Diversity

IT’S EASY for privileged people to think of diversity as just about appearances—how a company looks, who’s in a community, what groups are represented on stage. People who run things would like us to think of diversity that way, as kind of superficial. Because real diversity challenges power structures and puts us on the spot about who we are as human beings.

This collection of five powerful essays on diversity and Buddhism is part of our year-long series marking the fortieth anniversary of Lion’s Roar. Our theme is the next forty years of Buddhism—how it can change, deepen, and, yes, diversify in order to be of most benefit to many different people’s lives, to our society, and to the future. Benefit, after all, is Buddhism’s only goal and the standard by which it is measured.

Becoming more diverse will be as challenging and transformative for Buddhism as for the rest of society. But while each of these important essays offers a powerful, sometimes damning critique of the Buddhist status quo, each also points to the tremendous progress and benefit that real diversity will bring. It is one of the most important things we can do to make the Buddha’s teachings a reality.

The Invisible Majority

The vast majority of American Buddhists are of Asian heritage, yet they are too often ignored, mispresented, and even looked down upon. CHENXING HAN offers four ways we can start to heal the great divide in American Buddhism.

THIS PAST JANUARY, I read Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race, a yellow “NEW” sticker gracing the spine of my library copy of the book. Of course, race is nothing new in the U.S., though there are many who’d rather not talk about it. For Oluo, being black is a source of strength, beauty, and creativity. Her blackness also makes her a target of racism.

Oluo likens the experience of being a person of color to walking down a street and being punched in the arm every few minutes, without knowing who will be punching you or why, without ever being able to escape the street. Maybe a well-meaning individual, gesticulating during an animated conversation, lands an unintentional punch. Oluo writes, “The real tragedy is that you get punched in the arm constantly, not that one or two people who accidentally punched you in the arm might be accused of doing it on purpose.”

In the book, Oluo confesses that “even today, after having spent years of my life focused on racial justice, Asian Americans are at times an afterthought in my work.” I appreciate her candor—it’s hard enough to identify our blind spots, much less admit them publicly.

How does it feel to be an afterthought?

All too familiar. Though I don’t like to admit it, I’ve become inured to being dismissed in discussions about race in America. I’d become so accustomed to being a minority that I was surprised to learn, in a 2012 Pew Forum report, that two thirds of Buddhists in America are of Asian heritage. Just four years prior, the Pew Forum had reported the percentage as less than one third—the researchers had neglected to conduct interviews in any languages besides English and Spanish. In 2012, they added seven Asian languages to the survey, and the percentage of Buddhists of Asian heritage doubled.

And yet, a 2015 Washington Post article about 125 U.S. Buddhist leaders gathering at the