On a recent broadcast of Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D welcomed Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad, scholar, Buddhist practitioner, and founder of the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies, for a wide ranging conversation about her new book, The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. What unfolded over the better part of an hour was less a book promotion than a working seminar on the inseparable bond between interior practice and political resistance.
Vesely-Flad told listeners that her path to Buddhism began in the Bay Area, where she sought an internal foundation that activist circles, however vital, had not provided. She had moved in abolitionist communities filled with extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, but she found herself unsteady, in need of ground to stand on. Buddhist practice, she explained, gave her that ground. It also led her to Baldwin and Lorde, both of whom appeared again and again in the Dharma talks of Black Buddhist teachers she admired.
The pivotal passage came from The Fire Next Time, where Baldwin writes that those who cannot suffer can never grow up, and that those who survive cruelty attain an authority that is unshakable. For Vesely-Flad, that line names what Buddhism teaches as suffering skillfully. It is not a glorification of pain. It is a refusal to be ruled by it.
Davey D pressed her on the word suffering, observing that Black communities have long been told their pain is somehow acceptable, while others receive comfort and care. Vesely-Flad agreed the term demands precision. Drawing on the ancient teaching of the two arrows, she distinguished the first arrow, which is the pain inflicted by unjust conditions, from the second arrow, which is the self inflicted suffering that follows when we react without awareness. Baldwin, she emphasized, never excused white America’s role in producing Black suffering. He indicted white avoidance of death, sexuality, and self examination as the engine of racial violence. The construct of the so called nigger, Baldwin argued, exists because white America needed a receptacle for everything it refused to feel.
The conversation turned to Palestine, and here Vesely-Flad offered some of the most striking material of the broadcast. She walked listeners through Baldwin’s 1961 visit to Israel, his recognition of the colonial enterprise unfolding before him, his observation that everywhere he turned there was a border, and his refusal to call it anything other than what it was. Baldwin rejected anti-Semitism with equal clarity, she noted, drawing on lifelong friendships with Jewish classmates and a deep grasp of Jewish suffering. What he would not accept was the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, nor the moral cover extended to a state selling arms to apartheid South Africa.
Asked what Baldwin would say if he were sitting beside her at the Café de Flore today, Vesely-Flad did not hesitate. He would say nothing has changed, or it has gotten worse. Refugee camps remain. Checkpoints multiply. Whole communities live under the barrel of a gun. The rage and grief he named then would be the rage and grief he names now.
Vesely-Flad was equally clear about Audre Lorde, whose distinction between pain and suffering shapes the book. Pain, Lorde wrote, is an event to be metabolized into strength or knowledge or action. Suffering is the nightmare of reliving unscrutinized pain. That insight, Vesely-Flad noted, took on a different gravity when Lorde was diagnosed first with breast cancer at forty four and later with liver cancer. From that bedrock came the line that has since traveled into countless movement spaces: caring for myself is not self indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. Vesely-Flad was firm that Lorde was not describing the wellness industry. She was describing the daily discipline that allows organizers to keep going without collapsing into reactivity or harming those closest to them.
Davey D pointed out that every chapter of The Fire Inside closes with a practice, from mindfulness of the breath to the Tara Mandala practice of Feeding Your Demons. Vesely-Flad explained that the practices answer the question her readers most often ask. They understand the analysis. They want to know how to actually do this work. For people running on empty, she offered a single instruction. Create space. Sit, move, breathe, whatever fits your energy, but do it every day. Consistency is the practice.
The most personal moments of the broadcast came when Davey D invited Vesely-Flad to speak about her own family. Born to a Black father and a white mother, raised after age seven without her father, she grew up inside what she described as an extremely toxic white family. Her maternal grandparents, descendants of Eastern European immigrants who had paid what Baldwin called the price of the ticket to become white, refused to acknowledge her or her brother. Photographs of white cousins lined the walls. She and her brother were nowhere to be found. Her brother was once kept inside their grandparents’ house for a full week so that neighbors would not see him.
Davey D named the pattern bluntly. It is, he said, a quintessentially American story, the way newcomers fleeing their own forms of suffering arrive in this country and absorb anti-Blackness as the price of belonging. Cicero, where her mother was raised, was a sundown town. The same Cicero where Dr. King later said he encountered some of the worst violence of his life.
At forty seven, while writing this book, Vesely-Flad hired a private investigator, used a small DNA match on a genealogy site, and finally found her father’s people. She now has hundreds of cousins, aunts, and uncles. She traveled to the Mississippi Delta and visited the graves of her great grandparents, learning that her great grandfather had been a pastor and a union organizer who raised twelve children. That arrival, she said, was its own form of resolution.
Buddhism, Vesely-Flad insisted, did not deliver her into easy reconciliation or a soft refusal to name harm. It gave her something more durable. The capacity to stay with whatever arises, to feel safe inside her own body in an outer world that has never been safe for her, and to act from grounded clarity rather than reactivity. She named the lineages she stands in, the Asian and Asian American teachers and monastics who carried these teachings forward for more than two thousand six hundred years, and refused the polite erasure of calling the practice anything other than Buddhist.
Asked which chapter she most hopes readers will sit with, Vesely-Flad pointed to the chapter on anger. In a moment defined by unaccountable power, by genocide, by impunity at every level, she said, the work is to validate the rage and to metabolize it, so that those resisting domination do not collapse under its weight.
The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde is available now. Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad will appear at the Bay Area the following dates:
