Dismantling the Master’s House
IT IS EASY TO CONDEMN racism but difficult to see how we internalize its prejudices, myths, and assumptions. I like to think I am not racist because I’m politically progressive and a meditator. But one day, new to working as a Buddhist teacher in South Africa, that self-perception came undone at a supermarket in the town of Ixopo in KwaZulu Natal. An elderly Zulu man was struggling to free a shopping basket and finally wrenched it loose from the pile of metal just as I walked past. I took it, like the white madam erroneously assuming he was a worker rather than a fellow shopper. My nice Buddhist veneer had not managed to halt the insidious internalizing of the racist system I was in.
Privileging “whiteness” has been internalized by everyone. It maneuvers us all along the scales of “good” self/people (privileged) and “bad” self/people (oppressed), generating a complex value system rooted in a grievous
