“Everyone who is racist, please stand up.”

What a surprising request for a speaker to make of an audience. An uncomfortable silence descends upon the auditorium.

I never identified as a racist; in fact, I always thought I was quite a tolerant person. However, an experience I had when I was twelve years old called that self-image into question. I was volunteering with a hill tribe, my young stature dwarfing those of the native villagers. A crowd of children had formed around me, all eyes fixed in confused amazement on the wires connecting my ears to my iPod. Instead of scoffing, I saw their understandable ignorance of technology as an opportunity to impart the genius of The Smiths to people who had never heard them. I removed the headphone jack and crouched down for a more audible reveal. The further my finger dragged the volume slider, the wider the mouths and eyes of the children grew. As we sat there listening to “Still Ill,” I was elated to meet the first people to be as mesmerized by The Smiths as I was. I attempted to explain the lyrics, “Am I still ill?” I knew that the song referred to homosexuality, but, thinking that the children would be unfamiliar with that concept, I came up with an alternate explanation.

“Morrissey is black and, where he is from, people think that being black is not good. So he asks, ‘Am I still ill?’ questioning whether others consider him to be sick for being black.”

They nodded very slowly. They were completely lost.

One of them finally broke the silence. “What’s wrong with dark skin?”

“Well, nothing.”

I meant it, too. So why had I said that Morrissey was black? Why had I used being black as an example of being seen as sick? I had a queasy feeling in my stomach as I realized that perhaps I wasn’t as tolerant as I had thought—that maybe I was racist.

“Am I still ill?”

I clicked play.

“Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?”

I knew the words, that followed: “I don’t know.”

My head down and my face blank, I left them with my iPod.

As anyone who’s familiar with The Smiths knows, Morrissey is not black; he’s a white guy from Manchester. It doesn’t get much whiter than that, yet I’d said that he was black for my fictitious explanation. Did that mean I was racist? As I struggled with that question, I recalled an event that had occurred a few moments earlier. A group of volunteers had been carrying bags of cement from one side of the village to the other. As I watched the line go by, one person had stood out: a tribesman with a colorful shirt, woven pants, and dark skin. Seeing his frowning face and noticing his heavy breathing, I’d felt bad for him. Even though, out of all the volunteers, he was the most fit, he was the one I’d felt bad for. I’d felt bad for him because he lived a “poor” life, because he had a “hard” life. I’d felt bad for him despite all the smiles I’d seen on the tribesmen’s faces, despite how much fun the village kids had playing with wooden sticks and mud-stained hands. Despite their poverty, they were happier than any other kids I’d ever seen. Why, then, would I feel sorry for them? Even though it was not a malicious bias, it was still racist of me.

I dug deeper, hoping to expose my flaws. I was disappointed to find that I had clear memories of times when I had been bigoted. Once, while doing sprints across the squash court, I yelled to one of teammates, “Brian, why are you running like a girl?” The whole team laughed. Once, in math class, when a tablemate got stuck on a binomial expansion problem, I joked, “It’s okay, dude; you’re white.” Everyone at the table laughed, though, of course, we helped him out. I’ve even been racist towards my own race. Once, when I was at my friend’s house, I replied to his statement that his mom had already cooked dinner by pointing at his Bichon Frise and saying, “What do you mean? Ollie’s right there.” Of course, the insinuation of my crude quip was that Asians eat dogs. Even though I never intended to hurt anybody with any of these statements, I had to admit to myself that, by expressing such prejudiced ideas, even if only jokingly, I’d helped create an environment of intolerance.

I knew that I was racist, and I understood that this racism had a negative impact, but it was only recently, at a Buddhist ceremony, that I truly felt my racism. Walking in the dark, I reached the golden sala, where I and the rest of the sangha knelt in front of the bhikhu, feet arched up, hands in ajali, our mouths crooning the Sanskrit teachings. Muscle aches slowly crept up my body like the fumes from incense. Just as smoke does, the pain thickened; it seeped into my bones. Although the hum from my throat was soothing, it could not keep my mind off the pain.

“Ding...”

Like clockwork, the sangha folded their legs and put their hands on top of each other, right on left. I mindfully closed circuit as I touched my thumbs together. I exhaled fully and felt the smoke leaving my nose. With each deep breath out, I flushed all sensation from my body. As the smoke began to thin, it seemed as though something else started to take its place. As if I’d dislodged a stopper plugging my brain, I felt all the contents of my head leave my body. I left my body and mind to become the observer. For the first time, I wasn’t waiting for the bell to sound again. In due course, the bell rang and, as I lifted my eyelids, I came back to my body and mind with a fresh sense of self. However, although I was rejuvenated, I felt troubled. The injustice of my bigoted actions, which I had previously understood only mentally, came to me in a wave of emotion. I’d wiped my windshields clean and had let out the smoke in order to take a peek inside myself, and I did not like what I saw. Through monkhood, I had found my inner racist.

It was, I think, the most humbling experience of my life. In that moment, possibility became certainty. Instead of thinking I was wrong, I knew I was wrong—I felt it. The idea that I was so respectful of different races, that I was so objective and fair, came crashing down. Since then, I’ve been able to take a more critical view of myself. I now know that, after seventeen years of gathering knowledge, I have to reevaluate everything I thought I knew, starting with myself.

Maybe I am not objective. Maybe I am not a good friend. Maybe I am naive. Maybe I am a bad person. Maybe Martin Luther King Jr. was a bad person. Maybe Morrissey is black. Maybe I deserve to go to Harvard. Maybe The Smiths weren’t a good band.

Now, emotionally exposed to my situation in life, I have a stronger sense of responsibility to give back to humanity in any way I can. For now, I do this through the BUILD Foundation and Seeds of Empowerment, through which I help promote diversity and decrease racial and economic inequality. But, in that auditorium, faced with that surprising request, I also give back in a different way, by trying to teach people what I have learned—that, if we are to be part of the solution, we must admit that we are part of the problem.

The scrape of a chair echoes across the auditorium. Each pair of eyes scans side to side like a pendulum and, as pendulums do, they came to a stop. All heads turn in the same direction.

“I am standing for myself. I am standing for you. I am standing, for I am racist.”

I am standing.