Lifting as They Climb
Black Women Buddhists and Collective Liberation
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The lives and writings of six leading Black Buddhist women—Jan Willis, bell hooks, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, angel Kyodo williams, Spring Washam, and Faith Adiele—reveal new expressions of Buddhism rooted in ancestry, love, and collective liberation.
Lifting as They Climb is a love letter of freedom and self-expression from six Black women Buddhist teachers, conveyed through the voice of author Toni Pressley-Sanon, one of the innumerable people who have benefitted from their wisdom. She explores their remarkable lives and undertakes deep readings of their work, weaving them into the broader tapestry of the African diaspora and the historical struggle for Black liberation.
Black women in the U.S. have adapted Buddhist practice to meet challenges ranging from the injustices of the Jim Crow South to sexual violence, social discrimination, and bias within their Buddhist communities. Using their voices through the practice of memoir and other forms of writing, they have not only realized their own liberation but carried forward the Black tradition of leading others on the path toward collective awakening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pressley-Sanon (Istwa Across the Water), an associate professor of Africology at Eastern Michigan University, provides edifying profiles of six influential Black women Buddhists: Rev. angel Kyodo williams, bell hooks (1952–2021), Faith Adiele, Jan Willis, Spring Washam, and Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. Framing their contributions as an "inheritance" combining the Black autobiographical tradition modeled by Frederick Douglass and the African philosophy of "ubuntu" ("that ‘I am' only because ‘we are'"), Pressley-Sanon unearths how hooks's childhood traumas shaped her "revolutionary love" ethic (which views love as something to which all—even the most vulnerable—are entitled), and how Adiele's experiences as a biracial Buddhist nun in Thailand influenced her writings on the simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of people of color in American society. Throughout, Pressley-Sanon interweaves autobiographical anecdotes—including her alienating experiences as a Black woman in majority-white Western sanghas—to powerfully foreground the ways that "speaking truth to power in the service of Black people's liberation" serves as "a condition of universal collective liberation." The result is a worthwhile glimpse at the rich and complicated intersections of Blackness, womanhood, and spirituality.
