Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation
Joseph CheahOctober 28, 2011
Oxford University Press
While academic and popular studies of Buddhism have often neglected race
as a factor of analysis, the issues concerning race and racialization
have remained not far below the surface of the wider discussion among
ethnic Buddhists, converts, and sympathizers regarding representations
of American Buddhism and adaptations of Buddhist practices to the
American context. In Race and Religion in American Buddhism, Joseph
Cheah provides a much-needed contribution to the field of religious
studies by addressing the under-theorization of race in the study of
American Buddhism. Through the lens of racial formation, Cheah
demonstrates how adaptations of Buddhist practices by immigrants,
converts and sympathizers have taken place within an environment already
permeated with the logic and ideology of whiteness and white supremacy.
In other words, race and religion (Buddhism) are so intimately bounded
together in the United States that the ideology of white supremacy
informs the differing ways in which convert Buddhists and sympathizers
and Burmese ethnic Buddhists have adapted Buddhist religious practices
to an American context. Cheah offers a complex view of how the Burmese
American community must negotiate not only the religious and racial
terrains of the United States but also the transnational reach of the
Burmese junta. Race and Religion in American Buddhism marks an important
contribution to the study of American Buddhism as well as to the larger
fields of U.S. religions and Asian American studies.
