Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

When I'm on a book tour, I sleep on couches or in guest bedrooms of different host families along the way. A few years ago, a very kind gentleman in North Carolina was generous enough to host me in his

home for a couple of nights.

He was elderly, African American, and disabled, but he wanted to attend my book talk even though it was late in the evening and he had trouble seeing at night.

So he asked that I drove us both to and from the event in his car.

After a great discussion of the bookstore,

we were so engaged in conversation on the drive back to the house

that he forgot I was relying on him to give me directions back to the house.

As soon as he realized it he said

timber you were supposed to turn left back there so I made a U-turn in the middle of

the street and he reacted as if I had just hit a pedestrian and driven away.

He had a death grip on the door handle with one hand,

grabbed the center console with the other and screamed, What are you doing? I pulled over because

he was obviously distraught and said, I just turned the car around because you said I had driven past your street.

He looked at me and said, oh, you don't know about D.W.B. do you?

That night I learned the difference between white privilege and white ignorance.

Yes, I was ignorant that D.W.B. driving while black means you can't pull those kinds of maneuvers on the road because if a certain type of cop sees a person of color doing the same thing

That driver would get pulled over so fast head slammed against the hood of the car with arms handcuffed behind his back, and I didn't even think twice about making that U-turn.

That is white ignorance. Privilege is when you think something is not a problem just because it doesn't personally affect you.

Well racism is a problem whether it personally affects you or not,

and it isn't limited to job inequality or persons of color serving prison sentences four times longer than a white person who had committed the same crime.

Racism is bigger than my parents forbidding me from dating anyone in my teens who wasn't white and Jewish,

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