songs were rare, especially from “black” artists. Cooke had achieved fame as an early crossover vocalist. He was willing to risk that fame to release a from-the-heart protest song.
The song did not derail his career, but his death did. He was fatally shot in December 1964 between the release of the song on an album and its release as a single. He was 33. Spiritual teacher Andrew Holecek suggests that we Buddhists use a mantra to express our strong emotions in the way some might exclaim “Jesus!” or “Holy Cow!” So join me if you like in expressing grief over the impermanence of Cooke’s life:
Om mani padme hum
Some might consider Adam Lambert’s performance cultural appropriation. I consider it cultural appreciation and identification with another sentient being’s emotions.
My father, born in 1898, immigrated to the United States in 1922 from a devastated shtetl in what’s now Belarus. He died when I was 11, so I never had the opportunity to discuss ethnicity and race with him, but I learned a lot from what I observed in him when I was 4, 5, and 6. He treated everyone the same way. When his “black” truck driver was arrested, he took me to his cell to visit him. After the driver died in jail, he took me to call on his family.
My father had left a brother and sister behind in the shtetl. They both married and had children in the 1930s. So he lost those two siblings, their spouses, and their five children in the holocaust, but I never heard him say a bad word about the German people as some of my relatives did.
I never felt comfortable in Judaism, in part because I rejected the notion of being part of the chosen people. That’s one reason Buddhism was and is a good fit for me. All members of the human race (as well as other sentient beings) have the Buddha Nature, so why do we spend so much energy classifying us into racial, ethnic, and other tribes?
Race, especially, has become an obsession in the United States. The reasons for that go deep into North American history. For one view on the history, see Rev. Thandeka’s paper Why Racism Will Fail. As for the present, let’s take me as an example. I usually check the “white” box when a form asks for my race (although I keep telling myself to decline). My father and my maternal grandparents all came from the same shtetl, and according to both Ancestry.com and 23andMe my DNA is more than 99.9% Ashkenazi Jewish.
My maternal grandmother spent her childhood as an indentured servant in the “old country” because her family couldn’t afford to feed her. Before he emigrated, my father saw his father hooked up to a plow to grow vegetables for the German troops in the First World War. Not one of my antecedents set foot in the Western Hemisphere before the start of the 20th Century. What do I have in common with the descendants of “white” Southern plantation owners or the descendants of “white” Appalachian coal miners?
I’m using “white” and “black” in quotation marks in this post and will use them in future posts because they have only whatever significance we give them, and I opt to give them little. I married a “white” woman whose paternal ancestry goes back far enough in the United States that she probably has some small amount of DNA from Native Americans or African Americans. Our son is considered “white.” Does that have any meaning?
Racism exists, but we’re having a hell of a time getting rid of it as long as we maintain the fiction that race means something. Count me among those who want to end racism by doing away with the idea of race. One recent book and another soon to be released make that case.
Self-Portrait in Black and White: Family, Fatherhood, and Rethinking Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams came out in 2020.
The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism by Sheena Michele Mason is due October 1. Dr. Mason is an assistant professor of English at SUNY Oneonta (New York State), specializing in Africana and American literary studies and the philosophy of race. From what I’ve seen of her work, she takes a scholarly approach to ending the causes and effects of racialized dehumanization.
While Williams addresses the science and literature around race, his approach is mainly biographical. The son of a “black” father and a “white” mother, Williams grew up with the one-drop rule internalized, which was fine with him—until he married a “white” woman and saw his first child born, a “white” girl with blue eyes.
Here’s how Williams describes his parents:
My…father, whom we call Pappy in a nod to his Southern roots, is a red-brown man. Despite a dusting of freckles under the eyes and a prominent, in my mother’s teasing words, “Indian” nose, no one has ever described him as anything other than black. His appearance, along with the strength of his persona, allowed me to assume that the Williams family identity would forever be in his image, even though my mother is unambiguously white—blond-haired, blue-eyed, and descended on all sides from Northern European Protestant stock.
Williams struggles with his loyalty to his father and what he had until then thought of as his race. He struggles with the knowledge that, had he and his family been living under the slavery of the antebellum South, his daughter would be enslaved despite her blond hair and blue eyes. In the end, he refuses to let others (culture, the one-drop rule, bigots) define who he is.
I am not renouncing my blackness and going on about my day; I am rejecting the legitimacy of the entire racial construct in which blackness functions as one orienting pole.
One of the attractions of Chautauqua Institution last week was the opportunity to listen to and meet Williams. He is a brilliant writer and thinker. Toward the end of his book, he speaks of a daydream: He sees a blond, blue-eyed young woman someday in a future generation sitting with friends and mentioning that her DNA shows a “black” ancestor. Her friends are surprised, and Williams wonders how she will react.
On my return home after Chautauqua, I sent Williams this note:
Hi Thomas: We spoke briefly at your book signing after your Chautauqua lecture. I asked you when you were going to post something on your Substack, and you asked about mine. You also admired my tattoo of a concentration camp serial number along with the hands of the Buddha holding a lotus flower. I'd like to tell you a brief story about my trip back home to Northern Virginia.
My wife and I had listened to most of Self-Portrait on the ride up to Chautauqua and the rest as we drove back. As I heard you talk about your daydream of the blond blue-eyed girl in the future, I applied that daydream in reverse to my paternal grandfather, Shalom Yisrael Pinsky. Ancestry.com estimates his dates as 1855-1935. He was a respected elder in his shtetl, Shereshov, in what's now Belarus, and he had six children, the youngest of whom was my father (1898-1958). Shalom saw his prosperous and thriving Shereshov decimated by a series of pogroms and periods of starvation, the worst of which came during the German occupation during the First World War, when Shalom was forced to drag a plow in order to grow vegetables for the troops.
In addition to watching the destruction of Shereshov, he saw most of his children leave for the "New Country." He didn't live long enough to see his one son and one daughter who remained in Shereshov shot and gassed to death along with their spouses and five children in the holocaust. Before he died, I wonder whether Shalom had a daydream like yours. If he wondered about his youngest child's youngest child, that would be me. As displayed by my tattoo, I am faithful to my genetic heritage without being tied to it. I left the religion of Judaism and its customs before I turned 20, and became a Buddhist in my late 30s, but I respect what my forebears endured.
Unlike yours, 99.9% of my genetic heritage is in one ethnic group, Ashkenazi Jewish. My mother's parents also immigrated from Shereshov, so it's pinpointed even further. But like you, I refuse to be put into a box, and I'm struck by how similar Shalom's and Pappy's or his father's daydreams might have been.
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