On a recent episode of KPFA Radio’s Freedom Frequency Series with host Davey D, I shared a wide-ranging conversation about The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. KPFA described the conversation as “a working seminar on the inseparable bond between interior practice and political resistance.”
Davey D asked about suffering, and the fine line between bearing hardship and normalizing pain and suffering.
In response, I shared:
It is important to be very clear, very nuanced in what we mean by these words: suffering, pain, and the kind of disproportionate punishment that is inflicted on Black bodies. Writing off or dismissing Black suffering, and somehow justifying it or overlooking it – if you’re part of the dominant culture – is often the norm.
And I can hear how this idea that we learn to suffer skillfully might be heard as a way of accepting it. Like ‘that’s okay, it’s justifiable. It’s something that is part and parcel of what it means to be Black in this country and we’ll just go along with it.’
That’s not what James Baldwin and Audre Lorde were talking about.
Baldwin said,: ‘We do suffer as humans, and eventually all of us will die. And that in and of itself is a form of suffering. That’s part of the human condition.
But that’s not to be conflated with what it means to be Black in the United States.
He was taking on this very distinct racialized experience. Not justifying it. But what he also says is we’re given this model of how we should want to live. He talked about how he would go to the movies — he loved the movies — and he would see these images of false happiness.
And like all of us, he would think: “that’s what we should want, that’s what we should aspire to.” But for Baldwin, actually living is something different than that superficial happiness.
In speaking about his own experience as a Black youth in Harlem, he said: There is a broader experience of being overlooked, of having violence inflicted upon us, of being deeply impoverished. And he grieved that experience, he spoke to it, he resisted it, he became part of the civil rights movement, he supported the Black power movement.
He acknowledged what it meant to struggle against these material conditions that impact Black bodies and that absolutely shaped Black suffering.
Part of what I attempt to do in The Fire Inside is to say, actually we don’t just suffer because we thirst – which is a teaching in the Buddhist tradition – we also suffer because of causes and conditions. And conditions of white delusion shape Black experiences, the disproportionate suffering of Black people in this country, historically and in the present day.
It is a both-and. Baldwin said we suffer due to the conditions caused by white delusion, and also because we’re human. Audre Lorde said this too.
That’s part of what I attempt to introduce and clarify when I talk about how these two luminaries illuminate Buddhist teachings, and what it means to then acknowledge you can have these conditions.
There’s one teaching called the teaching of two arrows. The first arrow is these terrible conditions we find ourselves in. But then there’s a second arrow. And it asks what do you do with those conditions?
How do you actually respond to them and work with them skillfully so that you don’t suffer more, so that you don’t bring more suffering upon yourself?
That’s what these luminaries, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, and what Buddhist teachings point us to. When we’re addressing the suffering, how do we not bring more suffering upon ourselves?