Critical Yogācāra Social Theory and Practice: Examining Racial Marginalization

This paper develops a Yogācāra account of racial formation as karmically conditioned processes embedded in social institutions. To occupy a social position—police officer, immigrant, student—is to inhabit a structured field of expectation that trains attention, assigns salience, and routinizes response. Drawing on the Yogācāra concepts of vāsanā, bīja, and ālayavijñāna, I argue that racial perception is sustained through socially distributed karmic infrastructures that stabilize conditioned patterns of recognition and response across time. Śūnyatā, understood through the framework of the two truths, reveals race as empty of intrinsic essence yet conventionally real as a historically sedimented causal formation shaping vulnerability, opportunity, and perception. Examining institutional forms that employ procedural role fluidity, e.g. the Incident Command System (ICS), I discuss how systems that refuse the reification of roles can interrupt karmic inertia and loosen racialized conceptual reification. Yogācāra thus provides both a diagnosis of racial marginalization and a framework for institutional transformation.