Good evening, everyone. So this evening, I want to talk about a little bit about Sangha, Dharma community. And I want to talk about the karmic legacy of racism in our world, society that is so present this week. So Sangha, the community of practitioners is very important and Sangha can be seen, can be experienced, can be engaged in numbers of different ways. Can you hear me okay? So I was going to start by quoting Nogen, our founder of Soto Zen in Japan, about Sangha, some things he said about Sangha in an essay in Shobo Genzo about taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, the Three Jewels.

[01:21]

And just also to say that Samba is kind of my koan now. We are in this new, still really strange world of Zoom and not sitting together in our zendo. This has advantages. Some of us are here from, we have people here from Indiana and and Nashville, and so people can come from a distance, but it's also strange. It feels disembodied, and I just want to acknowledge that. And for me, in terms of Ancient Dragon, our particular sangha, how to take care of sangha and take care of each other and take care of the jewel of sangha is something I'm really kind of feeling and looking at. And so Sangha is community, but it's community that fosters awakening.

[02:29]

So Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha are jewels because they help us awaken, they help us find liberation in some way. So Dogen says in this Shabu Genso essay that one of the things he says is the Sangha treasure is the merit of learning what is beyond learning. So, and this is part of the three treasures as the essence of reality, to learn what is beyond learning. So it's not just our usual conventional idea of study, our usual conventional sense of abstract ideas, but what is happening on a deeper level? So Sangha helps us realize and experience that. So another thing that Dogen says about Sangha is that the Sangha treasure is to live in accord with reality.

[03:38]

being harmonious and free from stagnation. So to be in harmony, to be harmonious, and, you know, Sangha is about people, Sangha is about, well, it's not just about people, because we have the Sangha of all beings as well, but how do we find deeper harmony? And also to be free from stagnation means that we need to be flexible, willing to shift in different situations. And Sangha has that advantage. In whatever aspect of Sangha we want to consider, Sangha helps us to go beyond our ideas of what's happening. With Sangha, we rub up against each other, we see our differences, and then we also are sharing this common

[04:41]

practice or aspiration, inspiration to express Buddha. So how to be free from stagnation is part of what Sangha is about. So Sangha is alive. Our ancient dragon Sangha is very lively in its own way. And to be alive in new situations like we are in now. We're very much in a new world and how do we find Sangha in this world? So this is our, you know, so we're meeting in Sangha via this strange Zoom event and this is our first Monday evening so we're trying to play with what is supportive schedule on Zoom. So the word, the Chinese translation of the Indian word Sangha is harmonious assembly.

[05:48]

So how do we assemble together harmoniously with each of our differences? Each of us in our own particular little box here on the Zoom page. So, and Joanna Macy talks about Sangha as islands of sanity. So we, Sangha is about practicing in the larger world. The Sangha, there's the Sangha, the particular Sangha of a Dharma group like Ancient Dragon Zen, a practice group. But there's also the Sangha of friends and family, the Sangha of our neighborhood, our city, the Sangha of human beings, the Sangha of the trees and the lake and the flowers and the birds. How do we see these as communities that support us in our practice of being awake and being alive? So to be right now an island of sanity in what is a very strange world with the pandemic and with all the uprisings and unrest this week,

[07:04]

How do we support each other to just find sanity? So part of that is just to listen, to be open to discussion, to exchange viewpoints, to support each other mutually. So I hope we will have time for discussion. Dogen says the song is about precepts too, about the Bodhisattva vows and precepts. So the bodhisattva vows are how we express awakening heart-mind in the world we're in. This is a great challenge now. How can we be an island of sanity together amidst confusion and chaos? This is our challenge now. The precepts are about Radical respect for everybody, for everything, for all beings. This is challenging now. How do we respect all involved in all of the conflict in our world?

[08:08]

Precepts are also about benefiting all beings, not abandoning any part of the Sangha of all beings, but basically just being, trying to be helpful rather than harmful. or when we can't be helpful, at least not doing harm. So this is the world of precepts and we need to listen to it all. So I wanna talk about how this applies to the karma of racism that we all share and in this country and the world and to what's going on now in our world, the uprisings happening all over the country. How do we practice Sangha in this context? So this weekend, there were more than 40 cities with curfews. It's the most since after Dr. King was murdered in 1968, which I remember.

[09:11]

Over the weekend, 4,400 people were arrested. So many people are out responding with frustration, anger, desire for change, triggered by the public lynching of George Floyd, as you all know, in Minneapolis. How do we feel all this anger and frustration? of all this legacy, how do we share it? It's, of course, more than just George Floyd. And Alex, yesterday morning, read a bunch of names, but I have a few of them. Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald here in Chicago, Tamir Rice, Elton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Rekia Boyd, Walter Scott, Philando Castile, also up in Minnesota, and recently, Breonna Taylor, a person helping in hospitals, working in hospitals, who was shot in her own house by police.

[10:13]

And Ahmaud Arbery, a jogger in Georgia who was gunned down by three men. So this is the continuation of the history of lynching in our country. I've heard black people say it's not enough for white people not to be racist. White people need to be actively anti-racist and need to speak with each other about it. So I want to talk about what's happening this week as a way of continuing some conversation that we as white people, so our song is Monthly White, and as white people, we need to talk about this. It's what we're being asked to do by in our current situation, to look at our own privilege relatively, to listen and hear the pain of Black people.

[11:17]

And not to speak about this is complicity, is what Black people are saying, but I'm heartened by the fact that in all the the demonstrations, all the responses, all the actions I've seen, trying to follow this on television and various media, that many white people are also very much joining. So that makes this event and many things about this event that's unique that is possibly a sea change. There's been a week, and I think it's continuing today, of since George Floyd was killed, and I watched on television as his brother appeared at the site of the killing this afternoon. It was very moving. His brother talking about how the response needs to be peaceful.

[12:26]

So there are lots of aspects of this. I've heard that one in every 2,000 African-Americans in this country have died of COVID already. African-Americans are amongst the most strongly affected by the pandemic. But just the fact of all the people out in so many cities all over the country risking their lives to go out in the pandemic to protest in this uprising speaks to the great seriousness of this situation. And we're facing not just this immediate event of this murder by policemen of George Floyd, that we could all see in the videos on television, really horrible.

[13:34]

But this is about 400 years of the karmic legacy of slavery and racism, and now privatized mass incarceration, which is another form of slavery. This impacts each one of us, each one of us, who grew up in this country and there are different versions in other countries. So I see that this is also happening for David. There was an emergency alert. So the CTA is suspending all bus and train services So anyway, this will impact the curfew. There's no quick fix to any of this.

[14:39]

This is a long, long legacy, long, deep cultural karma. Each one of us has our own experience of it in our own context, in our own life, in our own upbringing, in our own childhood and growing. But today's the, actually yesterday was the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa riots in 1919. There was a strong black community in Tulsa was called the Black Wall Street. And in just a matter of, I don't know, a day or a couple days, it was leveled. The whole area was leveled. by a white mob and many, many blacks were massacred. Today is also the, today is the 35th anniversary of the bombing by police of a city block in Philadelphia where the MOVE office was, a group of black activists.

[15:44]

And 11 black activists were killed in this bombing, including five children. These are just little examples of how the lynching has continued. So very, very obviously we have two very different systems of justice in this country. Very different for black people and for white people. And maybe three, maybe there's a different system of justice for very wealthy people. It's just reality. that we've had systemic injustice and systemic racism in various ways for 400 years. So this particular situation and this week-long uprising, this is a situation that there may be, hopefully, changes made in policing. And there's some, seems like there's some response about that.

[16:45]

But the reality that As white people, we don't feel ourselves, we may know it intellectually, but every black parent has to worry when their children leave the house. Just to go out jogging, now we see what might happen. Every young black man has to worry when they see a policeman on the street. Maybe most of the time nothing happens, but there are times when it happens and it's been happening over and over again. So this is all happening in a very strange context of this pandemic. And also 40 million people are out of work now in this country. And maybe that's helping to trigger all the people who are able to go out on the streets in this uprising. But again, this uprising is happening with peaceful protesters, mostly peaceful protesters risking their lives in the context of the virus, the pandemic.

[18:02]

It's a really striking, startling event this week. This is just one of the huge junctures in our history as human beings and in this country. And so many examples of attacks. I saw in Columbus, Ohio, a black congresswoman was pepper sprayed by police. Many journalists on the streets have been attacked by police. Two policemen in Atlanta were fired and others suspended for breaking into a car and tasing and pulling out of the car two young black college students who had not done anything obvious to provoke that. So for African-American people, this is a really difficult, difficult time. On the other hand, of course, not all policemen are misbehaviors.

[19:04]

Very many policemen are conscientious public servants. I saw pictures of some policemen kneeling or marching together with protesters over the weekend, including some police chiefs. I heard about a black woman protester who went and hugged the armored policeman in front of her. And they hugged for several minutes. So this is happening too. It's such an interesting time. It's such a challenging time. How do we see it, talk about it, hear it, feel it as Sangha? And in terms of the Minneapolis police who killed George Floyd, there was the information today that in the last five years, 44 people were rendered unconscious by neck restraints from the Minneapolis police, and 60% of them were black.

[20:17]

So then there's all of the looting and vandalism And there is evidence that some of that's being done by white supremacists. But we don't know. And I do not want to condone any of the looting at all. And I feel deep sympathy for store owners just starting to open up after the pandemic and now having their life's work looted and shattered. It's terrible. But when we talk about looting, we also should recognize that there has been looting by the government. Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's widow, said, denying health care is violence. And we certainly see by the incidents of how The pandemic has affected African-Americans that disproportionately health care in our whole society is inadequate to say the least.

[21:31]

And especially we see that now, but that particularly has affected minorities. And again, about looting, the United States has looted the land of Native Americans throughout our country. So I appreciated that Dylan has a, dedication to the people who had been on the land of Chicago. Some of them survived, their descendants. The United States economy was built on the looting of centuries and centuries of African American lives from slavery. through racism, through now mass incarceration. So the discourse on looting is not applied to corporate and government looting. For example, the huge subsidies are now being given to fossil fuel and nuclear power companies.

[22:38]

I want to read some excerpts from a long article. And if anyone's interested, I'd write You need info on ancientdragon.org and I can send a copy of it to you. So it was in the Atlantic several years ago by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who's a great African-American writer called The Case for Reparations. And I'm just going to read a few very, very brief selections. It's a long article. So he talks about the history of all this. He talks about the history of all this, particularly in terms of Chicago and housing and redlining and so forth, but also some other things. He says that in, 1848, on the Senate floor, John C. Calhoun, South Carolina's senior senator, and one of the most powerful politicians in the first half of the 19th century, said, the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the white, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class and are respected and treated as equals.

[23:44]

Whereas, of course, the blacks are treated as inferiors in 1848. In the early 1800s, the consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon Black families and Black people were profound. The home ownership today, like home ownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves, but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. That was our world, this country's world then. The early American economy he says, was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office.

[24:48]

The lament about Black pathology, unquote, the criticism of Black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, rings hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of Black fathers, on the rape of Black mothers, on the sale of Black children. An honest assessment of America's relationship to the Black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer, but its destroyer. This destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. Those laws, these laws reached their apex in the mid 20th century, when the federal government through housing policies engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. This is not incidental. This was engineered intentionally. And this article goes into that in detail. He says, when we think of white supremacy, we picture colored only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.

[25:55]

So I heard the Reverend William Barber, who's an African American leader in South Carolina, talking about poverty. He said, even before this pandemic, 66 million white people and 26 million black people were living in poverty in this country. And the first three relief bills passed by Congress for the pandemic, 85% of the money went to corporations, not to essential workers or to people in real need. So, This is a function of something that is not just limited to the United States borders. The United States has 800 military units abroad, including supporting many dictators.

[26:59]

53% of the American budget goes to the military, supporting the American empire. This is money taken from education and healthcare and other social benefits. In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King said that our government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. It might well be argued that that is still the case. So what do we do? Again, just listening is The starting point and for we as white people to listen to black people in the black community is essential now. But also for us to talk with each other about this, about this reality. Voting in elections is very important, but I don't know that it's enough. This uprising is part of how change happens.

[28:02]

speaking out about injustice, not just at the voting booth. So sangha means listening deeply, listening to each other, listening to the voices of all of those in this uprising and all impacted by it, shop owners, and the policemen, these women. And so our challenge is how to be an island of sanity, how to be aware and awake and listen and express caring for everyone and all beings and respect for all beings involved. But we have a particular problem as white people the United States.

[29:03]

We all are very privileged. We don't have to worry about a policeman coming and attacking us just because of our skin color. And of course, there's so much more. There's the legacy that has disenfranchised and impoverished many black people. So it's a difficult situation. And I'm interested in hearing any of your responses, comments, questions. So part of Sangha is to talk together. So I want to open this up for your comments, responses, reflections. Please feel free. Thank you all very much. So you can just raise your hand or there's also the participant button on the bottom and there's a raise hand to open at the bottom.

[30:19]

Sandra, we can't see you if you want to raise your hand. But I know at least Dylan was out on the streets in Chicago. I don't know if you have any observations from your experience, Dylan, of being in the middle of all of this? Uh, sure. Um, I'll try to be because I'm really interested in what other folks have to say as well. Um, uh, so I, I went with a friend, um, starting with the car caravan near the Cook County jail. And then, uh, we drove up to the South loop and, uh, parts of the South loop and walked up to, uh, you know, state and lake and up to the, up to Trump tower with the protest. Um, I was there from about two to 6 PM on Saturday.

[31:21]

Uh, the afternoon hours of it were very inspiring. Uh, it, it reminded me of, uh, Occupy Chicago. of just a lot of people ready to work together, to stand together, to protect each other, and be vocal in a powerful way together. Uh, it, it was around, um, there were, there were numerous occasions where it could have gotten uglier with police.

[32:22]

Um, when, uh, you know, and this is hard, this is difficult for me because I'm very much, I'm in favor of finding ways for us to protect our own communities without there being Armed patrols everywhere. Um, I know that's possible somehow, you know? Uh, but I, I do have to say that there, there were numerous occasions when the cops were almost being invited to, to be, uh, provoked in a way. And, and, uh, and they, they didn't respond in a way that would have turned things into a very bad situation. And it's not always been like that in Chicago. And so that was the time for, like, for the time I was there, that's what I saw. Once things got to Trump Tower, people just kind of set up shop at Trump Tower for the part of the place I was at where there was

[33:26]

a big mass of folks that were on the bridge, sitting on the bridge, and ready to just be there for as long as they needed to. And at that point, though, the police started playing this recorded message that they were suddenly an unlawful assembly. They were suddenly an unlawful assembly, and that if they stayed there, that they would be arrested. Which doesn't make sense to me. Uh, you know, if you're sitting there and just on the, in front of Trump tower in front of the, the, you know, this guy was not publicly elected, you know? Um, and you're sitting there with everybody and then suddenly it's unlawful. Um, that's when it felt like things started to get a little darker, a little, um, uh, more confrontational. Uh, in a, in a more substantial way.

[34:31]

Uh, and, um, uh, around six o'clock, some folks started, um, you know, putting some trash cans in the streets. And I looked around and saw a bunch of gas, uh, or smoke. It was tough to see. And then I looked down state street and it was just a open sea of police officers. rushing toward Trump Tower, just, you know, just felt like endless. It felt like the water's parting or something. And that's when I turned to my friend and just said that this was really the time that I, it was time to go. And I'm really glad that in the moment it was difficult though, because, you know, as an activist, you have this feeling in you, you have this feeling in you that like, if you leave now, you're chicken, you know, like you don't really care if you're leaving now.

[35:42]

But I knew that I had a responsibility to this sangha. And I had a responsibility to my friends and my family. Uh, and so, uh, I just knew that it w it was not my path to get in the mix up that night. Um, and so I'm glad that we left when we did, because right as we were leaving, that's when they started shutting down getting in and out. Um, so it's complicated. You know, I, I really wanted to advocate for. Like for, for Lori Lightfoot to, um, start talking publicly about police reform, uh, or, uh, you know, changing, transforming the way police officers are trained and hired and prosecuted. But it's, it's tricky because I've already heard, you know, on police scanners that apparently there are some cops that are not happy with her.

[36:44]

And if she loses the trust of the police force and the police force start operating with no one that they feel accountable to, that's another chapter that I do not look forward to. So it's a complicated situation, I guess, right now. That's what I've got to share. Thank you very much for that first-hand report, and yes, it's very complicated. It's not simple. This is 400 years of difficulty. Other comments? Anybody else involved in the protest? Or just any comments or questions or responses, please. Alex. I wanted to say thank you for bringing up a very difficult topic.

[37:47]

And I think the topic that is very important, which is that, you know, right now for the group of us, we are, we are white people. And it's important that we talk about what that means and what that privilege means, how we can use it to support our siblings who don't look exactly the same way as we do. And I think it's a really hard conversation and a really uncomfortable conversation. And I appreciate this sort of karmic lens of racism. Um, and for me, the way that I try to think about it is, you know, of course, I don't want to think of myself as a person who benefits from systems of racism, or as a person who is complicit in systems of racism, or worst of all, as a person who is racist, as a person who does racist things. Um, But the painful reality of it for me is that those are just the facts.

[38:51]

Being a white person in America, those are things that you are born into and it is not your fault, but it is your responsibility to act proactively. And it is your responsibility to be an anti-racist rather than just saying, well, I don't think these things, so it couldn't be me. And I also wanted to say that I, you know, spurred biologists. I recently, I picked up the book Radical Dharma by Angel Theodore Williams and Lama Rod Owens, who are both Black teachers, I believe, in the Tibetan tradition. And it's about I forget the exact subtitle, but it's one of those three word subtitles and two of them are race and liberation. Um, and so I would be very open and very interested to read that one song. I think one, um, one thing that has been suggested that I think will happen is, um, a,

[39:57]

I don't know what it'll be called, a race study group. We've had some of those in our song before. Oh, Fushia is showing the book. Yeah, thank you. But there are numbers of books, and I think one of the things we can do is post a reading list. I think Dylan, you were talking about something like that for people. So we can't force people to talk about this. You all have chosen to show up here this evening and I posted the topic on the website. But how do we be an island of sanity? Other comments, please. Just off the, you know, does anyone else have their hand up? Hey, you know, a Houston police chief did a very good interview tonight on CNN with a British anchor. I'm not sure what it was, but he went on.

[41:00]

He was really very good. And, you know, I guess I have a bit of a question regarding the actions of the officer involved in that. in that death and, say, Laquan McDonald's death, how much of it is malice? How much of it is innocence? How much of it is intention? How much of it is ignorance? How much of it is uninformed versus intentional action? And how do we question the humanity of the accused? How do we reconcile it against the loss of the humanity of the victim? Are these questions regarding The condition of the individual or is the, is the, is, is it a question of citizenship? A lack of, uh, a lack of informed citizenship on the part of the police officer or on the part of the person acting in a bigoted manner, say in the fashion of the president at this moment. How innocent are they of these actions? How responsible are they to act informed?

[42:04]

I mean, I have the feeling that both in the case of the Chicago murder and the Minnesota Minneapolis murder that the officer involved was innocent to the degree that they were ignorant of their own malice or their own lack of informed action. And so it's not entirely clear to me where we discover the sources of these. distortions or these malignancies in communal sensibility. I don't know. Those are great questions. Just to say quickly that there's lots of discussion of systemic racism. And so in that sense, you know, maybe the policemen are victims too of this heritage of racism. I know that the Minneapolis policeman who put his knee on the neck of George Floyd, though, had a number of incidents in the past where he was at least accused of brutality.

[43:12]

But there's also, you know, like the incident, you know, there are things like stop and frisk and anyway, and profiling. And so there, so there's systems. It's not just a matter of individuals, but yeah, you're asking good, good questions and it's not easy answers. Other comments on this? Yes. Yes, David. First, thank you, Tygen, for that talk. And I'm really appreciating the comments. Mostly, I just want to start talking because I find it hard to talk about as a white privileged man. And I'm also someone who grew up in the Deep South. And I grew up with some of the people who raised me and taught me. you know, actually trying to inculcate racism into me. I mean, you know, racist discourse was taught to me by some of the people that raised me. And I also am old enough to remember the night after MLK's assassination, when white people were saying, they're coming, they're coming and they're going to massacre us.

[44:24]

Yeah, and I'm thinking about your comment, the way that if I do nothing and say nothing, I can be a nice white guy and I am still... complicit with systemic racism, and it's amazing. So one anecdote, a thing that happens to me today, so a number of undergraduates in a course that I'm teaching sent me an email saying, please, and there are several persons of color in this class, but I received several emails saying, Please cancel the final project for this. It's a poetry writing workshop. Please cancel the final project. If you assign this to us, you are, as it were, evaluating our privilege and our ability to work during this time. And I did it. I sent the message. And when I did it, I realized, wow, I am finding it hard to acknowledge the reason that I'm doing this.

[45:28]

And so I added the sentence at the end, Black Lives Matter, to make it clear that it's a response to the wrongful death of George Floyd and so many other so many other Black people in the country. Going back to a legacy that I'm so keenly aware of being a beneficiary of, the legacy of transatlantic slavery and then the oppression of Black people. Yeah, which was just so everywhere in the place that I grew up. There were still like back areas of department stores where there were still two water fountains and four restrooms, right? Because there were the white restrooms and the black restrooms. What state was that, David? I beg your pardon? What state was that in?

[46:29]

I grew up in Georgia. And the four bathrooms, that was like in the 1980s, you know, because nobody, this was in the back area of a department store and nobody had changed it. They were all used by everybody. I remember some young person naively saying, how come there are four restrooms back here? Because she had no idea. Anyway, but it, yeah, I simply wanted to say a word about it out loud. Thank you again. Hi, I don't know if anybody else is raising their hand, but you are. OK, thank you. Yeah, I resonate with what David is saying. I grew up in the South as well. And so all of this seems very familiar in a way, in a big way. But I also live on the South side of Chicago and have since the 1980s. Um, and so I, you know, it's, um, and I also, my, my, um, academic background is in social welfare and, um, so I've studied race and poverty for quite some time and it's always present and in a big way.

[47:40]

Um, I mean, As David said, I think we all, or I speak for myself, we are all complicit to the extent that there's not a greater effort, I think, in our politics to make demands on having some equality in schools, for instance. That is huge. Having some quality housing. That is huge. And as much as in the South, there was obvious segregation and separate bathrooms and separate water fountain. In my view, Chicago is segregated as much. It just isn't as apparent. It doesn't have to be signs put up.

[48:42]

people do not cross racial boundaries, geographic racial boundaries in the city of Chicago. So I think we don't have, it's really hard to, I mean, it's great to have some academic understanding and reading, but I think without having some direct experience it's really difficult to understand sort of the extent and the depth of the suffering in these poor communities like my neighbor community, Gary and Hammond, and how actually the whole African-American population has grown all the way up and passed from the South side of Chicago to um West indiana northwest indiana And that has been a progression that has been going on for at least 30 years um, and so I guess It's a little bit frustrating to have these same old stories coming up again, and they only seem to make um, i'm not sure I do think we make some progress But I also think that um

[50:10]

And a big sense for me, it is very frustrating that is only when there is a racial crisis in the country, that there seems to be enough attention given to it because it really is an ongoing every day, day in and day out for people who live in these communities. And we are just turning a blind eye to it. I guess that's all I should say, but thank you. I appreciate everyone's wanting and desiring to be helpful. I mean, I guess I can also say that I think that there's some element of our contribution to the whole situation and what the police are confronting every day in these communities themselves.

[51:14]

Because it is not a cakewalk for the police who we are paying to enforce these laws on these communities. I mean, our white communities are demanding this seriously. And so I think we are a very big contributor. We can't help. I mean, because we are all connected. So I think, you know, at least for me, I think I have to acknowledge that for myself. And what has become really difficult in these times of crisis also is it sets up a situation where it's difficult then to show in a way to these communities, in an integrative way, some sincerity in the efforts to, so I see some of that coming back on some, I know some of the protests or gatherings

[52:32]

in our community have been multiracial, which I think is a very positive thing. But at the same time, just probably a mile away from my house yesterday, there was a lot of looting in the local shopping mall that had just opened. And that definitely was not white, white racist. it was obvious that it was people from poor communities and that it was an organized effort. So we're all to blame though. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's so complicated. And yeah, just to say that I'm relatively new to Chicago, it doesn't show years, but I've heard it said that Chicago is the most segregated large city in this country. And it's frustrating, because there's not so much we can do.

[53:35]

The one thing that we can do, maybe, and I don't know how much it helps, but just for us to be talking about it together, not pretending it doesn't exist. And part of this particular situation, sparked by George Floyd's murder, is that there has been a whole week of continuous uprising. And I've been watching it. And, you know, I remember during the Vietnam War being involved in very similar demonstrations on the street and, uh, interacting with police. And, uh, it's a long time ago, um, 50 plus years ago, uh, and especially right after Dr. King was killed. Um, And if it wasn't for the pandemic, I would like to be out there now, but I'm at risk in terms of medical and age situations.

[54:38]

But it looked very familiar to me. And I have marched, I did march in some Black Lives Matter marches back after Laquan McDonald was murdered. So, you know, I don't know how as white people we can do anything meaningful, but I think talking about it together is something that's been requested of us, actually. Other comments, please. I would like to say just one additional comment. You know, when I was a student getting my professional degree, I would say maybe 20% of the class was African American, maybe 15%. And in my professional, when I entered the profession, I was in it for 30 years, not one African-American did I encounter once on any construction site, in any architectural office in Chicago, not one.

[55:39]

So that kind of isolation, which people say is systemic, I'm not sure. I mean, it's clearly that, but what else is it that there was that segregation away from the professional community of building designers in Chicago. That was not the case in California, at least in the educational program. It's not clear to me that that is not typical of most professional offices in Chicago. And what does that lead to, that sense of separation? Fear, right? Fear. So the problem is profound. profound, and this Houston police chief, if anyone gets a chance to listen to it, he says, hey, there's a disproportional access to resources in this country that is longstanding, and it contributes to this rage. So for the president to stand up and tell us to get tough, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He has no idea what the source of, what the cause is behind this rage, behind this anger, all right?

[56:44]

So that's all I wanted to mention. Speaking of Chicago institutions, Laurel, if you wouldn't mind, when you were at the Field Museum for so many years, were there African-Americans in positions there? It's an interesting question. So the Field Museum staff is divided in so many ways. It's an academic institution. It's also a public institution. So there were plenty of African-Americans on the staff. There were not a lot of African-Americans on the, in the academic hierarchy, higher levels of the academic.

[57:49]

But in terms of the education department and, you know, it's a complicated institution. I will say, to its credit, there was a very sincere, aggressive effort to work on that. That was explicit, that was talked about all the time, not just in February, and that was examined regularly and people were hired for that purpose and you know that the board of directors was involved, the leadership, so there was some self-knowledge about it and I would describe it as a work in progress. There's a lot of international participation in the academic staff and that was very

[58:52]

healthy because it brought a lot of cultural diversity and so that brought a lot of different viewpoints that help open people's eyes to, you know, not just being, you know, white Americans. It's an interesting experience. Different from that, so before I was at the Field Museum, I was at the Nature Conservancy, which is a private not-for-profit conservation organization, enormous, the biggest conservation organization in the world, also working toward racial diversity on staff being pathetically white. I mean, just shockingly. I would give them a D for giving them a letter grade in their approach and their success.

[59:54]

I mean, people were hired and then not supported enough. And there were just one sad story after another, you know, when people would be hired and there would be great excitement and then it would fail and it was really sort of bad. So, you know, it's not an easy thing to do. It's really not an easy thing to do. I just wanted to make one book recommendation. Last year, I read a book called The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. She's an academic, she's an anthropologist or a sociologist, social scientist, African American social scientist. It's a very long book. about the Great Migration and follows three families from three different places in the South, tells brilliantly the stories of their lives in the South in such ways that helps you see the violence against particularly Black men and the reason for the migration,

[61:05]

physical violence, economic violence, sexual violence, every imaginable kind of violence. And then she follows them separately and one moves to Los Angeles, one moves to Chicago, one moves to Detroit. And then there's a different kind of racism that they encounter in the North. It's not like, okay, now they're in the promised land and everything's gonna be okay. And the Chicago story in particular, tragedy of what happened to them in South Shore. You know, they moved into this thriving Jewish community that was very economically vibrant. And then and then, you know, that thing happened with the neighbors with the values of their property became nothing and they lost all their. Oh, my God. It's a very long book. And it's very, it helps see the story of America through particular families' eyes.

[62:10]

And she spent so many hours with each of these people telling their story. So it's really very good. Anyway. Thank you. So, Dylan, I don't know if Hogetsu is doing this, or if you might, or, you know, in terms of just getting together a reading list that we could post. on the website, just of good resources. I think who gets his post had a good start of that, but anyway, I'm not sure. I don't want to burden you with more things to do Dylan, but if that's something. Yeah, I'll check and see how far I can get on it. Yeah, and please add what the title that Laurel just mentioned and I can suggest some others. Can I say one other thing? The thing that's really upsetting to me is the amount of fear that I'm seeing everywhere.

[63:14]

I think yesterday at two o'clock in the afternoon, I went to Home Depot because I needed to get keys made because I just moved and I want to give friends extra keys and so forth. And it was closed, and it had just closed. And I said to this young man who was standing up, I said, why are you closed? And he had this look of fear. And he said, the looters are coming. It was like, just like this horror that he, I mean, he was so scared. He was literally sweating. And I thought, oh my God, what? And it's sort of like the parallel of the, of the, I mean, an hour before that I had been trying to buy cat food in the pet food store. And, you know, people were, I was wearing my mask and a lady was like giving, I felt like she was like giving me the evil eye.

[64:24]

Cause I was, maybe five and a half feet away from her instead of six or whatever. It's like so much fear around us. It's really debilitating. Yeah. I had the experience this morning. So I'm wearing a shirt that says, stop killing black women and girls. And I had an experience this morning of this woman who was walking her dog who saw me and then tried as hard as she could not to look at me. Like she like turned away, like literally turned away from me and tried to get by me as quick as possible, you know. Yeah.

[65:24]

Fushim. These issues seem to me to stem from a kind of possessiveness, and it makes me think about our precept not to be possessive of anything. And so our country is founded on the notion of possession, but it's such a silly, it really is kind of silly because we don't possess anything. I mean, we really don't. I mean, and so protecting ourselves, protecting our bodies, protecting our property, protecting our whatever it is we think we need to keep, try to keep. It's, I mean, possessing other people. Anyway, I just, I've focused on that.

[66:36]

And it seems to me that the experience of oppression frequently comes from a misperception of possession. So I just, I'm putting that out there for us to consider. It's not that we think about this very often, but maybe. But it's, I mean, you know, I think about giving money, giving, giving, giving stuff, giving myself, you know, as if I possessed it. And it's just very difficult to know how to deal culturally with the culture of cultural possession, a culture of accumulation and consumption, when the truth of the matter is that we really don't. It's very, very shocking to realize.

[67:39]

So I just cut off. Yeah, and thank you, Fushun. I just want to mention, in addition to that, in Rastvanstead, I mean, fear seems to be a core issue here, right? Not only in the expression of racism and the desire to protect oneself and one's possessions and so forth, but the aggression and the violence and the anger seems to have a fear component in all those things. I don't know. I mean, safety is one thing, trying to care for and support and nourish, and that's something different from treating something like your possession, seems to me. Hi, if I can, but I think two things that are also involved in less so on the on the um Racial division side, but that they're obviously playing out right now.

[68:46]

I think it speaks to your point that is um One like the police force is overwhelmingly male and I think men in america are not emotionally literate not raised to Handle their emotions to deal with it to empathize and men are taught to have to be happy angry and maybe scared but primarily happy and angry and all other subtle emotions are just sublimated into that um So it's no it's no shock that you know police feel their power threatened and turn that into anger or they feel scared for whatever reason and they turn that into anger and because they have power and tools of violence, the anger gets expressed as violence because they've been trained to do that.

[69:53]

And I think that that is specifically an aspect of toxic masculinity in the United States, that here is intersecting with really toxic attitudes on race. And long-standing systemic power dynamics I the other thing and so I was I was with my sister and her boyfriend this past weekend We had a we had a distanced hangout um, and he's a black man from around dc um, and he brought up the good point that a lot of this is Is informed by trauma and we don't talk about it That being a policeman is police officer Often deeply traumatic and Also being a black person in America in a different way, it's also deeply traumatic and So, how do you how do you expect someone to?

[71:01]

Not have emotional tools to To understand the world in a subtle way and their own emotions in a subtle way put them in deeply traumatic situations on a regular basis And then throw them into high emotion tense situations Fully armed for combat Against a crowd of people that outnumbers them and It's no wonder that police enact violence on these protesters, and it's no wonder that people are protesting, because obviously, for all the reasons we've been talking about, it's traumatic to be a Black person in America, and it has been since before the Constitution. I just wanted to speak on that. These racial issues are intersecting, I think, with toxic masculinity and a lack of, I guess you could say, mental health resources for cops and minority communities, and just not dealing with people as full people and not encouraging people to deal with themselves as full people.

[72:21]

Yeah. And I just want to say, can I, and I'm sorry, I'm speaking up. No, but in response to what you're saying there, Wade, I mean, I think that the amount of objectification that we impose not only on others, but on ourselves is so over the top where, I mean, there's no, there's no, where's the opportunity to recognize our own humanity, nevermind others. Right. And now I mentioned again, and I shouldn't, I'm emphasizing maybe too much, but you would really enjoy this interview that the police chief of Houston put out there. He's an extraordinary leader, very compassionate, enormously empathic. Houston's not a small city to be a police chief for. And it was an education for me to listen to that. And, and, uh, he was really, he's like, we need to forget about anger, forget about confrontation. We need to recognize each other as human beings. That's we need to heal, you know, and this was the police chief. So I'm just saying that there's an opportunity there. I actually heard a few different police chiefs speak being interviewed who were, you know, pretty good.

[73:33]

Yes. Thank you for your time. Thank you for mentioning that. Well, it's nine o'clock, and if you have to go or would like to go, please. But if anybody has something else to add, I just thank you all. This is just for us to talk and listen to each other. It's not that it fixes anything, but it's part of what really needs to happen now. So I really appreciate everyone here. Any last comments? If I could say something, I appreciate this conversation about you. I think it's all very true and very valuable. But I also, I mean, and this is in the context of the conversation, I want to share this in the context of being a Sangha and having this conversation. I can't help but feel that there is some sort of inequality when we talk about you.

[74:42]

and I can't help but feel that there's some sort of equivocation when we're talking about, can you hear me? Now I can. Okay. I feel that sometimes we can equivocate when we talk about fears and when we talk about the fears of the police versus the fears of black Americans versus the fears of people of color. And I guess to illustrate this, you know, Very good friend of mine. This has been open news for a while. Very good friend of mine, a neighbor of mine, two years ago was having a mental health crisis and was shot in the midst of a mental health crisis. I was there. It was in my alley. I saw the whole thing. And I ended up having a conversation with a friend of mine from high school who had to raise a police officer in my hometown today. And It is, it's very painful for me.

[75:46]

It's very painful for me to hear these conversations about fear because I can't help but feel like things aren't being communicated. And this is not to deny that police officers do feel real fear, but I feel very strongly that if we want to talk about doing the right It's important to acknowledge that in a lot of circumstances, police officers are people. Police officers are people with guns. Police officers are people who are trained to handle these sort of things. And so I just, I felt that I needed to express that because like I said, this is something very close to me where a very good friend of mine was shot. He went to jail and he's. That is life ruining because the police officer is scared. Thank you for sharing that.

[76:57]

I just one other thing to say and that is that there's a real clear link, and I don't know what the statistics are on this, but have transitioned from the military into police squads. So you've got trauma upon trauma upon trauma with some of these people. And we've got a industrial military complex going here, guys, and in our names, so I just it's alarming and just Another big question. Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that I feel like that's a huge part of the problem. I appreciate you adding that. Thank you Just all the all the people coming back from being trained to kill or to be warriors or whatever they are and Uh, anyway, it's complicated.

[77:59]

Anybody else? Well, we're not going to solve any of this tonight, but I, but I really appreciate everybody just hanging in there for the discussion. Dylan, do you want to do a closing dedication?

[78:22]

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