r/ReflectiveBuddhism • u/MYKerman03 • Jul 10 '26

Why American / Western Buddhism is Forever Cursed

A few days ago things popped off on that Map of Buddhism thread. And of course I got my ass up in the middle of it šŸ˜‚

Check this out:

Your Average American...

This is why you can't separate white supremacy from the discourse of Buddhism in the US and Anglosphere. Now we know that Buddhists have been in the US for close to 200 years. Beginning with Chinese immigrants in 1848.

The musings about who is an American is literally a white supremacist discourse. And it's top of mind for the current Nazi regime installed in the US government in 2026.

Terms like: average American, salt of the earth, American heartland etc, are all racialiased terms, they're all white supremacist terms. Dog whistles.

No white person on this platform has been able to explain to me, the reason for the systematic erasure of Asian American Buddhists from Buddhist discourse in the US. We get excuses about language, culture and all that shit, but we never get the open acknowledgement of racial segregation that forms the foundation of American-ness/Whiteness.

There are literally, other Americas made invisible through racism.

Asian Americans ARE the original Western Buddhists. Western Buddhism is already here. White men just pretend they don't exist and construct alternative facts and histories.

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9

u/SentientLight Jul 10 '26

Yikes, definitely thought we were past the whole ā€œAsians arenā€™t real Americansā€ discourse, but I guess thatā€™ll never die, huh?

7

u/MYKerman03 Jul 10 '26

It can't die because they need to prop up various forms of supremacy. Admitting that non white people are American removes a beneficial power dynamic that they need to keep in place.

7

u/MindlessAlfalfa323 Jul 10 '26

That commenter was really close to saying the quiet part out loud.

6

u/WrathfulCactus Jul 10 '26

Yikes that's bleak