We Know What We’re Seeing
A Dharma Reflection on Seeing Clearly and Telling the Truth
I was facilitating a BIPOC group recently.
After a reflection, a Black woman raised her hand.
She didn’t warm up. She went straight to it.She said she was bone tired, tired of being asked to carry this moment, tired of being nudged to the front lines yet again, tired of the shock in the air, as if this violence had just been invented.
“Ninety-two percent of Black women didn’t vote for this,” she said.
“And still we’re being asked to explain it. To metabolize it. To respond with grace.”“We already gave the language,” she said.
“Say her name.
I can’t breathe.
Black Lives Matter.”She paused. We all paused.
A Black man simply said. “Rest in peace, Keith Porter Jr.” “Rest in peace, Jean Wilson Brutus”
We all paused, sighed and nodded.
“Devin, I hear you. I’m with all y’all. But now white folks are finally seeing it.”He took a breath.
“They’re seeing that law enforcement can hold a camera in one hand and a gun in the other.”Silence.
“And shoot you dead, and call you a fuckin’ Bitch while doing it”
We paused for a moment, noticed the body, found the breath and with the sound of the bell honored the Black and Brown bodies who will never get their flowers, let alone justice.
Then silence. Dead-ass silence, the kind that lands in the body and doesn’t move however well-intentioned, always lands somewhere.
I’ve learned that some of the most dangerous moments are when people are slowly conditioned to doubt what they just saw. It happens in the body first, the mind comes later.
In the Buddha’s teaching, suffering begins at contact and interpretation. What we touch. What we feel. What we decide it means.
Coercion begins when people are trained to doubt their own perception.
As birders say: if the bird and the field guide don’t match, go with what you’re actually seeing.
When reality is rewritten in public, the nervous system goes on high alert, because the first takeover is psychological: you’re told not to trust what you see.
Harm becomes ordinary in this way and violence learns to speak softly.
From a Dharma perspective, non-delusion is collective protection.
The Body Knows Before the Mind Does
When harm is repeated, justified, and denied, it doesn’t stay “out there.” It settles into bodies. It shortens the breath. It tightens the jaw. It trains vigilance to become hyper-vigilance.
This is a nervous system responding to conditions.
That, too, is dukkha, not theoretical suffering, but the kind that follows us into sleep, into silence.
And when what we see keeps bumping into what we’re told to accept, that rub exhausts people. It teaches numbness. Or collapse. Or compliance and complicity.
This is how harm spreads without always calling itself cruelty.
Recognition Is Not the Same as Surprise
For many multi-generational Black families, mine included—this moment carries a particular weight.
Not surprise. Recognition.
A quiet, heavy knowing: we know this terrain. This is what our parents lived with. This is what our elders warned us about.
Recognition doesn’t bring satisfaction. It brings grief.
Because being right about harm has never protected us from it.
And this is not only a Black story.
It is not only an immigration story, or a deportation story.
Native peoples on sovereign land have been detained on their own territory, treaties broken that were never meant to be symbolic.
This isn’t a policy breakdown. It’s an ethical abandonment.
What we are witnessing is not new violence. It is old violence becoming more visible. And the Buddha was very clear about this: visibility is not liberation. Seeing is necessary. Naming is necessary. But awareness alone does not end suffering.
Ethical response does.
For Black bodies, vigilance is not a choice. It is an inheritance shaped by survival. Fear moves across generations. So does the cost of being told to “stay calm” while under threat of being asked to regulate ourselves in conditions that were never safe to begin with.
This truth isn’t something to transcend. It’s something to practice with. Anything that skips truth doesn’t liberate…it floats.
The Mask and the Message Beneath It
One feature of this moment has lodged itself in the body before it ever reaches the intellect: Masked authority.
Armed agents who conceal their identities. Whatever the stated reasons, whatever the legal arguments, the effect on the public is not subtle. Masked force communicates a message: I can act, and you will not be able to name me. I move through your communities with impunity.
This is not a new symbol in American life.
Black people remember when large crowds of white citizens gathered for public lynchings when violence was communal, documented, celebrated. Photographs were taken. Postcards printed. Body parts taken as souvenirs.
When we say this is where we are now, the truth is sharper and older: this has always been where Black people were made to stand. What is new is who is being asked to see it.
The mask, like the hood, has long functioned as a technology of fear: intimidation without accountability.
And it inverts a familiar phrase. We are often told: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
But when the armed power of the state hides itself from the public it claims to serve, it quietly tells us something else:
You are right to be afraid.
This is moral injury. There will be no face, no name, no consequence.
Seeing Clearly Isn’t Neutral
Large-scale harm doesn’t spread only through laws or weapons.
It spreads by shaping how people see.By stirring fear.
By narrowing attention until obedience starts to feel like safety.
By softening language so cruelty sounds reasonable
killing becomes “enforcement,”
disappearance becomes “procedure.”
The Buddha described this pattern a long time ago, in very ordinary terms:
Something happens.
We feel it.
Fear enters.
We want relief.
We grab the story that promises safety.
And then we act from there.
This is how fear conditions what comes next and it’s dependent origination under pressure.
Delusion is participatory. How we see conditions what we’re willing to go along with next.
There’s an early teaching that points right to the moment when seeing is distorted and begins to condition harm. In the Bāhiya instruction, the Buddha says, essentially:
In the seen, just the seen.
In the heard, just the heard.
In the sensed, just the sensed.
In the cognized, just the cognized.
The moment we add what isn’t there, perception becomes easier to steer.
That’s why ethical conduct, sila, sits at the center of the path. As protection. As a line we don’t cross.
Sila is how the chain gets interrupted.
American Innocence and the Myth of Deviation
We are often told to treat moments like this as aberrations. Mistakes. Deviations.
This is just the system doing what it was built to do.
What’s being framed as a new crisis has always been the story. From the legacy of genocide of the native peoples to the moment Black bodies were chained in the hull of a ship, the pattern was set.
People like to say now that we’re all in the same boat. I believe that’s true. The truth underneath it is harder.
Some of us were chained to the bottom of it long before others noticed it was taking on water.
American innocence is not a virtue and perhaps as James Baldwin once wrote “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” It is a mythology, one that has always required selective memory. Language has always done its work here, sanctifying violence long before it was normalized by law.
White supremacy has matured. It has evolved. And as Black scholars have warned for decades, it will destroy white people too, not because it suddenly turns on them, but because it corrodes reality itself.
Once violence is wrapped in the right words, it no longer needs evidence. Or investigation. Or due process. Loyalty to the story replaces responsibility to the truth.
Precision, then, is civic self-defense.
This Is Not New
Let me be clear about one thing.
Black people are not confused about this moment.
What many are only now naming as a crisis has long been the background noise of our lives. If this feels destabilizing to you, understand that it has always been destabilizing to us and we learned to survive anyway.
None of us walk through this moment untouched. The cost is unavoidable.
Someone recently asked me why I wasn’t “radicalized” by what’s happening now. My first response was: da fuq? I’ve inhabited this Black body for sixty years. This Black body isn’t neutral. Living in it has been an education.
If you’re looking for the source of my clarity, start there, with the four hundred years of my ancestors’ journey on this continent.
This is not a request for understanding.
It is a refusal to look away.
I’m here to call people in—
into responsibility, into clarity,
into the work of staying human without lying.
Calling people in isn’t gentler than calling out.
It demands more, not less.
Courage, Renunciation, and Refusal
The Buddha spoke of courage—vīriya—as a pāramī for a reason. Ethical clarity requires the renunciation of comfort. It asks us to give up the ease of repetition, the safety of euphemism, the relief of not having to decide.
Non-violence is not passivity. It is the refusal to lend one’s body, labor, or silence to harm.
This is where sīla becomes explicit again—not as rule-keeping, but as line-drawing. Right speech refuses the lie. Right action refuses alignment with cruelty. Right livelihood refuses to profit from confusion or fear.
You do not have to intend cruelty to participate in it. Looking away is enough.
Where Responsibility Begins
The Dharma asks us to stay clear without becoming cruel.
I keep thinking about how that room went quiet
not polite quiet.
Truth quiet.
If you saw it, you saw it.
If something in you said, this isn’t right—
That was wisdom waking up.
For Black and indigenous people in this country, neither of whom immigrated here, that recognition isn’t new.
It’s what state violence has asked us to live with, generation after generation after generation.
In a time of rising authoritarianism, ongoing oppression, and genocide
here and across the world
may our speech stay loyal to what we witnessed.
May our actions protect life.
May our livelihoods not depend on other people’s suffering.
And may we remember:
Clarity and insight are not the end of the work.
They are where responsibility begins.
If this reflection resonated, liking and restacking it helps it reach others.
—Devin
As always profound my friend. Thank you!
I'm sitting up straight with a strong core! Good medicine. Thank you!