Asian Buddhists

Beneath a Single Moon

| arun

Released in 1991, Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry was the first anthology to highlight the poetry of practicing American Buddhists. The reaction of the Asian American writing community was for the most part simple and straightforward. We were less than happy. Of the 45 American poets who appeared in Beneath a Single Moon, some were well-known poets, while others were quite obscure. None were Asian American.

Mushim Ikeda-Nash remembers “dropping the book as though it had burnt me.” In PREMONITIONS: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, editor Walter Lew provided half a dozen examples of accomplished Asian American poets whose work should have qualified. In 1997, Juliana Chang, Walter Lew, Tan Lin, Eileen Tabios, and John Yau together lambasted Beneath a Single Moon editor Kent Johnson in the Boston Review, arguing that his anthology “displaces Asian American poets from the practice of Buddhism.” They reprinted Lew’s most polemical paragraph from PREMONITIONS.

The 45 American poets whose essays and poetry on Buddhist practice comprise the anthology are all Caucasian, and the book only mentions Asians as distal teachers (ranging from Zen patriarchs to D.T. Suzuki), not as fellow members or poets of the sangha . . . When one considers the relative obscurity of some of the poets included in the book, one wonders how it was possible not to have known the Buddhistic poetry of such writers as [Lawson Fusao] Inada, Al Robles, Garrett Kaoru Hongo, Alan Chong Lau, Patricia Ikeda, and Russell Leong. . . . [Gary] Snyder’s introduction deliberates the question—‘Poetry is democratic, Zen is elite. No! Zen is democratic, poetry is elite. Which is it?’ . . . perhaps he should have also asked whether Zen and poetry, as reconfigured in American Orientalism, are racist.

Kent Johnson did little to help the situation when in a 1997 email response, he backhandedly disqualified all the writers Lew had mentioned.

Before reading this quote, I was quite certain that we had probably missed, out of ignorance, Asian-American poets who should have been included in the anthology. But now I am not as sure. If Mr. Lew (and the other co-signers of the BR response) had carefully considered the Shambhala anthology, they would have seen that a fundamental criteria for inclusion was a serious background in Buddhist study and practice. We were not interested, in the least, in poetry exhibiting the vague and stereotypical waft of the “Buddhistic.” If anything, our anthology begins to point to the fact that reductive notions of the “Buddhistic” are one of the by-products of the “Orientalism” that Mr. Lew denounces. There is simply no way of boiling down Buddhist artistic expression to any particular “Buddhistic” characteristics of tone, content, or style.

Now, I still suspect that there are publishing Asian-American poets who would have met the criteria we established for the anthology, but their absence was certainly not due to some underlying racist criteria of selection; we simply (and perhaps to our editorial discredit) were, and are, unaware of Asian-American poets who also happen to be Buddhists. Apparently, and unfortunately, so is Mr. Lew, as I assume he would have mentioned specific names if there were any.

Preoccupied with the word “Buddhistic,” Johnson failed to verify that most of the writers mentioned by Lew were, in fact, practicing Buddhists. One of these writers played a major role in getting me involved in the Buddhist community. Little did I know that, at the very time he advised me on Buddhist engagement, this literary controversy was storming in the background.

It took me some time to piece this history together, emailing friends, hunting down references and reviewing email exchanges from, well, the last century. What you see here is a sample of a much more complex fabric of conversations being woven at the time. On the face of it, the recriminatory exchanges must have seemed futile, either side barely acknowledging the other’s argument. But these conversations were not entirely in vain. As discussed by Jonathan Stalling, subsequent anthologies of Buddhist poetry opened their pages to include Asian American authors, including those mentioned by Lew.

Reflection on this history brings me an even share of bitterness and comfort. The bitterness is in seeing that so little has changed—that two decades after the publication of Beneath a Single Moon, the nature of the controversy and the criticism it engendered could have happened just last month. In fact, it did. On the other hand, the comfort is in knowing that I’m not alone, that I’m following in the footsteps of many others who came before me. There is comfort too in the thought that, if history is any guide, change may indeed come.

I Know You Are But What am I?

| arun

The question is almost inevitable. In response to the mention of white Buddhists marginalizing Asians, someone will raise their hand and shout, “Well, don’t Asian Buddhists discriminate against white people?”

I’ve received these comments since long before this blog was launched. I typically refuse to engage this type of response, but it so consistently reoccurs that I’m writing this post to dump my thoughts on it. Here are some basic reasons why I refuse to address these remarks.

  • Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. If I’m talking about the marginalization of Asians in widely distributed English language periodicals in Buddhist America, then please show me the marginalization of white people in widely distributed English language periodicals in Buddhist America. Remember: millions of us Asian Americans speak English, even as our mother tongue—English speaking Buddhist America is our community too! Once you start talking about the exclusion of white people from Vietnamese language temple newsletters, the comparison has now shifted to apples and durians. I’d personally love to hear from all those white Vietnamese speakers who feel their voices are being grossly marginalized in the Vietnamese American Buddhist community. There’s little point in even acknowledging a comment when the comparison is so far off.
  • Show me the numbers. Once upon a time, there was a young Asian Buddhist who felt that Asian Americans were being systematically marginalized in The Big Three. But there was no proof. Thus spawned the Asian Meter, crafted through diligent enumeration, documentation and research. As a result, we have charted analyses and budding histories that demonstrate this discrimination outright. Now, you could tell me that you had a bad experience with an Asian American community, but then I all I know is that you had one bad experience with an Asian American community. No more. I don’t want to hear you ventriloquize what you heard so-and-so friend tell you. If you intend to complain to me about white folk being systematically excluded from Asian communities or publications, I honestly have little inclination to listen to unless you do your due diligence and document it. That’s exactly what I did. And don’t forget to compare your apples to apples.
  • Exclusion does not justify exclusion. I know of one local predominantly Asian temple where the congregation leader has a history of being not-so-discreetly hostile to white Buddhists. It’s definitely not cool—but his intolerance does not justify Buddhadharma refusing to consider the voices of Asian Buddhist youth simply because they are Asian. Complain about ethnic divides all you want, but the justification of one group’s exclusion based on the transgressions of the other only serves to perpetuate this division. I don’t see any logic whereby white Buddhists are compelled to marginalize their Asian brothers and sisters simply because some Asian congregation is unwelcoming.

This last point ultimately renders the first two irrelevant. I understand if you have a chip on your shoulder because of this or that experience you’ve had. If you need to vent, go ahead. But don’t expect me to buy into a contorted argument that amounts to little more than, “I know you are, but what am I?” Such comments neither educate me, nor do they weaken the basic dilemma of Western Buddhist communities and publications which ostensibly embrace equality and fairness in one hand, but engage in marginalization and exclusion with the other.

Update: Many thanks to the anonymous friend who alerted me to my misquotation of Pee-wee Herman. I’ve updated the title accordingly.

Rights on Hold for Bangladeshi Buddhists

| arun

In case you forgot about the Buddhists in Bangladesh, IANS reports on the current status of the dragged out Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord.

A prominent Buddhist tribal leader of Bangladesh escaped an attack on his motorcade Monday, a day after he discussed with the government a peace agreement signed in 1997, which is yet to be implemented. […] The accord that proposes autonomy for the Buddhist tribals has been delayed because of protests from the Muslims. They were settled in the Buddhist majority region since Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) became part of the erstwhile East Pakistan during the India-Pakistan partition in 1947.

I previously blogged about violence against Buddhists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and Bangladesh’s uneven concern for its ancient Buddhist heritage. You can learn more at the Chittagong Hill Tracts Comission website.

On White Women and Buddhism

| arun

What’s gender got to do with Buddhism? How are women—and men—working with the challenges of sexism in Buddhist institutions? What opportunities present themselves when women pursue the path of dharma outside of traditional institutions and organizations? With these questions—and more—we are welcomed into Buddhadharma’s Winter 2010 feature, “Our Way.”

Brought together to discuss these questions are the brilliant minds of Grace Schireson, Christina Feldman, Lama Palden Drolma, Rita Gross, Lama Tsultrim Allione, and Joan Sutherland. These authors delve into the history of women bringing balance to the Buddhist community, current forward-moving trends and the outlines of a more equitable future for us all. But apart from these great women and their compelling discussion, I found something missing.

Namely, Asians.

In fact, no People of Color were included in this list—but here I prefer to underline the most blatant omission. For a feature that focuses “on women and Buddhism”—the editors chose none to represent Buddhism’s largest demographic: Asian women. Even when we narrow our purview to the Buddhist community in the “West,” Buddhists of Asian heritage are still an obvious part of the picture. Our voices are Western voices. Our mothers, sisters and daughters also reside in these lands, attend Western schools, live by Western rules, embrace Western values and grapple with the pernicious challenges of patriarchy that so regrettably pervade time and border. Asian American Buddhist women even represent the State of Hawai‘i in the U.S. House. By charting “Our Way” with the voices of white women, Buddhadharma has chosen to displace Asian women from “our” discussion.

Keep in mind that there are plenty of Asian Buddhist women capable of delving into these questions. The editors could easily have contacted Mushim Ikeda-Nash, Rev. Patti Usuki, Ven. Tenzin Kacho or Anchalee Kurutach, women of varied backgrounds who are engaged Buddhists and also Asian American. (In fact, you can even listen right now to two of them talk about Buddhism in the United States—in an all-Asian American broadcast to boot!) All that said, when it comes to Shambhala Sun’s track record at bringing Asians into the conversation, they’ve made it clear that, well, we’ve just about got a Chinaman’s chance.

My laments have become so frequent that they are banal. Only last month I admonished Shambhala Sun Space (among others) for covering white non-Buddhist politicians, while completely ignoring non-white politicians who are actually Buddhist. Two years ago, I excoriated Buddhadharma for deliberately excluding Asian Americans from a forum on “the future of Buddhism in a post-baby boomer world.” We can even look back to Beneath a Single Moon, Shambhala Publication’s anthology of contemporary Buddhist poetry, which failed to include a single Asian American Buddhist poet. Keep it up, and I’ll be able to publish an anthology of my own—a record of Asian Americans’ marginalization by the white Buddhist establishment.

If any of this is news to you, welcome to the discussion. Concerning the key actors involved, however, no new ground has been covered. We all know this dance. Angry Asian Buddhists castigate the white-privileged editors—who in turn acknowledge their faux pas, bemoan their obliviousness and profess their love for equality. Who knows, they may even ask for a letter to the editor. How grand!

But what would it take to have real change? How do we get consideration for a seat on that next panel—and how do we avoid being Chinatowned into a group of Asians talking about some “Asian” topic? I assure you, we Asian Buddhists can do a lot more than iron your clothes, paint your nails and serve you our “ethnic” food. We can talk about individual struggles, community institutions and transformative frameworks. I work with white Buddhists (and other Buddhists of color) all the time out here in the field, but I wonder what it takes to hang with the white kids in the big leagues.

Many of the divisions in the Buddhist community cannot be healed overnight. As one simple step, publications like Buddhadharma could simply recognize the broader diversity that exists. There are few starker lines of the so-called “ethnic divide” than the refusal of white Buddhists to even acknowledge the voices of the Asian Buddhist majority in the West.

Asian Buddhists Support Gay Rights

| arun

I’ve been AWOL from blogging for a bit, but I got this email in my inbox, which I couldn’t resist reposting. The United States’ oldest Buddhist mission affirms its support for gay rights.

The Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii, consisting of 36 Buddhist temples statewide, unanimously passed a resolution in February supporting gay rights and are planning related public forums.

“We wanted to say, ‘Hey, we’re here, too.’ We had never taken a stance before,” said Blayne Higa, chairman of the Honpa’s Social Concerns Committee. The group wants to add an Asian and Buddhist perspective to GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons) issues through its forums, Higa said.

In a March news release, Honpa Hongwanji President Alton Miyamoto said, “We want to share our Buddhist values of universal compassion, equality and interdependence with the larger community. We believe this issue is a matter of civil rights. We affirm the human dignity and worth of all people and that everyone deserves equal treatment within our society.”

I am so proud to have such a large organization with such deep history—in America’s most Asian state—affirm its support for gay rights. This support isn’t just limited to Buddhists in Hawai‘i. If you dip into the online database of contributors both supporting and opposing Proposition 8, you’ll find that the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese Americans (well, at least of people with Vietnamese surnames like Nguyen, Tran and Pham) donated to organizations that support gay rights. And this support spans generations. As the Honolulu Star-Advertiser goes on to note…

“It’s funny, our older members were some of the biggest champions (of the resolution). The really older members remembered a time when Japanese-Americans were discriminated against or interned during the war. For them it really was a no-brainer, it was really just common sense,” Higa said.

To be fair—not every Asian Buddhist feels this way. There is discrimination and bigotry within the Asian American community, and I wouldn’t want this post to suggest that gay Asian Americans don’t face serious issues in the community. They do. But even so, there are also organizations like the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawai‘i who are happy to open their doors and affirm their support for equality.

Update: See in the comments, the Buddhist Churches of America’s 2004 same-sex resolution, where they “affirm the worthiness of all persons independent of sexual orientation” and “oppose any governmental prohibition of same-sex marriage.”

Stereotypically Wrong

| arun

OkTrends, the blog and data crunching arm of the dating site OkCupid, came out with a hot post on race and stereotypes. Working with the self-defined race and profiles of 526,000 users, the analyst(s) parsed text, crunched the numbers and identified the most distinguishing features of each racial group. 

Using this kind of analysis, we were able find the interests, hobbies, tastes, and self-descriptions that are specially important to each racial group, as determined by the words of the group itself. The information in this article is not our opinion. It’s data, aggregated from the essays of half a million real people.

OkTrends’ yardstick of “statistical distinction” is relative frequency—how much more a term or phrase is used by one group over others.* As they explain, “[f]or example, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it’s a racial outlier.” OkTrends then goes on to make a number of Racial Stereotypes, such as the following:

White women show off their eyes (mascara is #5 on their list).
Black women show off their lips (lip gloss, #7).
Latinas show off both (mascara, #18 / lip gloss, #22).
Asian women, however, show off their practicality (lip balm, #48).

And thus we could also conclude that Asians like sashimi, right?

Wrong.

Although the numbers are in their own way intriguing, the final writeup suffers from the unfortunate analytical scourge that the economist Bill Easterly refers to as Reversing Conditional Probability (see here and heretoo). That is, the writers took one conditional probability—“If [your profile says] you like sashimi, then you are Asian”—and flipped it around—“if you are Asian, then you like sashimi.”

This logical fallacy is worth explaining with an extended analogy in another domain. Consider the following relative frequency:

Vietnamese are two to three times more likely than white Americans to be of the type B blood group.**

In other words, if you collected blood samples from equal numbers of Vietnamese and white Americans, then you’d end up with two to three times as many samples of type B blood from Vietnamese as from the white folk. Assuming a 3:1 ratio, that probability looks like this:

We can take this example one step further. Suppose you pick up a random type B sample. Given what we know about the equal sample populations in our hypothetical example and the proportion of type B blood in Vietnamese versus white Americans, we can then make a reasonable guess that this anonymous type B blood sample most likely came from a Vietnamese donor.

So if someone is Vietnamese, then they likely have type B blood, right?

Wrong.

This question makes the mistake of reversing the conditional probability. I took a simple relative frequency—the type B rate for Vietnamese is much higher than for white Americans—and inferred another probability—a random type B sample is likely from a Vietnamese donor—which itself depends on certain conditions, namely that the sample populations are equal. But this conditional probability can’t be logically reversed. The percentage of Vietnamese with type B blood could be anything from 90% to 3% of the whole Vietnamese population—all we know is that they’re more likely to be so than white Americans.

When we look at the overall blood group percentages by ethnic group, it turns out that for both Vietnamese and white American populations, any given individual is most likely to have type O blood. Only about 20%–30% of Vietnamese are of type B. If you happen to meet a Vietnamese person, they probably have type O blood, even while they are up to three times more likely than white Americans to have type B blood.

ONLY UP TO 30% OF VIETNAMESE HAVE TYPE B BLOOD.

Reversing conditional probabilities is the nuts-and-bolts of “data-driven” stereotyping. It’s where we jump from “Vietnamese are more likely than white Americans to have type B blood” (fact) to “Vietnamese have type B blood” (fiction). Or from “terrorists in the news are more likely to be Muslim” to “Muslims are terrorists.”

What makes OkTrends’ post so potentially damaging is that they hold up their findings as empirically based reflections of the world as it is. Yes, their findings are both data-driven and not entirely useless, but their faulty conclusions-rolled-up-as-stereotypes have no logical basis. Their data simply don’t allow a logical progression from “the term lip balm occurs most frequently on profiles of Asian women” to “Asian women show off their practicality.”

Where this issue applies to this blog in particular, and to the Western Buddhist community more generally, is when we run across stereotypes rooted in the very same mistake of reversing conditional probabilities. Elsewhere in this blog and on Dharma Folk, one commenter happened to make this kind of claim. Not only did his comment imply that certain individual Vietnamese practice a superstitious Buddhism (stereotype), he also attempted to justify his statement with relative frequencies based on anecdotal observations accumulated through the substantial period of his life spent in Asia (reversing conditional probabilities). This stereotype further becomes racist when one’s supporting evidence/anecdata has no relation to Vietnamese Buddhists other than the tacit assumption that they must be like all the other Asians one has met. You just don’t know enough to assume that any given Asian Buddhist practices superstitious Buddhism.

That’s not to say that this particular commenter is either racist or irrational. Very smart people can make logical mistakes, and well-meaning individuals often say things that come out completely wrong. I get the sense that we base our understanding of the world on relative frequencies, and often operate with the mistaken base assumption that our experiences are reflective of the wider world. We all have at one time or another probably fallen prey to the seemingly innocent mistake of reversing conditional probabilities. But it’s still wrong.

And I will be all too happy to call it out when I see it.

* I’m actually not sure if OkTrends’ stats measure relative to the overall average frequency or to the frequency of all other groups.

** Blood types for white Americans can be viewed via the American Red Cross. Blood types for Vietnamese are estimated from an old Japanese study and BloodBook.com.

Ditch the Asian Straw Man

| arun

I was writing a long response to David Nichtern’s Huffinton Post piece—but then I realized that lunchtime is almost over. So I leave you with these images.

Is Asian Buddhism versus Western Buddhism a fair comparison? Honestly, it’s like comparing characteristics of America to the Perth metropolitan area. There is a real issue of scale here.

Not to mention that the timescales aren’t exactly comparable, either. When self-styled Western Buddhists are writing about “Asian Buddhism,” it’s never entirely clear to me if they’re writing about something they saw the other day or read about in a historical text written by some clueless white guy European colonialist.

Buddhism in Asia is greater, more diverse and far, far older than Buddhism in the West. It will continue that way for the entire span of your natural life. When writers like David Nichtern attempt to describe Buddhism in Asia, they end up as nothing more than blind men feeling about an elephant. Their arguments create a fictional Asian Buddhism to use as a straw man in order to define their vision of a separate Western Buddhism. This rhetoric is colonialist at its root, and I encourage them to do better. I have no doubt that they could.

Update: In response to some thoughtful commentary below, I had to put it in print: sometimes I get it wrong.

Buddhist Massacre in Chittagong

| arun

I hope the title got your attention! I’m not using the term “massacre” glibly. You can get an idea of the situation from a few of the news headlines I was able to pull from Google News:

  • Chittagong Hill Tracts: Massive Communal Attack on Jumma Villages (UNPO)
  • 15 hurt as ethnic violence continues in Bangladesh (Thaindian News)
  • Fresh violence erupts in Bangladesh tribal region (Reuters India)
  • New clashes in Bangladesh tribal area (AFP)
  • Army deployed in tense Bangladesh tribal region (BBC News)
  • Bangladesh Deploys Troops to Stop Ethnic Clashes (VOANews)
  • Bangladesh Reimposes Night-Time Curfew In Southeast Town (RTTNews)
  • Ethnic violence continues in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill tracts (The Times of India)
  • Beyond the fires in the hills (The Daily Star)
  • Human Rights Abuse against Indigenous People in Bangladesh (The Buddhist Channel)

The single post that I could find from the Buddhist blogosphere was on Ajahn Sujato’s blog, Bangladesh Buddhists under attack. 

Recent events in the Chittagong Hill Tracts deal with Bangladeshi Buddhists who by and large are not ethnically Bengali—although there are many Bengali Buddhists in Bangladesh too. Collectively called Jumma, these tribes are culturally and linguistically different, the plurality (if not majority) of whom are Buddhist. You can learn more about this situation at the links below. 

More on this later.

Somaly Man

| arun

One of my goals is to highlight the profiles of Asian Buddhists, especially those whose religious identity may not be as prominent as their other accomplishments. One incredible personality is Somaly Mam. Tharum Bun has a very kind post about her on his blog Musings from Cambodia, which I’ve included below.

She’s not a prominent politician but an anti-slavery activist and survivor fighting for sex trafficked victims.

The 39 or 40-year-old Somaly Mam (she’s not sure about her birthday) stands out from the crowd for fighting tirelessly against human sex trafficking and helping the victims. In the poverty-ridden Cambodia of 14 million people she is not from an elite family. In fact Somaly was once a former sex worker herself; as a child she was sold into prostitution. But she rose up anyway to run a foundation, which is named after her, to help women and children to escape from slavery.

On the microblogging site Twitter she’s got 315,226 followers (126 tweets posted). In comparison there are only 59,154 people (1,355 tweets posted) who follow Thai former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra via Twitter (the figure was based on the date and time of posting this).

Somaly, also a human rights advocate, uses internet tools prolifically to spread news of her work to as many people as possible. Last week, she posted a tweet from her mobile phone about her speech ontrafficking that she was giving to more 700 students at a university in Phnom Penh.

In April last year Somaly Mam was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential figures. Her profile was written by non other than Angelina Jolie, goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, and she’s listed alongside the likes of British Prime Minster Gordon Brown and US President Barack Obama. You’ll find Somaly in the Heroes & Iconssection in between Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Thanks in part to the mainstream media, she can claim to be one of the most influential Cambodian figures not only in the Twitter universe but alive today.

Check out her book, The Road of Lost Innocence. Photo from Asian Correspondent.

Opportunities, Incentives, and Privilege

| arun

On the last Asian Meter update, Adam asked about the dynamics that underlie the small number of bylines that TheBigThree set aside to Asian writers. 

So, why do you think that is? Is it just blatant racism, or are there other factors? How many Asian writers have submitted material/applied for positions at The Big Three? How do they source their writers and material?

I responded separately that I believe this pattern to be a case of institutional racism, rather than “blatant” racism (such as an informal policy or a consciously implemented prejudice). This question is explored in more detail on an old post at Dharma Folk.

The second part of the question speaks to the submission process—we know the output, but what about the input? This question has been asked several times before and is worth revisiting. Below I’ve provided a similar comment that Ashin Sopaka left a long while ago.

While I do not in any way invalidate your experience of racism in Buddhism (I myself have seen negative comments like “ethnic Buddhists”), I can’t help but wonder how many Asian American (AA) Buddhists are stepping up to the plate, applying for jobs or submitting articles to the referenced publications, asking to be involved in panel discussions, etc. If this is happening and AAs are being actively excluded, then indeed, this is racism at its ugliest. Or, are AAs sitting back and waiting to be invited/involved? Or are AAs refusing the invitations due to language barriers, or whatever other reasons?

The logic here is straightforward. Perhaps this inequality is of the marginalized groups’ own making—there are fewer Asian writers because fewer Asians submit articles. This point was addressed directly by another blogger.

Ashin[hpoya], I can answer that one for you. These publications don’t think to ask Asian-Americans, so Asian-Americans are rarely if ever extended an offer to refuse in the first place. It’s not that Asian-Americans aren’t stepping up, it’s that there is a network of white convert Buddhists entrenched in the publishing field and they reach out to print articles by and about other people like themselves, without stepping out of their bubbles or making serious attempts to include other voices.

Some of this has to do with race issues in publishing. The staff at these magazines is virtually all white and always has been. That is not unusual in the publishing world, but it is regrettable at publications that seek to represent a religion that is overwhelmingly non-white (and even English-speaking Buddhists are less than 50% white). It isn’t racism in terms of actively disparaging non-whites. It is white privilege, the privilege to be focused only on one’s own community, to believe one’s own community is representative of the whole, and to not ever have to think about how one’s whiteness allows smooth entrance into the world of publishing and speaking for Buddhism in a way that people with far more history with Buddhism (but far more melanin as well) are as a group unable to access (the occasional individual exception doesn’t invalidate the general rule here).

Mr. Boyce’s article and his shock at how it was received are typical of this pattern. A person of presumably no malicious intent, he was simply blind to how his decisions wound others–blind because his skin color and social privilege allow him to not have to think about such issues until someone blows up at him after the fact. This is not racism as outright hatred, but institutionalized racism that affects the whole society and is especially entrenched in the media (i.e. the industry of representation and normative information control), Buddhist magazines included.

This response cuts right into the interwoven threads of opportunity, incentives and that pernicious elephant on the dining room table: white privilege. While hinging on white privilege, what’s key is how this privilege increases both opportunities and incentives for white writers at the expense of People of Color.

The Asian Meter merely puts some casual observations to the test with systematic inquiry. How many Asians actually write for The Big Three? Adam’s question goes further and points in the direction of what’s going on behind the scenes here. What are all the players doing? The answer to his question is more complex, and it’s exactly the sort of question we need to be asking in order to effectively address racial imbalances in our publications.

For example, in creating the Asian Meter database, one of the key factors I noticed has to do with the composition of a magazine’s regular contributors. If you are a white writer, you’re more likely to be tapped to write again in Tricycle than if you happen to be Asian. (I don’t have the numbers in front of me right now, but I’ll happily dig up the numbers for another post.) One solution might be for Tricycle to do more outreach both to recruit new Asian writers and also to retain old ones. But I’m getting ahead of myself here—it’s only by looking deep into the issue that we have the empirical basis to act on such a suggestion.

I haven’t provided a very thorough response, but Adam’s question has no simple answer. Just think of when we ask the same type of question in other fields. Why do so few women become surgeons? Why do so few African American students sign up for business plan competitions? It is no less controversial to ask why so few Asians write in the major American Buddhist publications. But it’s my belief that questions like Adam’s are among the few ways we can make any progress towards a truer diversity.