“Does anyone else get annoyed when they see white folk sportin’
dreadlocks, tribal tattoos, and stretched out earlobes with plastic
circles in them? What the hell is goin’ on? It irks the shit out of me. ”
I am overhearing a conversation as I wait for my order at a café in
Oakland, CA. The woman next to me is black and about 55 years old,
wearing dreadlocks that are about 2 feet long with a plethora of glass
beads flossed through them. She is speaking to her friend, a woman
probably in her 50s as well with a shaven head and wearing yoga pants
and a blue tank top. She has mocha colored skin tone and seems to be of
East Asian descent.
I know what this black woman is referring to: a group of three white
30 something year olds sitting at a table about 8 feet away from the two
women. Two men and one woman. They all have punk style dread lock
hairdos. They have shaven the sides of their heads and there are
interesting black tattoos on their scalps. They have piercings through
numerous parts of their faces: a bull ring, a nose ring, a stud through
the bridge of a nose.
I wanted to say something to the two ladies, but wasn’t sure what to
say. After all, it wasn’t my conversation and I guess I had no business
saying something… but I wanted to say something to this black woman. I
had heard the conversation plenty of times, amongst black people, how it
irks the shit out of them that white people try to ‘go tribal’ by
locking their hair.
“Drives me nuts too,” I hear her yoga pant wearing friend say. “It
reminds me of all the white people who jumped on the ‘I’m a Buddhist’
wagon in the Bay area, but don’t want to be all deep and reflective
about their nauseating white elite privilege.”
Ouch. Did she just say that? And really loudly?
Nauseating…. ?
Are white people not allowed to practice yoga, Buddhism, get tribal
bands, or wear locs since it’s not ‘white culture’ (and what is ‘white
cultures’ anyway)? If that is the case, does that mean I’m not allowed
to continue with my beginner Zen Buddhism practice? After all, I’m not
of East Asian descent; I’m a Black woman. Should my friend Heather, a
Chicana yogi who studied in India, stop teaching yoga at a community
center in NYC since she is not from India? Or, does our non-white
identity make us exempt from “appropriation?”
Shortly after leaving the café, I passed by a Black heterosexual
couple on the street, holding hands. The woman was wearing a punkish
Mohawk style and ear plugs through her lobes. Was she appropriating by
wearing that hairdo?
I had a friend, “Nicole”, who is Filipina and African-American whose
take was, “Well, I think what pisses me off about dreadlock wearing
white people is that they can wear our
black hairstyles, listen to our
black music, and be all hip but still they will always benefit from being
white.
They can just shave that shit off and that’s the end of the story. Yea,
I used to wear dreadlocks, but I shaved it yet I still have to deal
with the bullshit of what my brown skin means in a society obsessed with
white European phenotypes.” But, at the same time, I wasn’t sure if I
could completely agree with “Nicole.” When I first met her, she had the
biggest afro I had ever seen. Two weeks later, she had it professionally
locked and ended up interviewing for jobs in the finance industry and
landed a phat gig at Morgan Stanley… but she also seemed to navigate
through life rather well with her Dartmouth Tuck School of Business
degree making six figures at some investment banking company while
wearing her dreadlocks the first five years working there, and then
finally cut it all off into a short afro.
…my close from “T” is a white Jewish woman who now practices Zen
Buddhism for the past decade. She mentioned to me last year that she’s
getting uncomfortable with a lot of what she is doing because she
believes it is a form of appropriation for most of her white Buddhist
fellowship to wear the robes, use the names, and do the practices of Zen
Buddhism. She is deeply questioning if she is appropriating, without
being mindful of what it means to be able to do something that is not
associated with ‘the white race’, but not be at a ‘disadvantage’ because
of her own white racial privilege trumping the non-white roots of Zen
Buddhism….but I wasn’t sure if I agreed either, as her practice of Zen
Buddhism over the 5 years I have known her, have made her practice a
type of mindfulness towards structural racism and systemic whiteness
that may not have been possible, had she not become a Zen lay nun. She
seemed to understand that mindfulness
should include awareness
of race and white privilege. She and I have noticed the overwhelmingly
whiteness of Green Gulch Zen Center and the Berkeley Zen Center that we
frequent. The other month, I began reading
Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Surpremacy and Immigration Adaptation by
Joseph Cheah. He quoted from bell hooks’s provocative essay “Waking up
to Racism”, who reflects on how whiteness and racism operate even in
Buddhist communities that are largely white:
Often
white people share the assumption that simply following a spiritual path
means that they [white Buddhists] have let go of racism: coming out of
radical movements- civil rights, war resistance- in the sixties and
seventies and going on to form Buddhist communities, they often see
themselves as liberal and marginalized, proudly identifying with the
oprreeseed. They are so attached to the image of themselves as
nonracists that they refuse to see their own racism or the ways in which
Buddhist communities may reflect racial hierarchies (hooks in Cheah
2011, 4)
According to
hooks, many white Buddhists have failed to realize the extent to which
African Americans feel marginalized and out of place within their
religious communities. For some African Americans, choosing to belong to
a Buddhist community “has been synonymous with choosing whiteness, with
remaining silent about racism for fear of bringing in issues that are
not really important” (Hooks in Cheah 5, 2011). Hooks contends that
white supremacy operates as an invisible regime of normatily for white
Buddhists of all political orientations. Furthermore, hooks mainstains
that the ideology of white supremacy informas the individual
interacations that determine the shape and direction of convert Buddhist
communities (Cheah 5, 2011).
Leave it to bell to break it down like that…. But still, I can’t say I
totally agree. Yes, I’ve encountered plenty of annoying white Buddhists
who deny that their whiteness means anything and love collecting and
wearing anything that looks Zen or Buddhist… but I’ve also met a lot
who, like “T”, became Buddhist to become a better human being
and make sure they are not being complicit to structural racism.
What is it all about? Are us people of color collectively annoyed
when we see white folk doing things that we deem “non-white” because of
the reasons that Nicole and hooks mentioned? Or because of what the
Asian lady at the café mentioned in terms of certain white Buddhists
being clueless about white privilege?
What do you out there think? I mean, I practice so many food, herbal,
healing, music, etc stuff that isn’t “black” or “African”… does that
drive people who nuts if I’m using their music, foods, etc? Can I use
Chinese herbalism or am I offending Chinese people? Or is it okay since
my great-great grandmother is actually Chinese? Not that I’m looking for
permission…
Works Cited
Cheah, Joseph.
Race and Religion in American Buddhism : White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
**permission pending to use this article** Posted by Dr. A. Breeze Harper in
Race, Class, Gender Issues
