Part of a special section on American Buddhism, Race, and Power.
This paper explores the question of Black–Asian solidarities in American Buddhism in response to Rima Vesley-Flad’s examination of the possibility of Black–Asian Buddhist solidarities being stymied by historic tension and aversion among Black and Asian American communities. Rather than lingering on anti-Blackness, I focus on unpacking how Asian American racialization, particularly inscrutability, erases Asian American religious subjects in both religious studies and in public discourse. While a multicultural politics of representation highlights and celebrates Asian religious subjects and cultures, it commodifies Asianness while positing the impossibility of Asian Americanness. I analyze interpellations of Blackness and Asian Americanness that occlude Black–Asian solidarities both in popular US culture and in Rima Vesley-Flad’s Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition and Chenxing Han’s Be the Refuge. I conclude by suggesting that adopting Robin D.G. Kelley and Vijay Prashad’s polyculturalism as a discourse and hermeneutic can not only reveal imagined and realized Black–Asian solidarities, but also Blackness and Asian Americanness unbound from US racial hierarchies.