One of my side projects includes tallying Asian writers. Specifically, I tally the bylines set aside to Asian writers in mainstream Buddhist publications. Early last year, I investigatedThe Best Buddhist Writing series and came away with the following three conclusions: Asians are underrepresented in the anthology (about 19 percent of authors), most of these Asian writers tended to be Tibetan, and the Asian authors reappear in the pages more frequently than their non-Asian counterparts (who make up a much larger, mostly white pool).
A few weeks back, I updated my “database” to include The Best Buddhist Writing for 2009 and 2010. Little surprise, the running average remains almost exactly the same, at 19.2 percent.
But I’ve been more interested in a different statistic. It turns out that the editors of The Best Buddhist Writing choose from a very small pool of Asian authors. Out of 163 authors who have ever appeared in its pages, a mere 21 have been Asian, accounting for 46 bylines. Now, the real shock came when I tried to answer the question: How many new Asian Authors join each year?
Over the past two years—none!
The number of Asian authors—those who had ever had their work published in The Best Buddhist Writing—increased each year until 2008, where it plateaued at 21. In 2009 and 2010, the Asian authors all had also been published in previous volumes. In contrast, the number of total writers keeps on growing, as new non-Asian authors continue to be added to the mix.
The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 is the newest edition and currently on the bookshelves. You can check out a very positive review at the Buddhist Blog.
There’s a good post up at The Big Old Oak Tree on the politics of “engaged Buddhists” involved in the discussion of abortion reform in Thailand. The whole post is very much worth reading, but I felt obliged to copy over the last paragraph:
The point I am trying to make is that there is no “Buddhist” politics. As long as there is more than one Buddhist in the world, there will be a multiplicity of political views within the Buddhist community. Let’s say there is an elderly Buddhist Chinese gentleman living down the street from me. There’s a good chance that he and I don’t really see eye to eye on certain political issues, and that my views might be more in line with the BPF than his views. Does this mean that he’s not quite Buddhist, or that my Buddhism is more vital than his? I don’t think so.
Every once in a while, a Buddhist temple is vandalized. Property is stolen, statues are defaced. When these stories make it into the daily news, they are picked up off the news feed and broadcast to the larger Buddhist community by high-bandwidth bloggers like Barbara O’Brien and Rev. Danny Fisher. A week passes, and for the vast Buddhist readership out there, it’s as though the event never occurred.
I collected a few of these incidents from 2010 and saved them into Google Maps. There are reports of attacks on centers in Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota and Ontario. (I only looked at North America.) Spread across America’s “Mideast,” these are surely not the only violent incidents over the past year. They are just those that turned up in my news feed.
If I had the abundance of spare time that I do on my vacation, I would probably connect with each of these temples, hear their stories first-hand, do some follow up investigation and report on it. Aside from wanting to bring greater definition to the incident’s human face, I’d want to know what the best way to help is. Every center has its own unique character, its own unique set of challenges to overcome.
This little map is just one step in that direction. As a resource, it doesn’t take much effort to maintain. All this information is already available in the public domain. Hopefully, someone might make use of it to reach out and provide local support. This map also serves to track events and trends that are quickly forgotten in our attention-deficit blogosphere.
Please drop a comment if you know of a (documented) recent incident you think should be added.
I know it’s not about Tibet or Burma, but several hundred young Cambodians have recently died in a stampede during holiday festivities in Phnom Penh. According to the BBC:
At least 339 people [have] been killed in a stampede during festival celebrations in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, Prime Minister Hun Sen has said.
Huge crowds had gathered on a small island for the final day of the Water Festival, one of the main events of the year in Cambodia.
The stampede took place on a bridge, which eyewitnesses said had become overcrowded.
Hundreds more people were injured in the crush.
This is a huge tragedy, and I am honestly too overwhelmed to say much else.
I’m on a week-long vacation in the glorious city of Chicago. Aside from eating my way through the city (very strong recommendations for Green Zebra and Pho 888), I have the time to catch up on a huge backlog of blog posts that have accumulated since mid-summer. Who knows if I will, but my apologies in advance for bringing up (many?) issues which are so out of date, at least by the standards of today’s hyperspeed blogosphere. In the meantime, I’m off to see Harry Potter.
The San Francisco Film Society is sponsoring Saving the Wat, a film by Virada Chatikul and Siwaraya Rochanahusdin about a team of young community advocates who banded together to protect their community’s temple. Here’s a film synopsis:
Wat Mongkolratanaram, aka the Berkeley Thai Temple, comes under fire when a request to build a Buddhist shrine on their own property is submitted to the city. The Temple elders must now rely on a group of young and energetic second-generation Thai-Americans to advocate for their constitutional rights protecting religious freedoms. The team navigates through the city’s land use and permit process, represents the Temple in mediation with neighbors, launches an awareness campaign, and ultimately, brings together a community that would otherwise face potential closure of the Temple.
Please support this film project—not to mention Buddhist community organizers—by making a donation. You don’t have to bequeath your estate; if everyone in the community donates a little bit, we’ll be威而鋼 able to get this film off the ground! You may remember this campaign from posts last year by Rev. Danny Fisher and Dharma Folk, also reposted by several others. Now is a great chance to continue that support. (Hat tip to the Angry Asian Man; image credits to Where There Be Dragons and Asian Pacific Americans for Progress.)
Midterm elections have passed, and they sure have been painful for West Coast espresso-powered liberals like me. My greatest relief of the night was to see that Sharron Angle will not be representing Nevada in the Senate next year.
The Buddhist blogs indeed have been following the election—but with a special emphasis on white male candidates. Sift back through this season’s articles to see Tricycle reminisce about Jerry Brown, while Shambhala Sunswoons over Eric Schneiderman.
Four years ago, there was some excitement around Representatives Mazie Hirono and Hank Johnson, both of them Democrats who identify as Buddhists. Both held their seats last night. But if you’ve only been following Shambhala Sun and Tricycle, you’ll have missed out on Democrat Colleen Hanabusa, who took back Hawaii’s First congressional district from the Republicans, defeating Charles Djou. Oh, and she’s Buddhist too.
Just take that in for a moment. Next year’s Hawaiian congressional delegation to the House will be a team of Asian American Buddhist women!
Now, I realize that Jerry Brown and Eric Schneiderman were coverd by Shambhala Sun as “mindful politicians,” not necessarily as “Buddhists.” But it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth when the highest profile of the American Buddhist media swarm around white candidates who don’t identify as Buddhist, while ignoring the non-white candidates who do.
Welcome to the all-inclusive Western Buddhist community.
I’ve been AWOL from blogging for a bit, but I got this email in my inbox, which I couldn’t resist reposting. The United States’ oldest Buddhist mission affirms its support for gay rights.
The Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii, consisting of 36 Buddhist temples statewide, unanimously passed a resolution in February supporting gay rights and are planning related public forums.
“We wanted to say, ‘Hey, we’re here, too.’ We had never taken a stance before,” said Blayne Higa, chairman of the Honpa’s Social Concerns Committee. The group wants to add an Asian and Buddhist perspective to GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons) issues through its forums, Higa said.
In a March news release, Honpa Hongwanji President Alton Miyamoto said, “We want to share our Buddhist values of universal compassion, equality and interdependence with the larger community. We believe this issue is a matter of civil rights. We affirm the human dignity and worth of all people and that everyone deserves equal treatment within our society.”
I am so proud to have such a large organization with such deep history—in America’s most Asian state—affirm its support for gay rights. This support isn’t just limited to Buddhists in Hawai‘i. If you dip into the online database of contributors both supporting and opposing Proposition 8, you’ll find that the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese Americans (well, at least of people with Vietnamese surnames like Nguyen, Tran and Pham) donated to organizations that support gay rights. And this support spans generations. As the Honolulu Star-Advertisergoes on to note…
“It’s funny, our older members were some of the biggest champions (of the resolution). The really older members remembered a time when Japanese-Americans were discriminated against or interned during the war. For them it really was a no-brainer, it was really just common sense,” Higa said.
To be fair—not every Asian Buddhist feels this way. There is discrimination and bigotry within the Asian American community, and I wouldn’t want this post to suggest that gay Asian Americans don’t face serious issues in the community. They do. But even so, there are also organizations like the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawai‘i who are happy to open their doors and affirm their support for equality.
Update: See in the comments, the Buddhist Churches of America’s 2004 same-sex resolution, where they “affirm the worthiness of all persons independent of sexual orientation” and “oppose any governmental prohibition of same-sex marriage.”
OkTrends, the blog and data crunching arm of the dating site OkCupid, came out with a hot post on race and stereotypes. Working with the self-defined race and profiles of 526,000 users, the analyst(s) parsed text, crunched the numbers and identified the most distinguishing features of each racial group.
Using this kind of analysis, we were able find the interests, hobbies, tastes, and self-descriptions that are specially important to each racial group, as determined by the words of the group itself. The information in this article is not our opinion. It’s data, aggregated from the essays of half a million real people.
OkTrends’ yardstick of “statistical distinction” is relative frequency—how much more a term or phrase is used by one group over others.* As they explain, “[f]or example, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it’s a racial outlier.” OkTrends then goes on to make a number of Racial Stereotypes, such as the following:
White women show off their eyes (mascara is #5 on their list). Black women show off their lips (lip gloss, #7). Latinas show off both (mascara, #18 / lip gloss, #22). Asian women, however, show off their practicality (lip balm, #48).
And thus we could also conclude that Asians like sashimi, right?
Wrong.
Although the numbers are in their own way intriguing, the final writeup suffers from the unfortunate analytical scourge that the economist Bill Easterly refers to as Reversing Conditional Probability (see here and heretoo). That is, the writers took one conditional probability—“If [your profile says] you like sashimi, then you are Asian”—and flipped it around—“if you are Asian, then you like sashimi.”
This logical fallacy is worth explaining with an extended analogy in another domain. Consider the following relative frequency:
Vietnamese are two to three times more likely than white Americans to be of the type B blood group.**
In other words, if you collected blood samples from equal numbers of Vietnamese and white Americans, then you’d end up with two to three times as many samples of type B blood from Vietnamese as from the white folk. Assuming a 3:1 ratio, that probability looks like this:
We can take this example one step further. Suppose you pick up a random type B sample. Given what we know about the equal sample populations in our hypothetical example and the proportion of type B blood in Vietnamese versus white Americans, we can then make a reasonable guess that this anonymous type B blood sample most likely came from a Vietnamese donor.
So if someone is Vietnamese, then they likely have type B blood, right?
Wrong.
This question makes the mistake of reversing the conditional probability. I took a simple relative frequency—the type B rate for Vietnamese is much higher than for white Americans—and inferred another probability—a random type B sample is likely from a Vietnamese donor—which itself depends on certain conditions, namely that the sample populations are equal. But this conditional probability can’t be logically reversed. The percentage of Vietnamese with type B blood could be anything from 90% to 3% of the whole Vietnamese population—all we know is that they’re more likely to be so than white Americans.
When we look at the overall blood group percentages by ethnic group, it turns out that for both Vietnamese and white American populations, any given individual is most likely to have type O blood. Only about 20%–30% of Vietnamese are of type B. If you happen to meet a Vietnamese person, they probably have type O blood, even while they are up to three times more likely than white Americans to have type B blood.
ONLY UP TO 30% OF VIETNAMESE HAVE TYPE B BLOOD.
Reversing conditional probabilities is the nuts-and-bolts of “data-driven” stereotyping. It’s where we jump from “Vietnamese are more likely than white Americans to have type B blood” (fact) to “Vietnamese have type B blood” (fiction). Or from “terrorists in the news are more likely to be Muslim” to “Muslims are terrorists.”
What makes OkTrends’ post so potentially damaging is that they hold up their findings as empirically based reflections of the world as it is. Yes, their findings are both data-driven and not entirely useless, but their faulty conclusions-rolled-up-as-stereotypes have no logical basis. Their data simply don’t allow a logical progression from “the term lip balm occurs most frequently on profiles of Asian women” to “Asian women show off their practicality.”
Where this issue applies to this blog in particular, and to the Western Buddhist community more generally, is when we run across stereotypes rooted in the very same mistake of reversing conditional probabilities. Elsewhere in this blog and on Dharma Folk, one commenter happened to make this kind of claim. Not only did his comment imply that certain individual Vietnamese practice a superstitious Buddhism (stereotype), he also attempted to justify his statement with relative frequencies based on anecdotal observations accumulated through the substantial period of his life spent in Asia (reversing conditional probabilities). This stereotype further becomes racist when one’s supporting evidence/anecdata has no relation to Vietnamese Buddhists other than the tacit assumption that they must be like all the other Asians one has met. You just don’t know enough to assume that any given Asian Buddhist practices superstitious Buddhism.
That’s not to say that this particular commenter is either racist or irrational. Very smart people can make logical mistakes, and well-meaning individuals often say things that come out completely wrong. I get the sense that we base our understanding of the world on relative frequencies, and often operate with the mistaken base assumption that our experiences are reflective of the wider world. We all have at one time or another probably fallen prey to the seemingly innocent mistake of reversing conditional probabilities. But it’s still wrong.
And I will be all too happy to call it out when I see it.
* I’m actually not sure if OkTrends’ stats measure relative to the overall average frequency or to the frequency of all other groups.
I had no idea how popular my last post would be. I’d love to respond to most of the reactions, but here I address just one. Several commenters called me out on a crude rhetorical slip. While David Nichtern’s piece examines the development of Buddhist institutions in the West within a certain cultural context, my reaction pivots—with only a brief reference to his article—to assail arguments rooted in an East-West dualism with a couple of annotated graphs. The problem is that the graphs and notes had very little to do with the thrust of Nichtern’s article.
In other words, I pulled the old “I see your point—which reminds me of this other point I wanted to make.” But I didn’t even say that much.
At least one commenter vigorously drew attention to this discrepancy. (“It isn’t a this Buddhism vs. that Buddhism article.”) His response to my post dwells on the specific exhibits that Nichtern presents—the different roles of teachers in different cultural contexts. Nichtern notes that the roles of Tibetan Buddhist teachers that he is most familiar with have no obvious corollary in mainstream Western culture. He ends his post with a question mark—in what way will the various and sometimes conflicting roles and expectations develop among Westerners?
To be clear, my gripe is not with what Nichtern asserts, but with what he presupposes. Nichtern continues the timeworn notion of looking toward a separate Western Buddhism, culturally distinct and segregated from the forms of Buddhism in Asia. This notion is what underlies his presentation of the three different routes of “transplanting Buddhist teachings in the West”—(1) transplantation of the traditional form, (2) hybrid growth and (3) complete transformation into Western modalities. These are three points on a progression where at one end sits “traditional form” and at the other sit “Western modalities.”
As pointed out at the buddha is my dj, most of the objections to Nichtern’s framework have been discussed before. Issues with oversimplified notions of Western Buddhism, including drawing lines between “traditional” and “Western.” Or the issues that arise when describing religious movements with analogy to evolutionary biology. (On that last note, Thomas Tweed does a better job explaining why.) And so on. But my post wasn’t about these issues, it was about something else. Though I may stand by my point, it was inappropriately made with Nichtern’s piece as a foil.
More than owning up to bad writing, I owe David Nichtern an apology for misrepresenting his writing. In the blogosphere, it’s easy to click through and see the original writing for yourself, but so often the gateway biases you before you get there. This was the case with some who passed through my post, leading them to mistake Nichtern’s point. Separately, this was also the case with the Reformed Buddhist, who falsely accused me of “dislike of whites” and “insinuating a racial superiority of Asians over white people,” leading at least one commenter to suggest that’s what I was trying to convey. Not at all what I believe or intended.
The act of publication (blogging included) comes with a measure of responsibility for one’s written word. I wish I had written differently what I did, but it was my decision not to take more time to do so, or have someone else review it first. Next time, I’ll hopefully at least set aside more than a lunch break. Many thanks for all the feedback.
