When White Buddhists “Don’t See Race”

Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections

edited by George Yancy and Emily McRae

Lexington Books, 2019 380 pages; $115

WALKING INTO one of the most prominent Buddhist retreat centers in the United States, I’m struck by how very white the room is. On this particular day, from my vantage point in a very full room of practitioners, there is only one person who appears to my eye as nonwhite. At first glance, this observation strikes me as similar on the surface to heritage Buddhist centers that are composed largely of members of one particular nationality or ethnicity. But what’s different is this: unlike this predominantly white community, coethnic Asian American communities explicitly acknowledge their intention to maintain their heritage in a white-dominant culture that doesn’t reflect their experiences, languages, and cultural patterns. This is exactly the reason they largely cater to one ethnicity at the temple; maintaining these traditions and ways of being in the world requires effort, and such centers provide a place to maintain their languages and cultural traditions when there is no other, edited by George Yancy and Emily McRae, works to answer these questions and others through a critical inquiry into the habits of whiteness or white culture—a culture that refuses to be called a culture. As the authors in this book point out, the assertion of representing “Americanness” is symptomatic of those very cultural habits that render whiteness simultaneously dominant and transparent.