There is a Black Lives Matter sign on our front door at Berkeley Zen Center. In my brief travels around Berkeley and Oakland many people—white (like me) and people of color—show this message on their homes and businesses. Why is that? Because in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and with the killing of several thousand black men and women by police, vigilantes, and racist thugs over the last decade, “Black Lives Matter” are words society must grapple with now, turning words that can unlock the doors of justice and equality. 

In 2013 these words appeared as a social media hashtag and on protest signs after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the murder of African-American youth Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. In 2014 a loose-knit Black Lives Matter movement became widely known in protests responding to the shooting deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City. 

In some white communities and social media, a counter-slogan was raised: “All Lives Matter,” arguing that the expression BLM is divisive, exclusive, and even “reverse racism.” All lives do matter. It is true that not all white people are explicitly racist. It is also true that my fellow white sisters and brothers, knowingly or not, are the beneficiaries of white privilege in a thousand ways, large and small, overt and covert. My privileges go hand-in-hand with discriminatory views and unintended actions that I can hardly see. This not-seeing is known as “implicit bias,” acting on the basis of deeply planted seeds of prejudice and stereotypes without intending to do so. It is like a small voice whispering in my ear that other lives do not matter as much as mine and my family’s.

When push comes to shove, across four hundred years of white supremacy and racism, there has never been a question about whether white lives matter. The accumulated wealth of whiteness is built on lands stolen from Native peoples, the original inhabitants, and on the labor of African slaves, chained and transported across the Atlantic Ocean to work in the fields and factories of America. Discrimination in police departments, courts, prisons, housing, medical systems, education, and employment drive home bitterly the disparity between what is available to white communities versus what is withheld from communities of color. And if we look beyond the borders of this country, a white-dominated multinational corporate structure, backed up by the U.S. military enables us at bargain prices to grab the labor and resources of peoples of color in developing nations in the world’s southern hemisphere for our benefit and enjoyment. 

So Black Lives Matter here and now because Black and Brown people demand the justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity that has been long promised in the laws of our country and long denied in fact. They will have racial, social, economic, political, and environmental justice. Those three emphatic words, Black Lives Matter, insist on it. And in the long run, when we join the struggle that people of color are leading, all of us will benefit. 

In the short run, this is not all going to go smoothly. The pandemic is still with us. A second wave is very likely. Between our government’s ineptitude and seemingly intentional neglect and the underfunding of health resources in communities of color, as usual white lives are valued, and the lives of others are undervalued. Economic instability will hit hard. Defunding police forces, redistributing those funds into community-controlled resources, challenging long held views of social control, will meet with resistance. The prison-industrial system has replaced slavery plantations with steel bars and armed guards. We call for decarceration and abolition. Reparations for the historical damage of slavery is a live issue. On June 11, 2020, a proposal to establish a task force to study and prepare recommendations for reparations to African Americans passed the California Assembly, advancing with a 56 to 5 vote. When reparations go forward, they will cost money out of our pockets. Yes! magazine estimates that, in today’s dollars, the “40 acres and a mule” promised to former slaves after the Civil War would cost 6.4 trillion dollars.

Things won’t go smoothly because of fear and anger on all sides. From the Black side, understandable anger is rooted in police violence, in social exclusion, and in simple economics. Writer and activist Kimberly Jones makes this point in her riveting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llci8MVh8J4

“If I, right now, decided that I wanted to play Monopoly with you, and for 400 rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money, I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board, I didn’t allow for you to have anything, and then we played another 50 rounds of Monopoly and everything that you gained and you earned while you were playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you, that was Tulsa. That was Rosewood.*  Those are places where we built black economic wealth, where we were self-sufficient, where we owned our stores, where we owned our property, and they burned them to the ground…So for 400 rounds of Monopoly, you don’t get to play at all. Not only do you not get to play, you have to play on the behalf of the person that you’re playing against…and then you have to turn it over to them. So then for 50 years you finally get a little bit and you’re allowed to play. And every time that they don’t like the way that you’re playing, or that you’re catching up, or that you’re doing something to be self-sufficient, they burn your game…And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”

There is also the anger and brutality of white supremacy, rules of the game backed up with guns for the last four hundred years. When flames of fear are fanned by a president who appears to much of the world—including a majority of the nation he purports to lead—as a narcissistic, moral cypher, the flames burn hotter and brighter and more people of color die. How many have died at the hands of police and thugs in just the few weeks since the death or George Floyd?

So, this is why we have a Black Lives Matter sign on our front door. That is all well and good, but the pressing question is: if Black Lives Matter, what will I do as an individual? What will we do together? 

Here my words and thoughts come to a momentary halt, while I study and talk with elders and friends about just how to live to ensure that Black Lives Matter. I know that before acting, I cannot wait until everything is figured out. 

Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, writes:

“Our only hope for our collective liberation is a politics of deep solidarity rooted in love. In recent days, we’ve seen what it looks like when people of all races, ethnicities, genders and backgrounds rise up together, standing in solidarity for justice, protesting, marching and singing together, even as SWAT teams and tanks roll in. We’ve seen our faces in another American mirror — a reflection of the best of who we are and what we can become…I’ve glimpsed in a foggy mirror scenes of a beautiful, courageous nation struggling to be born.”

Love is not safe. Generations of Black women and men have few illusions about that. And love is not sufficient. Scholar and author Ibram Kendi writes that education and love will not deliver America from racism. He explains that racist ideas grow out of discriminatory policies. Racism emerges from an economic and political system weaponized structurally and interpersonally. The structures or systems are not “broken.” They are actually functioning as intended: to maximize profit by way of exploitation, social control and a masterful (pun intended) manipulation of privilege and fear. We need new policies and new systems.

As Kendi suggests, love in America calls for social and economic policies that are truly human. These are political questions, and we are in a political moment when all of us are called on to take sides. In these next critical months, that’s what I plan to do. I hope you will, too. That is how to demonstrate that we understand Black Lives Matter. 

—Hozan Alan Senauke

19 June 2020, Berkeley, California

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Biographical Note
Hozan Alan Senauke—asenauke@gmail.com—is a Zen Buddhist priest, vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center and founding director of the Clear View Project—www.clearviewproject.org. He is a core member of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, a life-long activist, writer, and musician.

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* Note
The Tulsa Race Massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre) of 1921 took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.” The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as “Black Wall Street.”
More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and as many as 6,000 black residents were interned at large facilities, many for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead, but the American Red Cross declined to provide an estimate. A 2001 state commission examination of events was able to confirm 36 dead, 26 black and 10 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates and other records The commission gave overall estimates from 75–100 to 150–300 dead. (from Wikipedia)


The Rosewood Massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida. At least six black people and two white people were killed, though eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed, in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Before the massacre, the town of Rosewood had been a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Trouble began when white men from several nearby towns lynched a black Rosewood resident because of accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been assaulted by a black drifter. A mob of several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors from the town hid for several days in nearby swamps until they were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. No arrests were made for what happened in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by its former black and white residents; none ever moved back, they were never compensated for their land and the town ceased to exist. (from Wikipedia)

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Resources for Standing Against Racism
• East Bay Meditation Center https://eastbaymeditation.org welcomes donations earmarked for our COVID-19 Relief Fund. This is a mutual aid fund and we are giving financial gifts to members of the EBMC Sangha who apply. These are almost completely a group of people of color, members of the LGBTQIA2+ community and people with chronic illness and pain.
Click on the “donate” at the top of the page. As you scroll through the donation details, there is a place where you can designate the program you wish to support. Write in “COVID-19 Relief Fund.”

• Showing Up for Racial Justice, Bay Area https://www.surjbayarea.org is part of a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice, with over 150 chapters and affiliates. Through community organizing, mobilizing, and education, SURJ moves white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice, with passion and accountability. Click on their Newsletter button to sign up for a comprehensive weekly bulletin of racial justice events in the Bay Area.

• Sign up for emails and text messages from Movement for Black Lives (M4BL): https://m4bl.org/ This is important and although you don’t have to do what they request, it is important to know what their demands are and why. Black communities need self-determination. They are saying what they want and need.

• White Awake https://whiteawake.org/about/
Organized by Black and white Buddhist teachers and activists to combat white supremacy by focusing on educational resources and spiritual practices designed to engage people who’ve been socially categorized as “white” in the creation of a just and sustainable society.

• Alameda County Food Bank: https://www.accfb.org

• East Bay Housing Organization (EBHO): https://ebho.org/about/
Since 1984, East Bay Housing Organizations has been the leading affordable housing advocacy coalition serving Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. EBHO is a member-driven organization working to preserve, protect, and create affordable housing opportunities for low-income communities in the East Bay by educating, advocating, organizing, and building coalitions.