Racial Healing: Rhonda Magee
By Wade Lee Hudson
Racism continues to inflict enormous suffering. Rhonda V. Magee, an African-American law professor, reports, “I often notice a lingering feeling that I might be in danger—that I could, at any time, be discounted, rejected, disrespected, injured, or even killed for no reason other than my perceived ‘blackness.’” This reality provokes heated resistance from oppressed people, while relatively advantaged people experience guilt and denial (a majority of white people claim to be color-blind). Tensions are high. Discussing these issues is often difficult.
This dynamic applies to all people of color, but I focus on black-white relations, which are most problematic in the United States. When white people fail to fully understand black anger, they often respond with calm, paternalistic advice. When black people find this paternalism offensive, they sometimes end their relationship with the offender. When white people sense what’s happening, they often “shut up and listen” as a way to increase their understanding. Many white people feel they should censor themselves when they talk with black people about race-related issues. As a result of these and other factors, many white people end up unsure about whether, when, and how to speak about racism and race relations. Friendships fade. Unity dissolves. The potential for joint action is undermined.
Within this context, Magee’s work is helpful. Magee teaches meditation to her law students and conducts racial-healing workshops based on her ColorInsight methodology. Her wide-ranging, challenging, and insightful magnum opus, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, includes many compelling personal narratives and useful self-help exercises, such as “Mindful Speaking and Listening Practice.” She argues that mindfulness practice can help us acknowledge bias and choose how we respond to conflict and division.
Magee calls race “a remarkable persistent imaginary idea” that has been used to help “build a sense of ‘natural’ hierarchy in our societies.” Thoughts and feelings are not hardwired; our brains create them. Racism “reduces each of us into categories” and plays into the innate tension between the tendency to “categorize and rank-order human beings” and the countervailing tendency to “minimize differences and seek equality and fair treatment across humanity.” Gaining prestige and status in the competitive rat-race is key to American life.
Nevertheless, “just because race is not real does not make race and the privileges and disadvantages attached to it any less real in their profound consequences in each of our everyday lives.” That’s why the phrase “I’m free, white, and twenty-one!” became so popular. Given the reality of racism, Magee advocates becoming “adept at seeing race, but not investing it with the stories and meaning...we have inherited from previous generations. We need perceptive flexibility and mindfulness can help build it.”
In a Mindful interview, Magee discusses the interaction between the “different degrees of (class) privilege...within which we live and the power differentials that have been associated with different (racial) identities.” She concludes, “Therein lies, I think, the rub.”
Racism alone would be difficult enough. But when race intersects with class, the problem becomes an immensely more challenging political conversation. Privilege involves having an advantage due to membership in a particular group. “Suddenly, we’re now talking about the just and unjust distribution of resources and access.” And our society fails to educate people about power—personal power and political power—as well as ethical responsibilities with regard to power.
Magee’s book calls for examining “how I live and participate in (unconsciously absorbed) systems and practices that create, re-create, negotiate, and to a surprising degree, maintain, generation after generation, socially prescribed roles”—roles that lead us to lose sight of both the “innumerable different identities” that constitute the “ineffable” whole person and “the structures of privilege that keep some types of people down while lifting others up.”
This systemic racism is reflected in how those who “have been formed by race and racism” in turn shape others’ identities. And it’s reflected in public policies, such as a lawsuit in San Francisco that “brought the city’s famously successful desegregation plan to a halt, setting the place on the path to the resegregated school system we have today.” Magee urges readers to reflect on “laws, public policies, or private policies” that have racially disparate impact
Magee’s “ColorInsight” work is rooted in mindfulness, which she defines as “simply paying attention, on purpose, with the attitude of friendly, open, nonjudgmental curiosity, and a willingness to accept (at least for now!) what arises”—a non-judgmental openness to explore with lovingkindness, compassion, patience, the “don’t know” mind, steadfastness, and the courage to seek and act for justice, which flows from compassion.
Racism is also reflected in subtle, often unconscious insults, frequently referred to as microagressions. Due to white fragility, white people are often unable to “bear even a small amount of the distress” that comes from challenges to these insults. “But ask those who suffer microaggressions regularly if not daily, and they will say what research does: a lifetime of exposure to such slight and related discriminations takes a serious toll on psychological health and material well-being.”
In recent years, microaggressions have received a great deal of attention. “For a time not so long ago,” Magee writes, many people believed “this was the only sort of race problem (if any!) that we had to deal with today.” She concludes that focus was exaggerated. “As we have already seen, the truth has turned out to be otherwise. We are witnessing a rise of old-fashioned conscious, explicit racism.”
This perspective leads her to a particular stance about the distorted emphasis on microaggressions.
And here is the good news: from awareness just like this, we may begin to respond differently to bias when it impacts us. The notion of “calling out” microagressions, for example, has given way to the idea of “calling in” the offender into conversation about the harm that is being done, and to put it even more gently, as Canada-based therapist Tada Hozumi says, “calling to”—calling ourselves to attention to such experiences, in a way that can promote healing. Rather than creating a sense of humiliation, we reach for understanding. We know that racism and bias are pervasive. Rather than being “shocked” when it shows up in our community, we are prepared to acknowledge and deal with it. We are willing to work with nearly anyone, doing what we can to create a culture in which we can address bias forthrightly. We do not, through a zero-tolerance approach, force the reckoning with these realities underground. And from this place, we seek to create spaces for acknowledgement and accountability, for learning and growing together that include mutual humility and compassion.
With this approach, Magee offers an alternative to an excessive focus on subtle insults. She believes mindfulness offers tools “to confront injuries” and “let them go...when we see that racism and its injuries no longer serve us.”
Magee discusses strategies for disrupting unconscious bias and subtle insults. In doing so, she aims to avoid a holier-than-thou attitude. “We, too, are part of the problem we seek to solve…. We co-create one another’s suffering… We are all part of the problem and may all play a part in the solution.” So she affirms the need to undo racist messages that have been internalized. And she aims to better understand those who offend.
Though it’s often unclear if Magee is only talking about persons of color when she speaks in the first person plural, I believe her insights sometimes apply to everyone, as with this passage:
Mindfulness helps us see that our identities are not merely foisted upon us, but they are constructions that we also participate in creating. And so they are constructions that we can dissolve and reshape…without making others our enemies…. As we let go of our fixed notions of race and other identities…, we are practicing the healing power of interconnection and the transformative power of true freedom…. We can choose to go through (painful) emotions and remain in connection with those who have triggered them.
We can begin to see our social identity with greater openness. We can begin to see how our self-understanding places undue attention on how we’ve been treated unfairly or cruelly—with “a view that holds in place a pattern of woundedness that does not serve us.” We become aware of our “fear of being seen as an outsider” and the pressure to “fit in” and succeed and prove ourselves—and the impact of those pressures. “We can, without anyone noticing, pause for a second or two, take a conscious breath, bring awareness to the thoughts, emotions, and sensations that are arising, and choose how we want to respond to comments that trigger us.” Those dynamics are universal.
Though Magee does not refer to him, her perspective reminds me of the great African-American theologian, Howard Thurman, a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote:
Anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the key to his destiny. If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.
Magree believes we can learn to regulate and even transform our emotions and “develop mastery over our responses. Mindfulness gives us space between stimulus and response.” With tools such as Marshall Rosenberg’s “nonviolent communication,” she says we can acknowledge the fear that often underlies anger, which we often express destructively.
As I understand it, nonviolent communication recommends that when someone says something hurtful, it’s better to say, “When you said that, I felt hurt,” rather than say, “You hurt my feelings,” which is scapegoating that places total blame on the offender. The Dalai Lama said: “You have to think: Why did this happen? This person is not your enemy from birth…. You see that this person’s actions are due to their own destructive emotions. You can develop a sense of concern, compassion, even feel sorry for their pain and suffering.”
The African-American folk adage first recorded in print in 1862 in a publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church proclaims: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me.” This perspective does not blame victims when they feel hurt, and it does not dream about avoiding pain. Rather, it aims for not being broken. It’s consistent with the recognition that, as Magee writes, “some of us have had extremely painful experiences of racism that we find hard to let go.”
Regardless of our race, a comment may at times be hurtful and at other times not be hurtful. When it is, we should face it and deal with it, without dehumanizing the offender. We can remember, as Magee writes, “I have come to see the futility of blaming others for the woundedness I feel around issues of identity. Given that we have the power to control our perceptions and our responses, we all bear some responsibility for the harm we feel.”
Nevertheless, society should discourage cruel words and hate speech that lead to hurt feelings. And we should hold people accountable for the consequences of their actions, especially when they violate the law.
Magee does not present mindfulness meditation as a panacea. But it can help us “stay with” the pain and promote deep healing. “It won’t automatically help us deal directly and compassionately with our own bias, but it can certainly help reduce it.”
Rather than allowing comments to trigger strong emotional reactions that interfere with rational decision-making and ethical action, “we need to bring mindfulness and compassion into the conversation.” This promotes “the opposite of fragile” and enables an awareness of paradox—”that some aspect of our experience may be ‘both this and that’...(such as) racial awareness and awareness of our common humanity.” Exploring “the values that underlie our work” nurtures paradoxical understanding and enables us to talk about our “labels” as both real and not-real.
Magee argues that the systemic, interwoven nature of racism calls for a commitment to undo the ways of thinking that gave rise to racial oppression—so we can nurture mutual respect. “We need to engage in the work of seeing and minimizing” unconscious bias by developing “ways of disrupting our habits.” In order to see “ourselves and our circumstances rightly,” this painful effort requires self-compassion. “Mindful communication helps us to listen to one another, to develop into loving, aware, committed communities.” If we cultivate compassion, we can also redress “structural and broader systemic causes as well…(including) the disconnect from the abundance of our earth home.”
For Magee, racial justice is about “taking actions against racism and in favor of liberation, inspired by love of all humanity, including actions at the personal, interpersonal, and collective levels”—actions that touch on the “systemic, thereby opening the door for transformation that benefits us all…. What protects us from racism, then, is working to end racism.”
We need to “look deeply at (racism’s) roots” and engage in outward as well as inward work. “We can set ourselves on a lifelong journey toward working to create structures, redress wrongs, and begin real healing.” This anti-racism work is not done in isolation.
Mindful friendship, staying in relationship and good fellowship with practitioners in human community [is essential].... Actions aimed at alleviating suffering—working to redistribute resources in the direction of fairness and increasing well-being for all—help heal the world. Taking such action is a form of justice itself. Thus, if we really hope to gain the true benefit of mindfulness practice, we must start by seeing it as a very personal practice whose benefits we realize in how we relate to and engage with others—including those we are tempted to view as less worthy because of the deep teachings of racism. Mindfulness practices help us to deconstruct the racialized identities we have constructed, and the racism that these identities were created to uphold. They can help us to live in the freedom that comes with the awareness of the possibilities inherent in our common humanity…., taking actions to let go of the illusions of race…. Realizing our essential interconnectedness, and the fact that we are, essentially, one human family….because the well-being of any one of us is bound up with the well-being of all of us.
Working to undo racism leads Magee to an affirmation of “democratic liberation” throughout society—”wherever we find ourselves, prompting us to ask who is suffering here and whose voice we might bring from the margin to the center.” With this approach,
we realize that our own vulnerabilities and identity-based suffering will not always take center stage. We develop the capacity and the will to rotate the center of our communities, to pivot around the concerns of differently situated people, ensuring that no one is left out and that the most acute suffering is addressed first.
Dedication to all humanity requires social justice to redress structural-economic problems that disproportionately affect various groups. The focus must be on both economic and racial issues, which are interwoven. “Our class system depends for its stability on racism, and vice versa.” Given the reality of systemic racism, both racial and economic justice are essential.
“The dominant culture’s inclusion/exclusion practices obscure structural problems that threaten us all.” These problems call us to
collectively organize structural change…. We cannot have racial justice in a society in which...other forms of social injustice reign…. Through these modes of healing,...we may create bold new models for working against injustice with the potential to transform the world…. Since it took centuries to construct race and racism, we must be prepared for it to take at least as long to deconstruct it. For now, the struggle is ceaseless.
This effort calls us to develop the will and the skills to connect authentically with as diverse a group as possible, speaking and listening carefully, remembering that “few people are moved to change by being on the receiving end of a withering battery that leaves them swimming in humiliation or shame.” With a commitment to living ethically, we can aim to “disrupt the patterns of power-over,” transform “the larger systems” we are a part of, and “counter the mindlessness of greed (and) the delusions of hyperindividualism.” We can find ways to “create bold new models...with the potential to transform the world (by) dismantling the structures that maintain...identity-based bias and oppression.”
This transformation moves from the personal to the collective and back—from the practice of being present, to being engaged with others “to change harmful systems,” and then “pushing the refresh button to begin again…. We look to ways of seeking accountability while maintaining a sense of ourselves as part of an integrated whole...in the fullness of our common humanity.”
Magee’s 334-page tome is inspiring. She addresses complicated issues with immense compassion. Unfortunately, however, it seems very few, if any, community-based projects are using concrete steps to grow holistic, compassionate communities and advance the kind of systemic transformation she discusses. Hopefully, by the time she writes her next book, she’ll be able to report on many such efforts.