America's Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal

by Larry Ward

Immediate, illuminating, and this is the key set of talks given by leading Zen Buddhist teacher Larry Ward, PhD, on breaking America's cycle of racial trauma.

"I am a drop in the ocean, but I'm also the ocean. I'm a drop in America, but I'm also America. Every pain, every confusion, every good and every bad and ugly of America is in me. And as I transform myself and heal and take care of myself, I'm very conscious that I'm healing and transforming and taking care of America. I say this for American cynics, but this is also true globally. It's for real." So says Zen Buddhist teacher Dr. Larry Ward.

Shot at by the police as an 11-year-old child for playing baseball in the wrong spot, as an adult, Larry Ward experienced the trauma of having his home firebombed by racists. At Plum Village Monastery in France, the home in exile of his teacher, Vietnamese peace activist and Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, Dr. Ward found a way to heal. In these short reflective essays, he offers his insights on the effects of racial constructs and answers the how do we free ourselves from our repeated cycles of anger, denial, bitterness, pain, fear, violence? Larry Ward looks at the causes and conditions that have led us to our current state and finds, hidden in the crisis, a profound opportunity to reinvent what it means to be a human being. This is an invitation to transform America's racial karma.

Genres: Buddhism, Nonfiction, Social Justice, Race, Spirituality, History, Sociology

144 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2020

Reviews

[Kate Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

This concise gem of a book offers both a deeper understanding of how white supremacy came to be so deeply embedded in Western cultures, and practical healing techniques for both oneself and society. As to the former, I'd always thought our cultural white supremacy came from white Europeans who wanted to go to the Americas and get rich at the expense of dehumanizing and enslaving native peoples, that it was just cruel, but extremely profitable, exploitation.
And it was, but did you know it had the approval of the Pope? Larry Ward quotes from a 1452 papal bull that granted the kings of Spain and Portugal (the main New World colonizers at the time) "full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ, wherever they may be . . . and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery." (!) I hadn't realized that organized religion had been so openly complicit.
Ward also traces pseudoscientific writings that attempted to establish the inherent inferiority of Africans and other non-European peoples.
Ward devotes most of the book to showing how long-standing habits of discrimination, although difficult to change, nevertheless can be changed, if enough of us commit to working on it. Through trauma training and other resources, he gives practices that can take us there, and his personal experience as an African American gives invaluable testimony to what works and what doesn't.
America's Racial Karma provides lots to chew on, as well as hope for the future.

[Keith Akers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a number of books on race this year, including White Fragility and Born a Crime. America's Racial Karma presents an interesting and different perspective (though ultimately in the same basic direction). Ward presents the problem of race from a Buddhist perspective. As he presents it, approaching the problem of race as a karmic problem sounds very much like common sense, even though no one else that I've read has presented the problem in quite this way. It's also short and easy to read, just 126 pages.

All of our actions have consequences. This is the law of karma, expressed in other traditions as "as you sow, so shall you reap." There is a wheel of karma that revolves from thinking, to speech, to behavior. We can slow down the wheel by intervening at any point, but we must stop the wheel from turning in some way. I don't think that Ward would say that we can't use laws and external reforms to heal the country and the world. But it all starts (somewhere) with intention, and then goes (see drawing on p. 26) to manifestation, transmission, retribution, and continuation.

We remain trapped in the karmic consequences of our ancestors unless we try to take positive action to break out of this. Ward also presents an interesting way to deal with race on the basis of the Buddhist psychology of the Plum Village tradition (followers of Thich Nhat Hanh). We have the seeds of racial trauma in us, but we also have the seeds of healing, and we can change ourselves and our society by watering the seeds of healing within us and in others.

I can recommend this book as an excellent and rather different approach to the problem of race.

[Rain · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it, but wished it had delved into a deeper conversation on a soul level.

We are simply souls wrapped in meat shells floating on a beautiful planet out in space after all.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

What are the main ideas?

* this is the wheel of america's racial karma:  - [source](https://www.lionsroar.com/healing-ame...
* the wheel of america's racial karma has five stages: intention, manifestation, transmission, retribution, continuation.
* intention is the seed, the energy that motivates the system of racist itself. the intentions of racism are fear and greed. fear of other and greed for material resources. these combine to create structures of exclusion and theft/extraction.
* manifestation is the intention seeping into the mind, into the consciousness. racism's intention manifests in the mind as white supremacy.
* transmission is the manifestation brought into reality with thought, speech, and behavior/actions. when white supremacist consciousness transmits, it shows up in the common ways we see white supremacy in the world. one way ward names this is "white supremacy became the defining criteria for self-worth, accumulating wealth and power through subjugating others and the natural word." but, as ward names, transmission is stage three of the wheel, not the first as many mistakenly believe.
* retribution is the process of transmission creating what it must create. it is the consequences of our thoughts, words, and actions. but it is not an outsized response, as is commonly understood. retribution is not escalation. it is just what was put out, returning.
* racism's retribution is trauma. one way to tend to that trauma is to be present with it and grieve what was lost in its creation.
* continuation is what happens if the wheel is not disrupted. things in motion will stay in motion unless otherwise interrupted. as retribution unfolds, without interruption, the intention will be restrengthened as apparent benefits of the system accrue for people who will then fight tooth and tail to prevent anyone from changing the cycle.
* grieving racial trauma is " a gateway to healing america's racial karma."
* buddhism, in its orientation towards strengthening the connection between the body and mind, has the possibility, if we let it, to disrupt the wheel of racial karma. in order for that to happen we must observe the seeds growing in our selves and be with them long enough to see their fruitlessness. then, we can detach from their manifestation and engage in a true human way, a way that recognizes we are all connected. "the purpose of being alive is to discover we are not separate."
* america takes great pride in its lack of mercy. we love that we show no mercy. however, in order to break the wheel, we must show mercy, first to ourselves and then to each other.
* "Healing takes time. When you cut off a fan, it keeps running for a while before it stops because of its previous momentum. In the same way, the turning of the racial karma wheel may keep going, but when we cut off the fuel to it--when we stop feeding it with hatred and instead, by nourishing our self-love, our self-compassion, and our joy, this karma will end and our society will change."

If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?

remember the original seeds of racism. as toni morrison said, "the very serious function of racism... is distraction." racism is a great lie that justifies theft.

How would I describe the book to a friend?

i don't even know if i could. at first when i read this book, i was deeply lost. eventually i realized i was reading it with the wrong eyes. i was trying to read this book like most books produced by the publishing industry. but, compared to this book, those books are fluffy, filled with words to make clarity come most easily. but, maybe unsurprisingly, each sentence of this book is meant to be digested slowly, mindfully even. moving too quickly from one sentence to the next, created confusion. moving slowly, endeavoring to deeply understand each sentence, opened up lots.

anyway, this book is a tiny tome containing years worth of practice insights, all oriented towards understanding the root and process of racism in order to disrupt it in service of all beings. in some ways, i think this book defies description and summary. i will probably need to re-read this at least twice to fully integrate what ward is bringing here with it.

[S. Wigget · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a timely Buddhist perspective on the racism that is so intertwined with this country. It contains meditations and reflections in addition to dharma talks.

"When our house in Idaho was bombed by members of a white supremacist movement, there was no investigation by local law enforcement and no resolution. It wasn't even reported in the local newspaper (p. 37)."

"Study racism and don't look away. Understand how it works. We can see here the karmic action from intent to manifestation to transmission implanting the seeds of ideas of racial superiority in our hearts and minds with its mission to subjugate nonwhites. Note your physical and emotional responses and scan your mind to see how these implanted images hide in your consciousness too (p. 61)."

"We know America was built on the backs of slaves and founded on the bodies of the first peoples of this land, but many still find difficulty in accepting such facts because they go against the American Dream narrative. We have spent the last five hundred years becoming so skillful In denying our atrocities and projecting the shadows of America's racial karma onto the bodies of nonwhites that we are like people suffering from traumatic brain injuries and amnesia (p. 62)."

[Dillon Allen-Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

9/10

It’s a great achievement how much research, depth of spiritual thought, and compassion for meaningful change Dr. Ward was able to cram into this relatively short, accessible book.

In Ward’s words, karma is a Sanskrit term for a Pali concept which “literally mean[s] ‘action’ or ‘doing’. Any kind of intentional action, whether mental, verbal, or physical, is regarded as karma” (p. 25).

Larry Ward draws from thorough scholarly research on the creation and perpetuation of the mythos of race in the U.S. He also draws much from the philosophies of his Zen teacher, the famous Thich Nhat Hanh, who ordained him. Ward also draws from his own experiences as a black man from Ohio who has lived, worked, and taught across the globe, often returning to the trauma of everyday American racial consciousness. He draws from his thoughts, feelings, and personal practice. Again, he crams a lot into this book, but it’s easy to read, while still being intellectually critical and emotionally moving. He does a wonderful job mixing these all together into a persuasive work with an open-hearted invitation to heal ourselves and move toward “posttraumatic growth”.

At one point, Ward pulls from The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. He summarizes how “traumatic patterns persist over generations” and that “[t]hese traces of trauma are the underlying web of our secret interactions with one another alienating us from our sense of empathy and shared humanity” (p. 68). Later, however, Ward pulls from research that began to surface in the mid-1990s which illustrates how trauma can actually lead to positive changes, personally and collectively. Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun called this posttraumatic growth (p. 102).

“Our suffering is in our genes! This is not a political topic at that level. This is a human topic and our willingness to go deeply into our own humanity is our only solution.” . . . “The issue isn’t that we will describe ourselves by skin color using two-hundred-year-old definitions, the issue is the intention behind that description” (p. 77).

This book is a call for “grieving our racial karma, restoring our racial sanity, and reimagining our lives together” (p. 15). Ward continues in the introduction: “This book is also a resource to better understand the mind’s grasping, clinging, and attachment to the fiction of race” (p. 17).

Why Buddhism? How will Buddhism help heal our racial karma? Well, “Your spiritual practice is to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. What’s driving you to do that? And to have the courage to ask yourself, ‘Is that wise? Is that healthy? Will that create suffering?’” (p. 40). It starts with yourself. You have power over yourself, and thus your world, and thus the world. You can stop yourself from being racist. You can stop yourself from believing the fiction of race and all the complicated mythos that surrounds it and permeates our U.S. culture every day.

I don’t want to mislead and make you think it’s easy. We like to think of ourselves as the protagonists, the heroes, of our own little stories, but this can lead us to being too caught up in our own perspectives. We like to think “I’m one of the good people” or “At least I’m not one of the racist people”. However, it is not that easy. Sometimes we are the antagonist of someone else’s story. Sometimes we are the bad person from someone else’s perspective. Maybe more often than anything we are simply a side character or some random human walking by in the background that just creates the texture of a scene. But the point I’m getting at is that healing our own racial karma is not easy. It might sound bad to say, but based on our collective history of thought and intentional action in the United States, it is not an easy practice to not be racist. It’s a difficult practice to do what is wise and healthy and what will not create suffering through classifying things based on the fiction of race.

What can we do to move through this difficulty in the practice of healing our own racial karma? Here’s some straight-forward advice from Ward: “Anyone shocked by American racism in 2020 needs to spend some time studying history and understand that the imprints of the past are still present in our consciousness, like seeds waiting for just a little watering to grow . . . Study racism and don’t look away” (p. 61).

Another reminder: “If discomfort arises, good: it means you are alive” (p. 63). Let me put this reminder alongside another quote from Ward that really hit home as an effective call-to-action for me as a reader: “What is the human legacy we wish to leave for generations to come? Will it be the pitiful response of indifference?” (p. 81).

I did a lot of direct quoting in this review, but the purpose here is really only to get you to go read this book. Hopefully you're convinced to check it out by now. I read America's Racial Karma as a book club selection from my local Buddhist group, Valley Streams Zen Sangha, via the Sacramento Dharma Center. Ward's writing invites wonderful discussion.

[Hazel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think everyone should read this book! Super short but sweet and has a bunch of reflection prompts and exercises for healing racial trauma and stopping the cycle of racism in the US! Loved hearing a Black Buddhist perspective but anyone of any faith could resonate with this book.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

highly recommend.

[Aimee Knupsky (bookchantment) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot packed into a small book.

[Sparrow Knight · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, as community/societal karma is rarely examined in depth. While Ward’s writing shines when he speaks of his own experience, overall I found the book did a poor job of tracing the development of the mind of white supremacy, and how it has been transmitted through time. Not surprising, given the small size of this book. Sometimes it felt like he was speaking to a black audience, sometimes trying to expound upon the white experience—I found his take on that unrelatable to a large extent—and he often alluded to things that weren’t explained or discussed, leading me to be quite confused about what he was trying to convey. The writing often felt disorganized and incomplete.

Only one meditation was integrated into the body of the text; the rest are at the very end of the book.

I came away disappointed.

[Harly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book made for our times. Dr Larry Ward distills so many important teachings into such a physically small book. When picking up this book and noting how it is small and light enough to fit into the pocket of my hoodie - I did not think it would have such a profound effect on my life. Dr Ward's words reverberated throughout my day to day experiences. I became more aware of teachings that I had practiced with for months while sitting on my lovely cushion. His voice is gentle, kind of like a loving elder who wishes that your practice can deepen to the point that we understand that we interARE. This should be mandated reading during these challenging times where we learn to discriminate rather than be in solidarity with each other.

[Patti · Rating 4 out of 5]

** I received this book from the publishers in exchange for an honest review **

3.5-4 stars. While I admit I’m probably not the target audience for this essay, I’m very happy I read it. Larry Ward, PhD, leads you through America’s Racial Karma based on his Buddhist education and how it all plays together. He explores the concept of seeds of thought and how simple changes in these seeds can change our life trajectory and overall consciousness.

Very eye opening and will lead to deeper introspection on how I can add to the karma as well.

[Laurie Zolas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of this book was about the traumatic history of racism and race related violence in the United States. It suggested that we need to face this tragedy and grieve for it. Systemic racism and violence are traumatic to the victims, witnesses, and even the perpetrators. He gives practices from secular sources as well as from Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhist lineage to heal ourselves of this trauma. He says that if we care for and love ourselves, the love will heal us spill over to love for others and change the world for the better.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the grounding, Buddhist lens to the conversation on racialized trauma and how the author wove together personal narrative, history, and spiritual insight into a truly reflective manual for healing. I really appreciated the actionable tools for healing, reflection, and transformation that were included in the latter chapters of the book.

I truly felt invited to feel, experience, and taste what racial injustice really is. I’m grateful for the enlightening read and have learned some valuable lessons that I’ll carry with me as I continue to work on my own biases.

[Dedette Gee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read by every American citizen.

This book cuts right to the heart of the matter regarding race issues in America. Then it gives remedy, solutions, coping skills to cope with the trauma experienced by every American due to racial injustices. This is a must read for every American serious or vaguely interested in healing race relations in America. This is a must read for all bodhisattvas.

[Jiana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful yet heartwrenching book about the state of our country and the racism within. Larry provides poetry to help heal us and also tangible ways in which we can begin the healing process no matter how you are racialized. I will carry this book and it's practices with me wherever I go.

[Monty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tiny book is full of many bits of information for us to think about and ponder and integrate into who we are. I read it straight through and will reread it in pieces since I missed a lot by not going into more depth with the content. I think this book lends itself to be read and discussed by a book group with an open-ended timeline.

[Dora Okeyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was heartbreaking to read and at some point I could not be rational or even look at things from a different perspective as I read the experiences Larry went through, and how he found understanding and healing in Buddhism. It's a timely and from my view as an outsider, one of the books that every American should read on race and injustice.
Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.

[Seth Kahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful, relevant, practical, and a blessing

Ward does an exquisite job of cracking open a knotted mess, speaking truth, and highlighting ways out both individually and collectively.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a few things and enjoyed the book. It was short and concise and a good overview. Some of the language and wording began to feel a bit overly complicated but then the practices were back to being grounded.

[Terese Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and pithy. It took me a long time to read because I found it gave me lots to reflect on. Larry Ward comes from the spiritual direction of Thich Nhat Hanh, and has some very insightful things to say about healing our nation's racial wounds.

[Cory Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, personal, and practical. It’s a short, easy read but one that will challenge you to explore your own racial karma and the way(s) in which our racial past continue to manifest in your life.

[Briayna Cuffie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This? This book is IT. I read it at a slow pace so that I could truly take in everything.

It is calming, validating, challenging, and personal. I had the chance to be a part of a conversation with Larry this week, and I greatly appreciate being able to read this beforehand.

[HILDA · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful book, always relevant to social Justice journey

This book was an easy read and offered beautiful words and practices to address the racial divide that we live in. Highly recommend it.

[Mary Hillebrand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful book. The personal stories helped me, a white woman with lots of privilege, start to envision and understand how deep and how far back the trauma for black people reaches. The practice for sitting with what I was reading and learning were very welcome and accessible.

[Julia B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely marvelous! This is a book I will be giving all my friends and family! Everyone would benefit from reading this book!!!

[Jane Mulkewich · Rating 4 out of 5]

A relatively short book with a lot of ideas in it. I have loaned it to a friend, and look forward to reading it again, at which time I will write a proper review.

[Kathy Mcconkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grounded in Zen Buddhist teachings, here is a way to get at the root of who and what we are. Only then can we know how to belong, to be fully human, in community.

[Gerrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book.

[Pro Mukherjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some deep and difficult insights on the road to recognising and healing the trauma of race over centuries. Highly recommended.