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Dharma Talk Seeing Things as They Are June 3, 2020
Revolves around the death of George Floyd, naming other black victims of police violence, to question what white people can do to ensure that the benefits of citizenship do not apply unevenly. Good morning. Thanks for showing up. I hope that today’s talk doesn’t disturb you. When we look at the world from the point-of-view of our small-mind, which really means while identifying with our sense of self and through the prism of the ego, it’s difficult not to compare things, make judgments, decide what we like and don’t. There’s a place for such kind of judgments and discriminations in daily life, of course, but we tend to think that that perspective is all there is. We forget that the the feeling of a separate self, is only half of the picture. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. The unseen half of reality is the mutually interdependent and connected one. All living beings are connected by oxygen, by sunlight, by water, by the labors of others—growing our food, delivering it, raising the cotton, weaving it into cloth, sewing it into clothes—we are connected by microbes in the soil feeding the food we eat, by pollinating insects. Without all of these things, there is no us. I sometimes say we are all like ticks on the body of the dog. And that is the fundamental truth.Buddha called it “Dependent Origination”— without this, that doesn’t exist. The fact that we ignore it is at our peril. Our world view seems self-sustaining and seamless, but without sensing the unseen connections between things we are like soldiers carrying unloaded weapons. In the final analysis they fail us. By now, I’m certain that everyone has seen the execution of George Floyd on television May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There was something so stark about this footage. So brutal by virtue of the complete denial of Mr. Floyd’s humanity; to see a white police officer, actually four white police officers kneeling on this man. Officer Chauvin, the officer training the other three, whose knee was on Mr. Floyd’s neck, was taunting him and saying, “Hey bruh, you wanna get up and get in the car now?” It’s hard to conceive of calling a man ‘bruh’ while you are strangling him. And it made me wonder what sense of power this man had? What sense of impunity? Had he ever been tested for psychopathology before we armed him and sent him out in the streets to “enforce” the law? He is murdering a man in broad daylight; while being filmed, while a nurse is shouting at him, warning him, “You are killing this man, check his pulse.” Nothing deterred him. He was completely relaxed, with one hand in his pocket while his companions followed his example kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s back further compressing his chest and making it impossible for him to breathe. For many young white people, this may be a first real exposure to the lethal power our culture allows police. Before cell phone videos such encounters were rarely witnessed. We had only the police versions of what occurred, which had been one of the privileges white citizens were afforded e.g., relieved of witnessing (and being guilty about) the ugly business of white supremacy expressed in our names, and paid for with our tax dollars. For people my age, it is not new. I began trying to recall all of the race riots and disturbances that I had witnessed or read about in my own life.. There were many, many more than I could remember, it was necessary to go online to remember them all. The first one I remember hearing about was Cicero, Illinois. I was ten in 1951 My family had a driver from Illinois whose people still lived nearbye. 4,000 white people attacked an apartment building which was renting to black people. In 1960, when I was 18, there were riots and protests against the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Joe McCarthy was searching for Communists and ‘traitors’ in US society and the government, insuring that they were fired from their jobs unless they informed on friends and colleagues. I followed these trials on television because I had family members who were Socialists and Communists —legal political parties at the time until August 24, 1954 (when I was 13). In 1962, in college, friends and I watched riots at – The University of Mississippi in Oxford as white people rioted to protest the admission of James Meredith, the first black student. In 1963 someone bombed Martin Luther King’s brother and bombed a motel where civil rights workers were staying. I remember that because I had friends who were in Mississippi. In November of that year President John F. Kennedy was murdered. In 1964—the year I graduated college, there were six days of riots in Harlem when an off-duty police officer killed an unarmed black teenager. That August, there were riots in Jersey City, New Jersey after police arrested a woman for being drunk, and rumors spread that she had been beaten to death. In 1965, I was in San Francisco in graduate school when 600 civil rights marchers crossed the Edmund Pettis bridge in Selma, Alabama. You’ve probably viewed the footage of the savage beating of men and women, beaten by police. John Lewis, who serves in Congress today was clubbed so savagely in the head that it affected his speaking. That same month, the Watts riots occurred in Los Angeles when a policeman named Lee Minikus tried to arrest a young African American driver.Underlying tensions exploded. Troops were called in. The loose goal of the riots was to end police brutality, and discrimination in employment, housing, and schools. That was 1965—55 years ago. In 1967 there were 159 race riots in America—Maryland, Michigan, Milwaukee, Detroit, Newark, New York and Orangeburg, South Carolina where protesters were shot by the Highway patrol. In March 1968 two sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were killed, while working in unsafe situations. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.travelled to Memphis to support a strike by the sanitation workers. On April 4th he was assassinated in there and America blew up. There were riots in Detroit, New York City, Washington, DC, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Miami, and 110 other cities. The entire nation was exhibiting a paroxysm of violence and outrage. In 1970 four students were killed by National Guardsman at a protest at Kent State in a peaceful protest {against the Vietnam War). Someone gave the order to shoot and kill them but there has never been a trial or deep investigation of those murders. 11 days later at Jackson State, Mississippi, a black college, during a protest against racism, two more students were killed, and 12 others wounded in a protest. 75 police units responded and more than 460 shots were fired by highway patrolmen using shotguns from 30 to 50 feet. Every window on the narrow side of the building facing Lynch Street was shattered. Feb-May of 1973 Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The U.S. Army attacked 200 Indians in an encampment at Wounded Knee [the site of a previous massacre by the Army in 1890]. In 1979 the White Night Riots occurred in San Francisco while I was working for Governor Jerry Brown. San Francisco Supervisor Dan White had murdered gay Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone and received such a light sentence for the two political assassinations that the entire city was torn apart by riots for days. By 2014 most of you probably saw the rioting in Ferguson, Missouri where Michael Brown was killed by patrolman Darren Wilson who left his body laying in the street. There were more riots which exposed consistent “shakedowns: of black people by the police. African-Americans were issued traffic tickets for insignificant offenses, and if they failed to appear in court, the citation went to warrants, bigger fines and grounds for arrest. In 2016 white nationalists clashed with leftwing protestors in San Francisco -- 10 were stabbed. In 2017—Native people fought the Dakota Pipeline crossing their tribal lands. George Floyd’s death rides on top of centuries of deaths and protests, which began long before I was born, is always current in black communities. There was a paper circulating on the Internet shortly after George Floyd was murdered. It’s deceptively simple. It begins with a sentence: “I have privilege as a white person because I can do all these things without thinking twice about it.” A quick list follows: I can go jogging. I can relax in the comfort of my own home. I can ask for help after being in a car crash. I can leave a party to get to safety. After each of those sentences, there’s a name of an African-American who was killed doing precisely what was described in the sentence. person. My African-American friends know these names. They know them at the tip of their tongue. I was embarrassed to realize that I knew only a few and so I decided to research every one of them on the list, discover their story, and say their names aloud, to white friends. Here are the names from the list I mentioned. Ahmaud Arbery, died Feb 23, 2020 this year. He was a young former football star, jogging in Georgia, when he passed two white people who thought he resembled a burglary suspect. They hunted him down in cars, forced him off the road and when an, altercation occurred, he was killed. Bothem Jean was relaxing at home, when Amber Guyger, a patrol officer walked in and killed him. It was reputed that they were lovers. She said she thought that it was her apartment and she feared for her life. During her trial many explicitly racist texts with her lover were discovered. She was sentenced to ten years. Attatiana Jefferson was home playing video games with her grandson, when a friendly neighbor called police to say that her door was open, and somebody should check. There was nothing of an emergency about the call. Armed police showed up and began surrounding the house. She heard the noise and and went to the window to look and was shot and killed through the glass. The white officer, Aaron Dean said he felt threatened. He has not yet been sentenced. Jonathan Ferrell—a young football player who had played for Florida A&M was in a car crash. He knocked on a door of a nearby house to ask for help, and the owner called the police and the responding officer, Randall Kerrick shot him 12 times. He was tried, the trial declared a mistrial and the State of North Carolina refused to reopen the case. Renisha McBride had been drinking and she crashed her car late at night. She wandered to a nearby home and knocked on the door. The owner arrived with a shotgun, claimed he thought he was being broken into, and shot her through the screen door. April 8, 2018, Stephen Clark climbed a fence to enter his grandmother’s home through the back door, as he often did. He was mistaken for a burglar by two patrol officers investigating something else who saw the flash of his cell phone in his hand and shot him 8 times. 6 of those shots were in his back. No charges were levied against the officers. Jordan Edwards was described as an exceptional student. A high school freshman who was leaving a party, on April 29 of the same year, 2018. A patrol officer, Roy Oliver, who had been recently reprimanded for firing into a car full of teenagers, saw their car pulling away, ran alongside it, smashed in the car windows and fired into the car, killing him. Oliver was charged with murder and received a 10-year sentence. Alton Sterling was selling CD’s outside a convenience store, July 2016. Cops responded to a report that a man in a red shirt was causing trouble, wrestled him to the ground and shot him while he was on the ground. The store owner denied that he’d been making trouble. Philando Castile in St. Anthony, Minnesota, 32-year-old African-American, riding with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds and her four year old daughter in the backseat. They were stopped by Hispanic cop named Jeronimo Yanzer. The girlfriend live-streamed this event. Philando tells the officer, “I have a weapon in the car. I’m licensed.” The cop shouts, “Don’t touch it” and he says, “I’m not.” Yanzer shouts, “Don’t pull it out!” He says, “I’m not.” The girlfriend says, “He’s not” and the cop shoots him five times through the window. The two families, Castile and Reynolds won a $3.8 million dollar settlement for wrongful death. And, as a result of the publicizing of this killing, the nations of Bahamas, Bahrain, and the Saudi Arab Emirates urged their citizens to have “extreme caution” when visiting the United States. Aiyana Jones was seven years old, sleeping on her grandmother’s couch when six officers, outside her door, accompanied with an A&E TV crew filming a series called “The First 48”, threw a flash-bang grenade into the house which landed so close to her that it burned her blanket. They stormed in. One shot was fired by officer Joseph Weekly hitting and killing the seven-year-old girl. When the dust settled, they found out they were in the wrong apartment on a tip, only the person they were hunting lived upstairs Tamir Rice, (you might remember this), was 12 years old, sitting in a park in Cleveland with a toy gun. An officer named Timothy Loehman races up in a car, and within two seconds, shoots and kills him, even though the call to the switchboard had alerted officers that he was a kid and the gun was “probably” a toy. Emanuel African Methodist Church, June 17,2015. Dylan Roof attends a prayer service and Bible reading with nine people before he shoots them all. He’s a white supremacist whose hate filled diary was put in the public record, and he continued to write hate filled notes from jail. You’ll remember Trayvon Martin because President Obama mentioned him. He was 17 years old, in Miami Gardens, Florida, February 26 2012, when he was killed by George Zimmerman who was driving through the neighborhood and thought he looked “suspicious.” Zimmerman called Neighborhood Watch. The Supervisor warned him not to leave his car. But he did and followed Trayvon. We can hear some altercation on a telephone recording, and the 17-year-old was killed. There was no video of the event. Sean Bell, a high school star pitcher with a11-0 record, 97 strikeouts in 62 innings, was killed the morning before his wedding after leaving his bachelor party with several friends. 5 undercover cops, who were investigating the bar owner for [alleged] prostitution, shot 50 rounds into their car – 50 rounds -- killing Bell and wounding two of his friends severely. The detectives were found not guilty of reckless endangerment, man slaughter and 2nd degree assault. Oscar Grant was murdered in Oakland Fruitvale station New Year’s Day, 2009 by Bart Officer Johannes Meserk, but his accomplice, Bart Officer Anthony Parone, was accused of provoking an incident, using the n-word some number of times, beating Grant in the face. Meserk’s excuse was that he said that he meant to draw his taser but drew his pistol by mistake. Parone refused to cooperate with the investigation and was fired. Meserk was sentenced to two years. Sandra Bland was 28 years old on July 10, 2009. She was pulled over near her Alma Mater, Prairie View A & M, in Prairie View, Texas. She pulled over for changing a lane without signaling. She saw a cop car behind her, and she pulled over to let it pass. Her exchange with the Trooper was videoed. The cop comes over to the window and says, “Are you OK? You seem irritated.” She said, “Yes I am irritated. You pulled me over for getting out of your way.” He orders her to stop smoking. She refuses. He orders her out of the car, and she refused, because she said she was frightened. He threatens to drag her out, finally threatens her with a taser and says, “I will light you up.” She gets out, and you can see the beating he gives her on video, before manhandling her into the police car. She was found dead in her Waller County jail cell, hanging from a plastic garbage bag. Two jailers resigned immediately. The family pointed out that she was beginning a new job, the next day. There was nothing suicidal about her. The Trooper who arrested her was indicted for perjury, but all charges against him were dropped if he promised to leave law enforcement. Corey Jones, Oct. 18, 2005 in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, was killed while waiting beside his disabled car, by a police officer in plain clothes policeman, Pakistani Nouman K. Raja. Jones was a drummer returning from a job. He had $10,000 of equipment in the car, and he had turned down a friend’s offer for a ride, because he didn’t want his equipment stolen. There is no video of this confrontation, but the emergency assistance line to the towing company line was open and the interchange was recorded. Raja never identified himself as police. He was fired and sentenced to 25 years. John Crawford III, 22 years old, shopping in a Walmart, picked up a bb gun for sale, walked around the store continuing his shopping. He was on the phone. A patron named Ronald Ritchie, called 911 and said that he was “pointing it at people”, Ritchie later recanted, and the surveillance tape from the Walmart proved that that never happened. Two cops arrive after the dispatcher told them there was “a subject with a gun in the Pet Department.” Crawford was talking on the phone when he was shot and killed August 5, 2014. On May 20, 2017, Terence Crutcher’s car is disabled on the side of the highway outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. On police video he is walking away from the police with his hands in the air when he was shot in the back by Officer Betty Shelby (who was actually en route to another call). The Tulsa Police Chief called the video disturbing and hard to watch. Officer Shelby was accused of “unnecessarily shooting Crutcher”, but a jury found her not-guilty. Clifford Glover, 10 years old, was killed by Thomas Shea, undercover policeman April 28, 1973. He was shot in the back while running from a white man with a gun. After the shooting, Shea’s partner was recorded on a radio transmission saying, “Die, you little—-(expletive).” Sept. 15, 1974, Claude Reese is preparing a basement room for a party with six other boys and girls. A neighbor calls police, fearing burglars. Officer Frank Bosco investigates. He and his partner tell the kids to stay where they are. The girls stay, the boys run. Bosco chases Reese upstairs to an outdoor courtyard and kills him. He claims he thought Reese had a gun. Reese was holding a handsaw. Bosco was cleared by a jury. Randy Evans, a 9th grader at Franklin Lane High School in Brooklyn, New York encountered a police officer who was leaving a scene of a domestic argument. He was with several friends. One of the friends, asked officer Robert H. Torsney, “Randy wants to know if you were in apartment 70?” Torsney responds, “Damn right” and shoots Randy in the head. He was immediately arrested. His fellow officers said, “He was not lucid.” He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital. Dietician Yvonne Smallwood died December 16, 1987. She’d been arrested on December 3rd for protesting a warrant on her boyfriend who was a cab driver named Austin Harper. This began a ten-day journey through criminal justice for her, which according to her friends, she was savagely beaten. She died in jail of blood clot, and it was noted in the autopsy that there were bruises all over her body. In February 1994 Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant in New York City was sitting on the “stoop” -- was shot 41 times by four plain clothes cops who claim to have mistaken his wallet for a pistol and misidentified him as a rape suspect. They were acquitted of all charges. April 4, 2015, Walter Scott died on video, shot in the back while fleeing an officer after a traffic stop in Charleston, South Carolina. I’m sure you all saw this. This was one of the first notorious videos. 37% of the population of Charleston is white. 80% of the police force is white. July 17, 2017, Eric Garner is strangled by Officer Daniel Pantaleo. The police call it “strangling” when they put you in a neck hold that closes off your [carotid] arteries. It’s only “choking” when they compress your windpipe. Garner was suspected of selling single cigarettes. His death was videoed as was his cry, “I can’t breathe.” Like George Floyd. No charges were levied against the Pantaleo, but Garner’s family won a $5.9 million settlement. April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland for having a knife. He was thrown in the back of a police van. By the time he arrived [at jail], his spine was damaged in multiple places. He died as a result of those injuries because officers did not follow procedures for his safety. 3 officers were acquitted, 1 had a mistrial. The rioting over his death was so great Governor Hogan of Maryland declared a state of emergency. The US Department of Justice declined to press any charges. I realize that is a long list, but I wanted to say those names aloud. I wanted them heard by what I’m assuming is a mostly white audience. Most of my black friends know and recognize those names. One of the things that I am sure is on everyone’s mind but I do not hear overtly expressed is that these situations exist because those of us who are white people tolerate it. When I was young and the genocide of the Nazi holocaust was being revealed, and disturbing pictures of bodies being tumbled into mass graves came across the television, my family would discuss relatives who died in the Nazi Holocaust, and I could see how upset they were. I wonder what German Jews were thinking, say in the late 1920’s, when laws began to appear, simply distinguishing Jews from all others. Then later, as reports of Jews being beaten and their stores vandalized in surfaced. I can be pretty certain what the Jews were thinking, but what about the average Germans? They did not strike or protest. And later, as violence against Jews began to surface publicly and without disguised? What must it have been like, to have your child, brother, husband. leave the house and not know if he would return. And isn’t this precisely what black mothers and fathers say today? Elie Wiesel, a famous German author and concentration camp survivor, said, in so many words, Once Hitler was in power, he didn’t blame the German people for cooperating. They were suffering under a police state. He said, “I blame them for electing him.” He reminds us that Hitler wrote a book declaring his beliefs. How will our fellow citizens tomorrow, in some hopefully post-racial period, consider us ordinary citizens and the terrible behaviors we have tolerated against fellow citizens who are African-Americans. Somehow, white people tolerated several centuries of slavery; tolerated another century of Reconstruction; maybe a century and a half of Jim Crow laws, lynching and dedicated violence against African Americans trying to exercise their franchise as citizens. Those of us who are black citizens were not allowed to vote until the late 1960s. Somehow, society tolerated that. These murders, I cited, just like the violence against Jews in Germany – every one of these people had families, had friends. And these storiesd were told and passed down through the community, and become part of the wisdom of that community. They’re not often shared with those of us who are white people, because they make us uncomfortable. As the Germans were made ‘uncomfortable’ by the suffering of the Jews. What makes me particularly uncomfortable – is that I am the unintentional beneficiary of the color of my skin. Much of my life has been dedicated to struggle for civil rights for all Americans. I was arrested many times for performing in a play that was quite explicit about racial violence, and I participated in Civil Rights marches and discussions. But despite all that, I never worry if I go into a store or have to wonder if I’m in the wrong place. I never worry if my car breaks down by the side of the road. I never worry if I go to the window to investigate a noise outside. I never worry if I have to knock on someone’s door to seek help. It’s heartening to see so many white people demonstrating in the streets. And the murder of Mr. Floyd seems to have galvanized strong feelings among many white citizens. But I hear a lot of “clucking” about the violence of the protests. We are all sophisticated enough to know that any large gathering is taken advantage of by provocateurs and trouble-makers. The police have historically used provocateurs to create violent incidents to discredit the cause that’s being protested for. “Left” and “right” people may enter these demonstrations for their own purposes. Anarchists who don’t believe in any central government. Rightwing people who, because there are so many white people in the crowd now, can freely blend in. The question is, “What can we do?” One of the things that we can do, is use our privilege to protect black protestors and people of color. I saw a line of white women in Louisville do just this, placing their bodies between the police and the protestors. During the 1960s my counterculture family, The Diggers was working with the Black Panthers and the Black Man’s Free Store, and refused to “move on” when we saw police interrogating a black man or woman – or even a traffic stop. We can remain nearbye, at a distance, to assure police and those they are interrogating that their behavior is being observed. It doesn’t matter how we feel about that person. Those of us who are white citizens should not have to be like someone to guarantee them their civil rights. It seems to me that a good part of the anger that we see being generated on the streets comes from the fact that those of us who are black people know that this situation is within the power of the white majority to control. By not controlling it, those of us who are white continue to be the beneficiaries of the privileges and we can “cluck, cluck, cluck” and say, “How horrible those intolerant bigots are,” but we are not behaving as allies for our fellow citizens. We are not sharing our power and privilege to help. In the 1960s, the “Diggers”, and used to create big public celebrations on the winter and summer solstices and on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Those are planetary events. They have nothing to do with humans, but are the clock of the universe ticking rhythmically. Because the frame of reference was so vast, it rendered everyone equal. There was no violence. Hells Angels were there; Black Panthers were there. (I’ll never forget Roy Ballard and the Black Man’s Free Store basting a white dummy over a barbeque pit while Hells Angels observed.) There was no violence because everybody was rendered equal within this larger frame of reference. What would a frame of reference be today that might engender the same feelings of equality? “America” doesn’t seem to be working any more without a common attack. “Citizen” might be made significant if we began referencing Citizen instead of black, white, brown, Democrat, Republican, etc. I’d like to connect this idea back to my opening remark of the central delusion of humans: [that] being the idea of our separateness. When we talk about the environment, we’re talking about something “out there”. We’re not talking about ourselves. We’re talking about preserving the earth so that I get good oxygen; so that I get clean air; so that my grandchildren get it. I can’t get these things unless my enemies get them as well, so this is another example of a vast frame of reference uniting us. But even this sort of thinking, resides in the realm of ideas. But we rarely see sophisticated and urban people directly addressing the earth as a living being. When I leave my zendo in the morning I have a little practice. The sun is usually just rising over the North-South mountain range just East of my house. As soon as I see it, I bow three times. I bow to Sun-faced Buddha. Because nothing living would be here without the sun. You can consider it primitive or you could regard it as acknowledgement. An acknowledgement that all life we know about is framed on the theatre of the planet, its heights and depths. We can forget that the earth itself is living; is alive to its deepest recesses. That the creatures and organisms that live on it are aware and they share awareness. Scientists now know that trees communicate through their root systems. So do mushrooms. Anyone who’s ever had a pet has experienced communication with animals and other species. I’m interested in eliciting the frame of reference in which being “black” or “white” is so included that it doesn’t matter. And, by the way, I don’t know anyone who is black. I don’t know anyone who is the color of my toilet. My skin is not white. Flesh of my African-American friends ranges from coffee-colored to coffee with cream to as pale as I am. “Black” and “white” are political statements. They are statements of differentials in political power and access to privileges and wealth and they are “posed” to be at odds.What I am looking to find in my own life are ways of expressing my knowledge that the earth is my frame of reference, and all humans on that earth are part of me. It’s just fact! If you look at a choppy ocean, and you look at all the millions of little individuated waves … when we call them waves, they all look separate. But they are all the ocean. They have never for one instant not been part of the ocean.That is true for us as humans too. Before we were born, we were the ocean. As we appear, we are an individuated wave, and eventually, we collapse back into ocean. We call one state “LIVING” and the other “Dying” but what does that really mean? The time is overdue when those of us who are white citizens must wake up to the cost that others are paying for our privileges. It is uncomfortable to be “white” when others are suffering at the hands of the institutions serving us exclusively. But, believe me, it’s more uncomfortable to be “black” and “Latino. No one is putting white children in cages.Black mothers have almost three times the incidence of deaths at childbirth, 2.3 times more infant mortality. Shorter lifespans. Higher stress. While we eat organic food, look for pure bottled water, study yoga. Meditate. We have to share our advantages. We have to figure out ways to do it. We’ll probably mess up, but so what? We’ll keep going forward until we get it right. If we want a country where we can all live, we are going to have to ensure that everyone can live here. These protests and struggles are for all of us. I think that’s enough. I thank all of you who have stayed for this entire. It was important for me to say those things. I’m going to say my little three-line prayer. I invite you to join me. [bell]
May all beings be filled with lovingkindness. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be happy and at peace. [bell] May all beings be filled with lovingkindness. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be happy and at peace. [bell] May all beings be filled with lovingkindness. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be happy and at peace. [gassho]
Thank you very much.
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