Beginner’s Mind is a special project collecting insightful essays written by US college students who have attended experiential-learning courses related to Buddhism. Some of the authors identify as Buddhists, for others it is their first encounter with the Buddhadharma. All are sharing reflections and impressions on what they’ve learned, how it has impacted their lives, and how they might continue to engage with the teaching.
Allison Wong is a senior at the University of Southern California, where she studies Design, Technology, and the Business of Innovation. She wrote this essay for her Buddhish Economics course. She is interested in incorporating cultural studies into her design work and exploring how creative practice can shape more thoughtful and interconnected systems.
From Cliques to Colonies: Why Stratification Prevents Human Connection
In my USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy (IYA) cohort, friendships often formed along lines that felt natural: shared humor, shared backgrounds, shared cultural habits. Over time, those groupings began to mirror racial lines. No one explicitly chose that outcome; there was no declared exclusion. It simply felt comfortable to gravitate toward what was familiar. But retreat disrupts that pattern. For a weekend, we shared space, food, music, sleeping arrangements, and daily rhythms that were not always our own. That temporary disruption revealed something unsettling: what feels “natural” is often the result of inherited structures.
I noticed this pattern long before college. Growing up in Irvine, California, most of my friends were Christian Korean girls. We shared East Asian identities, but even within that category there were quiet boundaries. Their churches structured their weeks. Their language, humor, and references revolved around youth group culture. My family, however, was not particularly Christian. I spent more time in Buddhist temples. Our foods were different. Our rhythms were different. Even small things, such as which holidays we emphasized, how we prayed, how we spoke about elders, carried subtle distinctions. No one declared these differences as dividing lines, but over time they shaped who felt closest to whom. The boundaries strengthened through repetition. Comfort formed patterns.
Humans deeply want connection, yet our societies are organized in ways that normalize separation and displacement. The Kalama Sutta reframes greed, hatred, and delusion not as isolated moral failures but as recurring patterns that scale into collective precarity. (AN 3.65)
The text does not say: bad person, bad world. It describes conditions. “When this arises, that arises; when this ceases, that ceases.” (AN 3.65) Greed arises, and harm follows. Hatred arises, and violence spreads. Delusion arises, and unfriendliness takes root. As Ass. Prof. Jessica Zu explains, dukkha can be understood not only as personal suffering but as systemic precarity produced through recurring relational processes. (Zu, 2025) When patterns stabilize across communities, they harden into norms and institutions.
Applied socially, racism does not require explicit hatred to persist. When familiarity is present, comfort arises. When comfort repeats, boundaries solidify. When boundaries solidify, distance becomes normalized. What begins as neutral preference sediments into patterned access: who shares housing, who recommends whom for jobs, whose norms define professionalism, whose presence feels out of place. Racism, in this view, is not merely an accumulation of bad intentions but a chain of conditioned responses that reproduce separation unless underlying conditions are interrupted.
My experience in predominantly East Asian communities complicates this picture further.
Clustering was not always about exclusion; sometimes it was protection. Our culture has been fetishized, infantilized, and targeted. Shared language and food created safety in environments where we felt misunderstood. Comfort can arise from inherited privilege or inherited vulnerability. That complexity is precisely why structural analysis matters more than moral accusation. The question is not simply whether people are kind. It is what conditions shape where comfort settles and how far its boundaries extend.
Scaled historically, the same relational logic becomes spatial. Settlers cluster for mutual recognition and security; property regimes form around those networks; land is claimed, renamed, and legally secured. Colonial displacement persists not only through overt violence but through arrangements that continue to organize belonging and exclusion. Residential segregation, zoning laws, and unequal land access are comfort patterns hardened into infrastructure. The move from clique to colony is not a simple moral escalation but a magnification of conditioned preference into institutional design.
The Cakkavatti Sutta (DN 26) offers a stark image of what happens when relational ethics collapse. After cycles of violence, survivors emerge and cry out, “Fantastic, dear foe, you live!” (DN 26) The phrase is striking. “Foe” acknowledges hostility; “dear” introduces recognition. The joy is not individual redemption but mutual survival. Repair does not occur because one person becomes morally pure; it occurs because former antagonists recognize shared vulnerability. Collapse was collective, and restoration must be collective.
I think about that moment when I think about retreat. There is always a point, usually the second day, when the initial awkwardness fades. People try each other’s snacks. Someone explains a family tradition. Someone else plays music that fills the house in a new way. The cliques soften. It is not dramatic, and it is not permanent. But something shifts because the structure shifts. We are sleeping under the same roof, negotiating shared bathrooms, cooking in the same kitchen. The environment interrupts our habits.
Retreat works not because we suddenly become morally better, but because the design of space requires interdependence. If racism and colonial displacement persist through relational structures, then redesign must occur at that level. Land acknowledgment cannot remain symbolic recognition of past harm. Symbols without redistribution leave property regimes intact. If space shapes behavior, then moving toward land return, co-management agreements, or redirecting institutional resources toward Indigenous stewardship changes the spatial conditions that organize belonging. It alters who is centered and who is displaced.
Similarly, if comfort-based clustering reproduces separation, intentional mixing must be structural, not accidental. On retreat, mixing happens because rooms are assigned and schedules are shared. Back on campus, proximity fragments because the larger environment allows it.
Housing policy, school zoning, shared public infrastructure, and collaborative governance are larger-scale versions of the same principle. The goal is not forced proximity for optics, but reshaping environments so familiarity expands over time. Just as conditioned separation scales into structural harm, conditioned interdependence can scale into structural repair.
Even honeybee swarms offer a useful contrast. In Honeybee Democracy, Thomas Seeley describes how bees select a new home through decentralized signaling and quorum sensing. No single bee dominates; decisions emerge through repeated communication. The swarm succeeds because its structure channels behavior toward collective survival. Human societies, by contrast, often embed power into systems while calling them neutral. What feels natural may conceal structured advantage. The issue is not simply human moral failure, but the relational designs that guide action.
When I return from retreat, I notice how quickly old patterns re-form. People sit where they usually sit. Conversations regroup along familiar lines. That return reveals something important: small structural interruptions are temporary unless reinforced. The Kalama Sutta suggests collective precarity arises from recurring patterns, not isolated villains. Dismantling racism therefore cannot rely on personal moral awakening alone. It requires redesigning the conditions that make separation feel comfortable.
In Zu’s reading of the KalamaSutta, “may the friendliest thrive” is not a guarantee but a practice. (Zu, 2025) Hope does not promise that justice will prevail automatically. It calls for courage in reshaping conditions. Retreat shows me that when the environment changes, so do we. But it also shows how easily we revert when the structure does not hold. If intentions are shaped by the structures we inhabit, then altering those structures alters what becomes possible. What feels natural today was built—through history, through repetition, through policy. It can be rebuilt.
The question, then, is not simply whether individuals are good. It is: what conditions make separation feel natural? And how might we redesign them so that interdependence feels just as ordinary?
Reflection of AI use
Writing this essay with AI does not take away my ownership of it. The core ideas came directly from my own experiences, including retreat, my childhood growing up among Christian Korean girls while my family practiced Buddhism, and my comments on the readings in Perusall.
I developed the main arguments myself, especially the connection between comfort, racial clustering, and structural patterns. What I asked AI to do was help me organize those ideas, clarify certain concepts, and strengthen the connections between Buddhist texts and my lived experience.
In that sense, AI acted more as a tool for refinement than as a source of original thought. This process has made the idea of anatta, or no-self, feel more concrete to me. If the self is shaped through dependent co-arising, then even what I call “my” thoughts are influenced by teachers, books, culture, conversations, and now AI. My brain does not create in isolation. It responds to conditions. AI becomes one more input within that network of conditions.
At the same time, I remain responsible for choosing what to keep, what to reject, and how to express it. I decided which arguments felt true to my experience and which language sounded like me. In that way, interdependence does not eliminate autonomy. It changes how we understand it. I actually think AI can increase freedom in some ways. By helping process information or organize ideas more efficiently, it gives me more time to think, reflect, and refine what matters.
AI cannot feel discomfort on retreat or navigate racial boundaries growing up. It recombines patterns. Humans also draw from patterns, but we do so through embodied experience and emotion. Using AI has shown me that authorship is never purely individual. It is relational. Claiming full credit means acknowledging the conditions that shaped this essay while also taking responsibility for how I chose to shape them.
References
Seeley, T. D. 2010. HoneybeeDemocracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sujato, B. (Trans.). (n.d.). Cakkavatti Sutta (DN 26). SuttaCentral. https://suttacentral.net/dn26
Sujato, B. (Trans.). (n.d.). Kālāma Sutta (AN 3.65). SuttaCentral. https://suttacentral.net/an3.65
Zu, Jessical. 15 October 2025. Karmic Psychopolitics: May the friendliest thrive. The Immanent Frame. https://tif.ssrc.org/2025/10/15/karmic-psychopolitics-may-the-friendliest-thrive
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