Being Buddha, Staying Woke: Racial Formation in Black Buddhist Writing

Abstract

This article challenges academic explorations of Orientalism as an interaction between a white West and an Asian East within the context of American Buddhist communities. Taking as its focus twentieth- and twenty-first-century semiautobiographical writings by black American Buddhists, this article explores how black American Buddhists engage with Buddhist teachings to understand themselves as racialized subjects on local, national, and transnational levels. It argues that black Buddhists’ writings rework Orientalist discourse to empower black Buddhists within predominantly white communities. These writings challenge assumptions that the normative Buddhist subject is white, male, and heteronormative. Additionally, they portray the Buddha as a social reformer enlightened to the operation of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities. This portrayal of the Buddha allows black Buddhists to articulate a counter-narrative to hegemonic Western authority while paradoxically constructing their own romantic vision of Asia as the “Other” to the West.