Describing their experiences participating in PoC group sits and activities, a recurring sentiment was the embodied feeling of being relaxed, and feeling safe and comfortable.

Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in California with BIPOC practitioners of mindfulness, this article examines their efforts to create “safe spaces” to collectively experience and process painful embodied emotions around racialized trauma. These collective spaces, I argue, help meditators move from experiencing painful emotions as internal to their personal experience as individuals, and instead help relate their difficult emotions with those experienced and shared by other racialized minorities.

The case-studies are of two of the largest Western convert Buddhist movements in the UK—the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) and Soka Gakkai International-UK (SGI-UK)—and focus on their branches in the multicultural inner-city location of East London. The findings suggest that most Buddhists of colour in these movements come from the second generation of the diaspora.

For the FWBO, there is an apparently hegemonic discourse of middle-class whiteness that people of colour and working class members of this movement have to negotiate as part of their involvement. In contrast, for SGI-UK, the ethos is one of a moral cosmopolitanism that encourages intercultural dialogue thus facilitating the involvement of a considerably more multicultural and international following.

People of colour find that their practices of the techniques of the self provided by each movement enable them to feel more empowered in relation to their quotidian experience of racisms and racialisation, as well as encouraging them in a more anti-essentialist approach to identity that sees it as fluid and contingent.

While often associated with a liberal demographic, the increasing online visibility of rhetoric such as “snowflakes,” “politically correct,” “postmodern identity politics,” and “cultural Marxism” demonstrates the presence of right-wing sentiments and populations in American convert Buddhism.

We chart this backlash across a broad right-wing spectrum that spans from “reactionary centrism” to the “alt-right.” We illuminate the ways in which participants both de-legitimate “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” as political rather than Buddhist and naturalize their own position as Buddhist rather than political. We show how American convert Buddhist lineages have become a site of the “culture wars”…

Although Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon Martin, was an ear-witness (by cell phone) to all but the final minutes of Zimmerman’s interaction with Trayvon, and testified for nearly six hours about it, her testimony was disregarded in jury deliberations. Through a linguistic analysis of Jeantel’s speech, comments from a juror, and a broader contextualization of stigmatized speech forms and linguistic styles, we argue that the lack of acknowledgment of dialectal variation has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers of stigmatized dialects.

This podcast episode is a gripping summary of the true story told in David Grann’s book, Killers of the Flower Moon which was later adapted into an award-winning film of the same name.

exposure to a stereotype, regardless of whether one agrees with it, can shape how one experiences and learns from interactions with members of the stereotyped group, such that it induces individual-level prejudice

Computational modeling revealed that this preference was due to stereotype effects on priors regarding group members’ behavior as well as the learning rates through which reward associations were updated in response to player feedback. We then show that these stereotype-induced preferences, once formed, spread unwittingly to others who observe these interactions, illustrating a pathway through which stereotypes may be transmitted and propagated between society and individuals.

Lecturers in the experimental condition added a transcript of their names in Arabic. Our findings revealed a substantial and positive impact on Palestinian student’s sense of belonging, class participation, and overall grades.

Our intervention demonstrates that small institutional changes when carefully crafted can have a significant impact

Notable to me in the study was that even the Jewish kids in the experiment saw a slight improvement in their GPA from the increased inclusivity of their virtual classroom, despite disliking it.

A gray hoodie will not protect my son…

Nonverbal signals of racial biases are abundant in children’s everyday social environments. Studies show that preschool children acquire social group biases when they observe other people’s social interactions and nonverbal behaviors.

To be specific, there are practically thousands of
the aforementioned abiding in perpetual near riot
of wild behavior, indiscriminate coloring, and only
the Good Lord Himself can say what diverse soliciting…

You know, it would be better if you asked me how I’m sleeping.

A Black and a White American sit down and discuss how racism doesn’t just live in our minds and institutions, but also lives in (yes, all) our bodies.

… policy with intentional marketing titles.
Assimilation; Relocation; Termination…

This paper revisits a landmark study of the prevalence of mental illness in the state of Massachusetts conducted by Edward Jarvis in the 19th century. Jarvis drew an improper conclusion about the relationship between social class, ethnicity, and insanity, asserting that the Irish foreign-born had a higher prevalence of insanity in each social stratum. A reanalysis of Jarvis’ data shows that in both the pauper and independent social classes in Massachusetts, the prevalence of insanity was significantly lower among foreign-born persons than among native-born persons.

On the basis of his misperception, Jarvis constructed elaborate etiological theories. These theories made a strong impact on the mental health service policies of his day. The effects of incomplete examination of data on etiological theories and mental health policy in current times are highlighted in this article.

Why do we see more information [about other people’s stuggles] as threatening rather than as clarifying? At the point that we can see that things are hard for all of us, then we [should] know that it’s a structural problem.

Why is the solution always “my kid is going to be one of the twenty” rather than “why are there only twenty slots?” The inability to make that [mental] shift [from competition to solidarity] is what keeps messing us up.

With the restoration of my old ID number, the previous six years of my life, including the three years I spent in prison, became a numberless life. In truth, this was a blessing for me. I believe that the record of my punishment and imprisonment had been wiped from the police system. Networked computers had not yet been widely adopted.

The true story of how a Uyghur poet and film director narrowly managed to escape a genocide—and of the friends and family that he left behind.

Despite being cultural aliens, the nomads were aware of the superior literary and cultural tradition of the Chinese with whom they came into contact. Accepting the Confucian tradition and Chinese ways, however, would have meant subsuming their military superiority to and separateness from those they conquered. Instead, most nomadic rulers chose to adopt Buddhism as an alternative cultural policy.

There is a tribe of people known as the Ethno-graphic Filmmakers who believe they are invisible. They enter a room where a feast is being celebrated, or the sick cured, or the dead mourned, and, though weighted down with odd machines entangled with wires, imagine they are unnoticed.

Someone yelled, ‘That dog gonna end up in a pot of rice!’

Today’s poem faces, head on, the way jokes can harm people and proliferate racism.

… here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.

… two stories of people trying to figure out what to say or if they should say anything in this moment of backlash.

… how we see the world is dependent upon what we expect to see

Morning: walking my neighborhood, I come upon a colony
of ants busy at work…

… white supremacy has created an American culture in which other practitioners, namely White practitioners, have been granted the freedom to be Buddhist in safer and more public ways. Instead of facing systemic injustice for embracing a spirituality that departs from the Judeo-Christian norm, White Buddhists are often lauded for this difference.

A straightforward account of how racism has shaped Buddhism in America.

We tell a story about ourselves to create our self. And oftentimes we’ll behave in a way that reveals that our story is at least partly inaccurate […] The self is a much more slippery idea than we often give it credit for and that has enormous potential.

… they voted unanimously, every person there, that they would not provide labor to allow any drilling or mining to go ahead. These were men who would’ve made money, it might have been years of work for them if oil drilling and mining had gone ahead, but they didn’t want to spoil what many of them—having been to The Great Barrier Reef—knew was at risk

A brief history of the United Nations’ efforts to promote cultural tolerance in the aftermath of World War II.

A mysterious letter shocked Britain in 2014, alleging an Islamist plot to take over one city’s general schools. But who wrote it?

An eight-part miniseries in which two journalists attempt to expose an eight-year-old conspiracy in Birmingham’s public schools. The Trojan Horse Affair shows how minor racial biases and stereotypes, multiplied across society, ignited into a full-blown, moral panic and, along the way, they uncover state secrets, an ominous cucumber, and serious questions about the role of journalism in a biased world.

is one a brahmin due to birth,
or else because of actions?

Two brahmin students ask the Buddha about what makes a brahmin. The Buddha points out that, while the species of animals are determined by birth, for humans what matters is not your race or caste but how you chose to live.

Where are all the young adult Asian American Buddhists, and what can we learn from them?

A heartwarming ethnography.

And after you’ve finished reading it (or before you start!), listen to this interview with the author to hear more about the process behind writing the book.

How does one say “what if” without reproach?

A kaleidoscopic meditation on race, identity, culture, and deep listening.

Every other rights struggle that we have seen—disability rights, gay rights, women’s rights—all come from the efforts of the black civil rights struggles. […] It is black people who have been the perfectors of democracy.

The history of The United States, retold beautifully and powerfully in three emotional hours.

Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context–randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to God!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.

An astonishingly good book of poetry describing the contemporary African American experience and how “race” emerges in relation.

The key is to focus on two distinctions: systems as distinct from individuals, and having privilege as independent of choosing how to engage with it.