Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

by Angel Kyodo Williams

What is required is a new Dharma, a radical Dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies the systems of suffering, that starves rather than fertilizes the soil of the conditions that the deep roots of societal suffering grow in.

White folks’ particular reluctance to acknowledge impact as a collective while continuing to benefit from the construct of the collective leaves a wound intact without a dressing. The air needed to breathe through forgiveness is smothered. Healing is suspended for all. Truth is necessary for reconciliation.

Will we express the promise of and commitment to liberation for all beings, or will we instead continue a hyper-individualized salvation model—the myth of meritocracy—that is the foundation of this country’s untruth?

you have identified with it as much as your very own name, but without being willing to name it.

If the fruit of practice is not a desire to respond to the world, if it just remains in response to your own needs, “me” is all you are seeing: “I want to feel better. I want to feel like a spiritual person. I want to be seen as right. But I don’t want to actually be responsible for the world that I’m in.” Then you haven’t yet woken up.

The most difficult part of leaving is remembering what has been left, articulating the why of my leaving, regardless of how it may put me at odds with those closest to me.

I understood more intimately that I was suffering, that other people were suffering, that I was a part of other people suffering, and that I was charged with addressing my suffering and the suffering around me.

learned to appear unflappable under pressure, and I could bear a lot.

The problem with being at home in whiteness is that it goes hand-in-glove with the presumption that everything whiteness does must be best, right, noble, beautiful, moral, and productive.

With no one of color, at least no one relatable, I felt like I needed to maintain that appearance of self-sufficiency I had picked up in school, being both good and unflappable.

The tiptoeing around race and other forms of difference as if in fear of waking a sleeping lion is one of the most subtly toxic attributes of whiteness in our culture right now.

deserve to feel like it wasn’t a bad idea for me to be here.

“What made me choose me?” and “What had to end?” and “What got left behind?”

Each world you inhabit is no more or less real than the others.

People who are queer do not have the privilege of not naming or claiming their queerness on the path to being whole.

Not only suppress it in yourself, suppress it in others, because if you don’t suppress it in others, then it reminds you that you’re suppressing it in yourself. That’s part of what we’re experiencing in the dharma communities—the suppression of emotion.

We can have this rhetoric of overthrowing oppressive systems, but we have to balance that with the work of overthrowing the oppressive system operating internally that actually keeps us enslaved.

Identity is wounding only because we survive in places where difference remains invisible instead of being seen and celebrated.

Love is the wish for myself and others to be happy. Love transcends our need to control the recipient of love. I love not because I need something in return. I love not because I want to be loved back, but because I see and understand love as being an expression of the spaciousness I experience when I am challenging my egoic fixation by thinking about the welfare of others. I go where I am loved. I go where I am allowed to express love. In loving, I have no expectations.

Healing is being situated in love. Healing is not just the courage to love, but to be loved.

When we are identifying like this, then our actions are more about protecting ourselves than generating authentic concern for others.

When I suffered severe depression, the easiest thing to do was hide it. You become quite skilled in distracting others from focusing on you and your suffering. This is possible because most people are not interested really in how others are suffering and certainly not interested in their own suffering. There’s no judgement here. Suffering is difficult and tough.

It is the basic ordinary work of staying engaged with our own hurt and limitations.

Opening our hearts to woundedness helps us to understand that everyone else around us carries around the same woundedness.

The most profound practice I have ever been taught by my teachers is simply letting my shit fall apart, developing the courage to sit with all of my rough edges, the ugliness, the destructive and suffocating story lines I have perpetuated about myself, and letting go of the same suffocating storylines others maintain about me.

The propensity for violence for which the law held him accountable was not his alone to own.

afford, for something beyond the cycle of punishment, exile, and annihilation we erect around those whose presence poses a clear and present danger to our sense of safety.