Defining Your Role in the Fight Against State Violence

January 28, 2026 | Articles

by Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad

 

At the time of writing, there is great peril in our country; there is also great promise.

The level of state violence against immigrants and the protestors supporting them provokes an undeniably just rage.

As Audre Lorde taught us, it is healthy to give this rage oxygen.

It is communicating something important: an urgency, a need to stand against injustice, a need to insist upon safety and protection for all.

I wrote a chapter on anger and compassion in my forthcoming book, The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (North Atlantic Books, 2026).

But what is most present for me as I write this newsletter is the research I’ve been doing on how Buddhism as a set of doctrines, responds to the prison industrial complex, including the immigration system.

I understand the institutions of our society as a set of interactive relationships, not independent entities. This mirrors how Angela Davis describes the prison industrial complex in her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? In it, she discusses an “array of relationships” that are interlocking, and that include government officials, private corporations, and incarcerated individuals.

This array of relationships also includes us.

We who are committed to justice for everyone, whether or not they are documented, are part of this system, and we can change it with our determination and drive.

We follow in the footsteps of our ancestors James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, who fiercely and outwardly spoke out on behalf of those whose voices were silenced, even as they also attuned to their inner lives.

I am inspired by the protestors in Minnesota and elsewhere who refuse to be silent, who refuse to acquiesce to the violence of ICE officials, who continue to care for their neighbors at great risk to themselves.

I uplift those who died at the hands of ICE officials in 2025. I uplift the protestors who were murdered and the protestors who have endured bitter cold, tear gas, and daily violence as they sought to protect their community members.

May we do everything we can to stand up and resist this administration.

More from Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad

James Baldwin argued that racism is not a “Black problem” but a white fear-driven delusion that scapegoats Black people and evades interior work. Drawing on Baldwin’s essays and testimony, we discuss his critique of white moral pretentiousness, evasion, and the projection of shame and fear—especially the fear of death—onto Black bodies. We also see how Baldwin’s analysis relates to Buddhist teaching on dependent origination from the Rice Seedling Sutra.

 

In this dharma talk, we investigate the role of Sati—which is translated as knowing, awareness, presence, or mindfulness—in the writings of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, in conversation with early Buddhist writings.
In this dharma talk, we understand the weight of suffering through the eyes of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. We learn how Baldwin gleaned the difference between suffering due to the violence of racism, and suffering that is central to the human experience. We learn about Lorde’s embrace of the idea that pain can teach us something important, but that we need not suffer uselessly.

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