Lately I've been thinking about my dissertation. It seems ancient to me now, a project from another time, but those conversations I had in the fall of 2015 and the winter of 2016 (before the election; before all of this) still mark a turning point in my own life: the long moment when I began to confront my own whiteness, my privilege, my participation in systems of oppression, and also the ways in which my own Buddhist communities had upheld those systems in their unwitting allegiance to a very comfortable status quo.

What I remember most, of course, are the conversations themselves. Hours of sitting down in people's homes, in local DC libraries, in neighborhood parks over soda and bagels. I remember the sense of electricity as person after person laid out for me, a well-meaning white guy, what it was like to be black or brown or otherwise not white, and walk into a room full of 200 well-meaning white folks who hadn't done their work. 

Then I came home to Madison, Wisconsin, to my university life, and spent months sifting through the transcripts with my friend James, coding, interpreting, debating, checking one another's work.

We assumed that, because he's black and I'm white, we would encounter rough spots of divergent heuristics. But the data was, for the most part, exceptionally clear. And so, after those months of sifting, and with the help of my advisor Stephanie as auditor and guide, we settled on six themes that seemed to capture the experience of people of color in a primarily white meditation community.

1. Interpersonal Barriers to Full Participation

2. Institutional Barriers to Full Participation

3. Strategies for Coping with Racialized Exclusion

4. Failures of Leadership Support for People of Color

5. The Range of POC Experiences

6. Promoting Equity and Inclusion

(Click here to read the article we published in the Journal of Global Buddhism for a full treatment of these themes.)

These days, as we stumble through our current moment of cultural reckoning, I've been casting my mind back to the six themes (and back to those conversations) wondering about what progress has been made—not necessarily in the wider culture, which is enormous and complex and harrowing, but in our own Buddhist communities. 

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure much has changed on a structural level. My guess is that the POC folks who walk into a room full of 200 well-meaning white people at a dharma center feel just about the same as they did five years ago. My guess is those institutional barriers haven't been breached. That failures of leadership still abound. And all the rest.

But some progress has been made.

For example, when Devon and I started talking about this stuff in 2015, we often met resistance. Back then, many of our white Buddhist friends seemed to experience our commitment to issues of equity and inclusion as an idiosyncratic obsession, a politicizing of the "pure dharma."

That's changed. These days, when we talk about racial justice, most (though certainly not all) white participants in our events and classes thank us and ask for more. They want resources: books, interviews, articles, places to donate.

So that's a heartening shift in the American Buddhist cultural landscape.

Still, there is another development that might prove more important in the long run. In the time since I finished my dissertation, both Spirit Rock Meditation Center* and Insight Meditation Society kicked off teacher trainings primarily for POC leaders. These programs are a big deal, extremely competitive to get into, happen only once every five years, for only a handful of students at a time, and they explicitly aim to produce something like the next generation of dharma teachers.

Time and again the POC folks I interviewed for my dissertation said that nothing significant would change in Buddhist communities until there were people of color on the teaching seat. And on the board. And on the practice council. And in the back office. And in every level of whatever Buddhist organization we were talking about.

But especially on the teacher's seat.

And that's starting to happen. At Spirit Rock and IMS, there are now POC teachers on most teaching teams. POC voices are being elevated in the major Buddhist magazines. Publishers are finally putting out books by POC leaders. And there seems to be a general shift underway to center the issue of racial justice in Buddhist communities.

I don't want to exaggerate the progress. I certainly don't want to imply that Buddhist communities have made great strides on the issue of racial equity. Since the time I wrote my dissertation, though, there has been movement. Slow movement. Shaky movement. But movement nonetheless.

Sending many good wishes,
Craig