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Black Lives Matter: How do you Want to be Changed

Greetings, and I am grateful that you are here, and grateful to have had the chance to meditate a little while with you. Now I will share some teachings.

Before I talk about my topic for today, I wanted to mention that I haven't been doing these Monday nights for quite some time during the shelter-in-place time. I haven't really had the capacity to teach more than I am doing and take care of more things, so it felt better to just be home. Over the next weeks, we will start up again here at IMC with the Monday evening sits and talks, and Diana Clark will be teaching them for a while. Diana Clark is a wise, deeply practiced, and wonderfully kind person, and I am very happy that one of our teachers here at IMC is willing to step up and offer the space on Monday evenings.

The reason I came down today was because I haven't really had a chance to talk to our IMC, IRC, and AudioDharma community in the last weeks in a regular talk, and I won't for another few weeks because I will be away for the next two Sundays. But it felt very important for me to come and speak a little bit about what is happening in our world, what is happening in the United States with the killing of George Floyd, and all the police brutality and other people who have been killed in recent times—especially the African Americans who have been killed—and what a deep wound this is for society.

I don't quite know what to say, and I certainly feel quite inadequate to be able to address all these issues that are coming up and that we have to face and work with as a society. But I think that to be a witness to it, and to speak in order to try to find out what we can do and what we can say, is a very important part of this. It is a little bit hard to give this talk not knowing exactly who the community is that I am talking to. Because of all these circles of people who listen to these talks now, it used to be that the community was the people I met with in front of me, sitting in a hall like this. So, it is a little hard for me to find my way here with this talk, so I hope that you will be patient with me.

But as a Buddhist teacher—and that is primarily how I speak publicly—I have a Buddhist perspective on these things. From the perspective of my years of being a Buddhist teacher, talking with Buddhist practitioners, and talking about their inner life, one of the really important things I feel I can offer is this: the more distressed, the more troubled a person is by events in the world, the suffering of the world, challenges of the world, and sometimes even personal challenges; the more they trigger fear in a deep way, or anger in a deep way, or distress or confusion in a deep way, the depth of that speaks to the fact that there is something important in you, in us, to really look at. There is really something here to practice with and get to the bottom of, to bring your kindness, your mindfulness, and your care to really address and be with what is here.

Also, when we are really upset by what is happening in the world, the suffering of the world, it is very important—the more upset we are, the more we are moved by it. Maybe upset is not the right word, but the more we are moved by it, and it really shakes us up, and we really want something to be different, to really want change to happen, the more important it is that we change. That you, if you feel that way, that you change, that we change not only our mindset or attitudes or how we live, but what we do in the world. If we go back to what was the case before, where we just get troubled, be upset, and say that someone else should do something—you know, the politicians should do something, and it should be different, other people should do something, it is their problem—and you wish it could be different, we do a very big disservice to ourselves, to this inner life we have.

We have an inner life, we have a heart, we have this deep inner capacity that really cares, that is really connected to others in the world. That deep way in which we get moved is part of that primal connection, that primal connectivity and kinship we have with people. If that kinship, if that sense of connection, that way of being moved just goes to sleep again or gets covered over again, it is actually a little bit worse than it was before we even got moved in the first place. So the big question is: how do you want to be different?

How will you be different? Or, said another way, how would you like to be changed by the events of the world, the events in this country? How do you want to be changed to be a witness, a historical witness now, to the tremendous suffering of racism in this country? But not just in this country, it is also around the world. I think there is a heightened, acute awareness now, for a number of reasons, of racism. For me—maybe I was not paying enough attention before—but it is so blatant now. When I first started hearing the language of white supremacy, I thought we were talking about really far-fringe people on the edges who were just strange people. But it is so obvious now that there is this conscious and unconscious emphasis on white supremacy at the highest levels of the government and institutions that we have. There is no denying it, I feel, at this point.

And to see this amazing thing of having these videos, to be able to see history in front of our eyes in a way that I think, in the past, it was very easy not to believe or for it not to get much prominence. There are so many times down through the centuries that such horrendous things happened to people, as are proceeding now in this country, and it was not recorded. We had one word against another, or maybe the people who could speak up about how terrible it was died, and no one spoke up then because of it. It is remarkable what we are seeing in videos. We are seeing people being killed repeatedly, being shot, being choked, killed by no longer being able to breathe. It is quite an amazing thing to see and to witness this. We are witnessing police brutality. I know sometimes it is not popular to highlight police brutality, and sometimes there is a rush to defend the police, but there it is on video. We can see it.

A couple of weeks ago, there was this amazing video taken in Central Park in New York of a white woman, Amy Cooper, who called 911. You can see her making the phone call in the video, and she is saying that she is being assaulted by an African American man: "Come and get me, help me." He wasn't assaulting her. He was taking the video. So the police came, but she was the one who got in trouble because it was clear that she was lying, and there was video to show that she was lying. Too often, there haven't been videos, and the white person has been believed, and nothing else happens.

This really is the same story as the beginning of the civil rights movement, at least in Mississippi, a year after I was born in 1955. There was a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till^[1] who went into a grocery store. In a conversation with a 21-year-old white clerk, Carolyn Bryant, something went wrong. Later, she accused him of grabbing her in a sexually inappropriate way and yelling obscenities. Her husband and a relative went at night, kidnapped the boy, and committed a horrific lynching. Eventually, the boy's body was found. The two men who killed the boy were charged, tried, and acquitted relatively quickly. A year after being acquitted, because of double jeopardy and the rule that you can't be tried for the same thing twice, the two killers admitted that they killed the boy. Decades later, Carolyn Bryant said in an interview, "Oh, I just made it up, what I said about the boy who got killed." There were no videos, no record. Who did people believe?

To be a witness to this kind of history, one of the impacts it has on me is that I certainly want to be changed by it and try to create a better society. I could say a better society for African Americans, but how many times have white people said that? There have been all these commissions about race riots in the United States, and these commissions keep coming up and saying the same thing. Since 1919, they've said there's unconscious prejudice where the police will treat Black people badly and side with white people. Because in the 1919 riots in Chicago, police stood on the sidelines as white people rioted and killed many Black people. The reason for the riot, and the frustration, was that a 17-year-old Black youth had swum in Lake Michigan across an informal line into the white part of the lake, and so he was stoned to death. No white person was ever arrested for that. There was a commission, and the commission talked about police brutality and how the police didn't take care of everyone or make people feel safe, and how they attacked Black people. They said all these things had to change, but nothing changed. There kept being commissions—probably 25 or 30 big commissions for these riots—and they all came to the same conclusion: police brutality and not feeling safe around the police was a recurrent problem.

So this is the white history of the United States. I could say that I want to make life better for African Americans, support them, open doors for them, and give them a helping hand. But I think it is also very important, maybe more important, to study not just African American history and their difficulties, but the other half of it: to study the white history of racism. It is an amazing history. It is a powerful current, and there is no denying it. Certainly, a lot of people are not racist, but the institutions, the momentum, and so much of the culture repeat it over and over again. It is heartbreaking. If your heart is broken, don't turn away from that. A broken heart is really the beginning of being changed; it is a source of how we can open up to a new world.

I think we really need to look at this question: how do we want to be changed? Because in so many ways now, in these last months, the world has changed. I can't imagine it going back to what it used to be like. So much has changed, and I don't want it to go back to where it was before. So then I ask myself: "Well, if that is the case, how am I going to be changed by it? What will I do differently?"

Certainly, one of the things I would like to do differently is related to my profession as a Buddhist teacher. I really want people to do introspection, to do the deep inner looking to purify their minds and hearts of hate, of greed, of conceit, and of selfishness. I want us to really drop down into the depths of who we are, where we find freedom, where we find love and compassion, where we find connectedness to others, where we find kinship with all beings.

It was a very powerful moment for me some years ago when I was talking with an African American friend. I was asking about the warmth and friendship that I sometimes receive from African Americans in this country, trying to understand it. Her response really took me by surprise and went deep inside. She said something like, "Of course they are friendly, because we are all kin. We are all family." When I heard that, my mind went through the experience of African American descendants of slaves in rapid succession. I thought of how some ancestors had a white slave-owning father who disowned his own Black children—in fact, allowed his own children to go off and continue to be slaves. On plantations, there were Black children of a white slave owner living together with his white children—half-siblings. To think about that family rupture, where a father would act in such a mean, violent way... what a deep karmic^[2] connectivity. But to then think, "We are all kin here in this country, everyone literally." Maybe we can start seeing each other and realize, yes, we are all of the same blood, we are all connected, we are family. Hearing that was a powerful moment for me, and that was the moment I decided to become an American citizen.

I hadn't been an American citizen, even though I had been here for decades, partly because of the racism of this country. I had great hesitation about becoming a citizen. Watching the fires of Watts burning during the Watts Riots as a child, and all the stories I had seen... But when my friend said, "We're all kin," I thought, "I want to be kin. I want to be family with this group, with African Americans. I want to be part of this big family as well." That is when I decided to become an American citizen. More recently, someone said to me, "You probably wish you hadn't become a citizen now and given up your Norwegian citizenship." I said, "No, this is why I chose to be a citizen. I chose to be here now to help and support, to make a difference because of these things, because of these kinds of challenges."

I offer you these examples of myself because we can make a choice about how we are changed. We can be moved in such a deep way that we don't want to go back to being the person we were before. We want, somehow, to live in a different way, with a different purpose, a different dedication. I like to believe that this Buddhist practice we do is a practice meant to prepare us to live in the world with all its challenges, to learn how to be fearless, to have courage, and to learn not to pull away or shut down, but to be able to stand up and look at the problems and difficulties directly. I am very confident this Buddhist practice has the capacity to do that. The question is: will we practice it? Will we avail ourselves and engage enough to go deep enough and fully enough so that we can be changed, so we can be someone who really is trying to make a difference for a better world? Because we are all family, we are kin.

Ideally, in my mind, there is no "them" out there; it is all "us," and it is all up to us. To be able to drop the conceits of "us" and "them", the separation, to drop the barriers—it is just another way of discovering what Buddhism has to teach. There is suffering in holding on tight to a sense of self, to conceit, whether it is personal, for your tribe, or for your ethnicity. But to really understand that, and to sit in quiet and let it melt away, is a beautiful thing. To have it all melt, shed, and drop away into this quiet and still place, this beautiful place of tenderness within—to trust that and allow that to come forth, to let that be the guide. So it is not from a sense of obligation, duty, or "should" that we try to make the world a better place. It is just: "Of course we do. That is what this tender heart wants to do." It is possible to follow the tender, caring, loving, liberated heart. It will guide us. It will help us find our way. This doesn't have to be a burden. We are beautiful people. We have tremendously wonderful capacities. I believe completely that we all have good hearts deep inside. How do we support others to let their goodness come out? One way is that we start with ourselves. It would be nice if all the ways we try to help come from that place of freedom within, a deep abiding peace within, and then we make a difference.

So, how would you like to be changed? And if you want to be changed in some way, what will you do to make that personal change possible? What do we want to see change in our society, and what change can we do for society that is really for the welfare and happiness of everyone?

I will end with a little story that I heard last week. There was a Black Lives Matter rally of about a thousand people here in Redwood City. I went down there with my family, my two boys and my wife, but I didn't see this remarkable thing. Someone else from IMC was there, and she told me about it yesterday. At the very center of where the protest was, there was a storefront—actually a theater front—where the glass was all boarded up with plywood. She watched as a person there was writing the names of African Americans who have been killed here in the United States. She apparently had a piece of paper that she was copying the names from. But there was a police officer there as well, watching her. At some point, he started reciting the names of the Black people who have been killed in the United States in recent times. He started reciting them from memory so she could write them down. This white police officer knew the names of the people who had been killed. He must have cared.

If you go to the IMC website, you can see a picture I took today of this plywood with the names. In the "What's New" section of the website, there is a letter that I wrote about the George Floyd killing. If you read the letter all the way to the end, at the bottom, there is that photograph. As I was down there today, I saw that on the plywood it was written, "Black Lives Matter." I thought, "Yes, of course, Black Lives Matter." It needs to be said. It is so sad that it needs to be said, but I wish there could be another phrase as well: something like "White Lives Care" or "White Lives Making a Difference." Because we really need to do more than just see that Black lives matter; we really need to be the ones who do something about it, who really care, support, and change what is going on. Especially given the legacy of what white people in this country have done that continues right up to today, I think we have to understand this white history and have a slogan of white people caring and changing.

So thank you for listening. As I try to find my way on this topic, I hope I said something that is supportive and moves us all in a good direction to try to make this a better world for us to live in. Thank you.