We Are One

The summer that Rhonda Magee was sixteen, she got a phone call that marked a turning point in her life. Jake, her boyfriend at the time, called to tell her that his father had just kicked him out. “He did what? Why?!” Magee asked, but the truth was, she already knew the answer.

Jake’s father had never met Magee, yet she was unacceptable to him. Or rather, his ideas about her, and of people supposedly like her, were so unacceptable he was willing to cut off his own son. She was Black, Jake was white, and his father was racist. This experience of being racialized was profoundly painful to her, and it changed the direction of her life.

In her seminal book The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, Magee writes, “What I learned that summer inspired in me a desire truly to understand race and racism in our everyday lives and to see them for what they are: deep and pervasive cultural conditioning for grouping others into categories and placing them at enough distance to render their suffering less visible, for obscuring our intertwined destinies, and for turning us against one another rather than toward one another when we suffer in common.

“In short, what I learned that summer inspired my life’s work: dissolving the lies that racism whispers about who we really are, and doing whatever I can to reduce the terrible harm it causes us all.”

Today, Magee is a professor of law and leader in integrating mindfulness into the legal system, higher education, and social change work. Combining the inner work of personal development through meditation and other practices with the outer work of racial justice, she says, “will set us on the path toward acting with others for justice—in solidarity with those suffering the most—with humility, kindness, and the capacity to keep growing and rowing on.”

“Because there are so many rivers of pain joining and forming the ocean of racial suffering in our times, personal awareness practices are essential for racial justice work,” writes Magee. “By experiencing new ways of looking at race, we can grow in our capacity to be with one another in ways that promote healing and make real our common humanity and radical interconnectedness.”

Magee was born in 1967 in Kinston, North Carolina. It was a segregated town where tobacco farming, furniture making, and white supremacy framed life. Magee says she grew up in “the projects,” in a family dealing with trauma, poverty, alcoholism, and domestic abuse. Her mother’s second marriage moved the family to Hampton, Virginia, during a period of active efforts to desegregate the South.

“I’ve experienced some real dynamism and participated in the front line of the so-called experiment of desegregation,” Magee says. “And I’m here to say, it worked. But the thing I witnessed along the way was that not everybody in the culture was actually happy to see successful desegregation.”

The experience of living in a society that was supposed to be integrated but was, in truth, still fractured, spurred Magee on to more learning. “As I grew into adulthood, I somehow knew my worth was not measured by the gaze of white people or those who had internalized prejudices against people like me,” writes Magee in The Inner Work of Racial Justice. “I loved the Black experiences into which I had been born and all that they had given to the world—especially the many models of people struggling against injustice for ourselves and for beloved communities everywhere, all the while maintaining loving, praising hearts.”

Magee says she also knew in her own heart that more connection and love between different identity groups was something that could happen. “Having come up through desegregation and witnessed its efficacy and effectiveness, I knew what was possible,” she says. “I wanted to live my own life as a testimony to that.”

What Magee wanted most was to make a difference in society. She was on a PhD track in sociology at the University of Virginia, but when a professor suggested law was a better way to create change, she switched to the university’s famed law school. Yet when she started her career as a practicing lawyer it still didn’t feel like a true fit with her values. “It was mostly in the service or pro bono part of my practice that I was able to address some of my interests in social justice,” says Magee. This just wasn’t enough—she wanted social justice to be her focus.

As she searched for her life’s work, Magee also found a spiritual calling. Having grown up with a Christianity grounded in love for your neighbor and community, Magee started reading about other spiritual paths, including Buddhism. She began practicing mindfulness in fits and starts. She discovered in it moments of clarity and calm, but had mixed feelings about committing fully, as no one she encountered in this sphere looked like her or came from a similar background.

She finally found her spiritual footing when she was invited to join a group of lawyers in the Bay Area who regularly meditated under the guidance of Zen teacher Norman Fischer. Magee says this practice community of legal colleagues helped her settle into a regular meditation practice. “I saw that if I was going to continue to walk the path I’d begun,” she says, “building bridges between communities traditionally seen as different, I would have to find a way to deal with regular indignities without going crazy or suffering further damage to myself and others.”

More at Source:

https://www.lionsroar.com/rhonda-magee-the-dharma-of-racial-justice/?goal=0_1988ee44b2-d76833898f-22790869&mc_cid=d76833898f&mc_eid=3caec741db: We Are One

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