Race and Religion in American Buddhism White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation

When the first wave of Burmese immigrant Buddhists set foot on American soil in the late 1960s, they came into contact not only with a variety of forms of Buddhism not found in their native Burma, but also with white or convert Buddhism, whose legacy includes the specter of an Orientalist and racist past, often hardly acknowledged, yet rarely, if ever, entirely absent from the discourse within Euro-American Buddhism. Vestiges of the latter can still be seen today, from the controversy surrounding who represents ''American Buddhism'' to a smorgasbord approach to Buddhist practices taken for granted in many meditation centers, hospitals and other institutions. InRace and Religion in American Buddhism, Joseph Cheah contends that race is embedded in these and other issues not so much in a sense of prejudice or discrimination as in the sense of racial ideology of white supremacy. By white supremacy he means a hegemonic understanding, on the part of both whites and non-whites, that white Euro-American culture, values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices are the norm according to which other cultures and social practices are judged. Cheah investigates the role played by the racial ideology of white supremacy in the two different ways in which white Euro-Americans and Burmese ethnic Buddhists have adapted Buddhist religious practices to the American context. He employs racial formation theory to examine the appropriation of Asian Buddhist practices by convert Buddhists and sympathizers, and uses a dual domination paradigm to analyze the adaptation of Burmese Buddhist practices by Burmese immigrant Buddhists to the American context on the other.

Joseph Cheah is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut.