Liberalism is an ideology and cultural set of knowledges, habitual understanding, and unconscious forms of knowing. And the secret power of an ideology is that it operates in a way that is hard to detect or change. It is a a way of seeing—approach to political, cultural and economic life—common law, individual rights, liberal values about equity and inclusion. And liberalism, like it or not, is the stage on which zen emerged, continued, and is maintained.

Dharma right now …. the opportunities are enormous… for allowing our understanding of things as they are to challenge the norms and values of soto zen teachings. If the dharma world has oft been thought to be an entirely different and separate universe than the market world—such views are no longer tenable, if in fact they ever were.

The separation between the monastic training world and the market world is and always has been an an artifice in the 20th and 21st century Western practices. On the other hand, perhaps the separation made some sense within the context of Japan. In an NHK special on Eiheiji (circa 1999) the trainees included sons of priest families and future salary men who would later enter the corporate workforce. The world of Eheiji and the world of zen in the west… Vastly different cultural contexts, not that you asked. Formal practice in Japan, for example, is rooted in a society whose cultural norms and values are so different from the West. I wonder why we try so hard to insist on their continuities rather than the discontinuities.

In the U.S,, a slow burning crisis in liberalism has been evolving since for decades—that popular faith in social institutions has declined steadily is just one index of change. The so called Southern Strategy— an electoral politics based on the importance of the South, the divisiveness of race has been in play for decades. Thats right, decades. Oh, and, the economy—now the two economies of corporate capitalism and the money laundering in global markets in transnational crime (sex, drugs, weapons).

In 1906, W.E.B. Dubois wrote, famously, “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Dubois was largely ignored by his own discipline, Sociology. From the beginning of the 20th c to the end, Dubois prescience was ignored. And even in the post war era, when sociology diverged into progressive critique of the social order, even the leading edges of critique, voices who longed for societal transformation European and American Marxists (and neo Marxists alike) were deaf to race, and turned a blind eye to the the history of Sociology. It took a critique of the critique, so to speak, the early and seminal writers in cultural studies, cf. Stuart Hall, to think anew about race, culture and capitalism. Understanding evolved slowly.

In order for the dharma world to wake up to race, my hope is that sanghas will read history together— histories of the present moment. Those histories include not simply the studies of blackness but also the histories of other racial groups. Our pasts are deeply intertwined… and so too our futures.

About the picture: Many years ago, I spent a year living on the Lower east side of Manhattan working on a book manuscript, about liberals and race (and affirmative action). NYC was, I thought, a good place to write about liberalism and specific discourses about merit, equity, and race. The city is wondrous and everyday life can be a gritty, beautiful and the terrible.*

• Imani Perry’s book, “More beautiful, More terrible,” borrows for its title from the words of James Baldwin, who wrote:

  “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”