People of Color

 “We need to bring the dharma beyond where it’s been. We need to be able to teach the unusual practitioner, the outcast practitioner. You can’t get to those deep places without someone there to guide you, to hold your truth while you take a chance with yourself.” — Tuere Sala


“… Challenge your notions,” the 55-year-old woman with dreadlocks told them, sharing her journey as a black Christian turned Buddhist, a racial rarity among meditators. “I once thought there was something devilish and ‘woo-woo’ about this, that people would find out, that they would say bad things about me. There was a cultural ‘I can’t do this’ thing. But I tell you: You can do it.” This class of Buddhist meditation was for beginners, tailor-made for minorities. Men could come, but no whites were allowed.  “Being an American Indian woman, I am judged all the time. I just feel more accepted if it’s not white people telling me what to do, how to meditate,” said Teresa Powers, a 54-year-old mother of two who was drawn to the study of meditation after losing her job. “It’s like I’m among my own.”

Seattle is one of the least racially diverse cities with one of the largest Buddhist communities in the country. Martin Luther King Jr. said that 11 a.m. at church is the most segregated hour in the U.S. But in 21st century America, should race continue to divide us? “People say we’re going against Buddhism,” says Tuere Sala, the black Buddhist teacher who is one of the leaders of the movement in Seattle and taught the beginner’s course in October. “They are kind of right. Only kind of.”

“Outside of these people of color sanghas, many of the Buddhists who claim to meditate are not Asian-Americans. And many Euro-Americans who are Buddhist would place meditation very high on the list. Most Asians would call it a small practice,” says Sharon Suh, a professor of specializes in Buddhism, race and Asian-American spirituality at Seattle University. “There is an assumption that the Buddhism brought over by Asian-Americans is less authentic.” With a few exceptions, the two groups — mostly Asians and whites — do not mix. One of the main reasons is that their practices are often foreign to each other. In places such as Seattle, a city both known for its liberal culture and its segregated populace the meditators have recently tried to diversify among themselves.

As Sala Tuere puts it, “at least make our practice less white, more open and more diverse.” Sala, a teacher at the Seattle Insight Meditation Society, is part of a new movement in the region to create “people of color” Buddhist meditation groups that are exclusive to people who are not white. Sala is a teacher at the Seattle Insight Meditation Society, one of the major and most well-known meditation-based Buddhist organizations in Seattle. Of 10 teachers listed on the SIMS website, only one besides Sala is not white. The situation has not changed much since her first time in the meditation hall 11 years ago, but her belief in the practice has grown. Over the last two years, Sala joined together with Bonnie Duran, a Native American Buddhist, the other non-white teacher at SIMS, with a lofty goal: to bring more minorities to the wider meditation community, but to draw them in on their own first.

“We need to bring the dharma beyond where it’s been. We need to be able to teach the unusual practitioner, the outcast practitioner,” Sala says. “You can’t get to those deep places without someone there to guide you, to hold your truth while you take a chance with yourself.” Born in South Seattle in a largely black neighborhood, Sala grew up in public housing projects. Her younger years, she says, were full of violence. She was raped. She was abused by an ex-husband. As an adult, she was nearly always in financial ruin. Raised as a Missionary Baptist, she instantly turned to faith to cope with pent-up anger and emotional distress. For 15 years of her adult life living in Kansas City and Seattle, she hopped between Baptist, Presbyterian and Catholic churches.

Sala’s Buddhist journey began with her own suffering and a resolve to improve her life, a path similar to that of many other Buddhists. She’s practiced meditation for 20 years, and credits it for freeing her from emotional turmoil. Her life’s goal, she says, is to bring Buddhist practice to those who are suffering. On weekends, she teaches Buddhism to prisoners, and has found herself spending vacation days from her day job as a criminal prosecutor to attend Buddhist retreats to be certified as a “community dharma leader.” One day, she hopes to leave her job to be a full-time meditation teacher. “Hopefully, to people like me,” she says.

On a recent Thursday, Sala was one of seven non-whites in the crowd. Facing the group was Rodney Smith, a nationally known Buddhist teacher. “What we are doing in our spiritual journey is we’re transforming what we thought we were, which was the expression of ourselves in form, to spirit, the expression of ourselves formless.” But where would that leave race? “You can see differences, I can see differences, but does it have to create an anxiety or stress? I would say no,” Rodney, a silver-haired, slim 65-year-old, said later. But in the people of color sanghas, that’s precisely the reason many give for joining: They feel anxiety, stress and a sense of being rejected by white Buddhists or are unable to find a connection to the established sanghas.

“So the people of color, they feel they are at the stage of their development where they feel they need special groups of people leading them who are the same ethnicity of themselves; they want to gather around that common factor of color to feel a sense of relaxation. They have had enough tension being in a broader society that is often prejudiced against them. So we give them that.” He meant it literally. Smith and the board of SIMS list Sala’s people of color introductory class in their pamphlets and pay the rent for the church room it uses each week. “The point of dharma is to add a point of consciousness to the society, it doesn’t do any good for just a group of people in Seattle or New York to do this, the point is to make the culture as a whole more conscious,” he said. “And we began to think: Are there ways we are excluding people?”

That doesn’t mean he’s entirely comfortable with the idea of separate meditations.  “Buddhism goes against identity. Race is a very superficial way of looking at things,” he said. “Hopefully at some point the (people of color) will be relaxed enough within their humanity to be able to come into a greater room full of people and feel that same degree of relaxation, but that’s a stage of development and that can’t be pushed or forced upon them. And at some point they do, like Tuere, she just naturally started to come [to the broader meditation groups]. But it may take long.”

After almost a decade of meditating on her own, Sala began attending the main sangha at SIMS at the invitation of a friend. She was immediately put off. “We walked into this room and there were 60 white people. No black people. No people of color,” she said. “I did not want to stay … We had been there only five or 10 minutes, and a woman in the group began asking a question and talking about how she had transcended her body, and was looking at herself from the outside. It was way too ‘out-there,’ for me and it just seemed to reflect a whole different outlook on meditation than what I was used to. It was what I stereotyped white sanghas as, you know, a little hippie, a little self-involved.”

Sala and many of her students attend a group called POCAS each week. It stands for “People of Color and Allies,” and is made up black, Latino, Native American, Asian and white practitioners.

They meet at the home of Duran, the Native American Buddhist who co-taught the beginner’s course with Sala, and follow the same schedule as most meditation gatherings: a 40-minute sit, a dharma talk and socializing afterwards.  “I go to lots of places to meditate. I’m going to California next week (for a retreat of) Native American meditators, and the week after that, I’ll be back at SIMS, where everyone’s white. I just think there should be options,” said Duran, a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Washington. “You know, I just feel like we’re friendlier here. We can giggle, we don’t have to be so serious about this meditation stuff all the time,” said another woman, Barbie-Danielle DeCarlo, who almost exclusively meditates with people of color. “I just don’t get the style in other places.” From across the living room, Sala chimed in: “Just make sure you keep doing it, wherever you go. Meditate. Be proud. And let the people of color out there know we’re not the only ones.” ~ Jaweed Kaleem

Photos:
~ Tuere Sala
~ Teachers Tuere Sala (left) and Vimalasara Mason-John, pausing during the two-day retreat at Seattle Insight Meditation Society. Photo by: Genevieve Hicks
~ IMS began offering a People of Color Retreat
~ People of Color Shambhala Meditation Center of NY