A Conversation on Mindfulness, Bias and Racial Justice

Stephanie Domet: I’m Stephanie Domet, an editor at Mindful magazine and a writer and podcast producer for mindful.org. This is a special edition of “The Point of View” podcast featuring Mindful magazine and mindful.org founding editor Barry Boyce in conversation with Rhonda Magee, Ram Mahalingam, and Mirabai Bush.

Mirabai Bush is the co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which seeks to transform higher education through the introduction of contemplative practices and perspectives. Mirabai has worked at the interface of mindfulness and social justice since she learned contemplative practices in India in the 1970s.

Ram Mahalingam is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He’s the director for the Mindful Connections Lab. His current research is on mindfulness and dignity in hospital settings and in the cleaning industry, with a specific focus on janitors in India, South Korea, United States and Japan. He teaches an undergraduate course on mindful leadership and a course on mindfulness and engaged living.

Rhonda Magee is a professor of law at the University of San Francisco. Also trained in sociology and mindfulness-based stress reduction, Rhonda is a highly practiced facilitator of trauma-sensitive restorative mindfulness interventions for lawyers and law students and for minimizing the effects of social identity-based bias. Magee has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society and a visiting professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s also the author of The Inner Work of Racial Justice published by Penguin Random House.

We convened this panel to talk about issues that arise out of racial justice, including a discussion of concepts around privilege and fragility—two ideas that are also examined in the October issue of Mindful magazine. It may be both unfortunate and fortunate that racism is so much in the news these days. It’s a hot topic in homes, campuses, offices, and in the media across North America and around the world. It’s unfortunate, of course, because we’re seeing a reigniting and re-emergence of hate speech and incitement to act harmfully, even violently. Fortunate, perhaps, because we may be uncovering deeper forms of division that we can explore in the ultimate interest of finding unity, interconnection, peace and justice.

When we talk about racial literacy and understanding implicit bias we get one kind of reaction. But things can get more pointed when we talk about white privilege, white supremacy and so on. It’s maybe the power and danger of calling it out—the power, perhaps, comes from truth telling, and the danger may come from labeling of someone as being on one side of a divide. And it’s a place where fragility can emerge.

Barry, Rhonda, Ram and Mirabai connected recently to begin unpacking some of these ideas and the role that mindfulness can play.

A Contemplative Approach to Social Justice

Barry Boyce: Thank you all for being part of this conversation. We’re talking with you today because you all have experience with both contemplative practice and equity issues, and I think that’s where we can make a real offering. Readers look to Mindful for encouragement and staying in and manifesting a feeling of interconnectedness, that we’re all one in some fundamental way, and that we need to be truthful about pointing out inequities and the harm resulting from bias. And we need to learn from that—go on some kind of a journey.

So today, let’s explore whether contemporary approaches have anything to offer, as Ram has suggested, “Keep the door open while not sidestepping the truth,” which I think is a great formulation.

So, in a few minutes we’ll dive into all the hot terminology: privilege, whiteness, supremacy, fragility, colorblindness, etc. But first, I’d like to hear from each of you about whether and how you see contemplative practice, and contemplative approaches to dialogue, aiding us as we navigate social justice issues.

So, perhaps we can start with Rhonda.

Rhonda Magee: Thank you so much Barry. So I think contemplative approaches can assist us in so many ways when we think about having conversations about these issues. As we all know, at a sort of fundamental level, contemplative approaches of a wide variety really help us with becoming more present and more aware to both the obvious and the less obvious aspects of our experiences in the world. So, mindfulness practices—often referred to as embodied mindfulness practices, those practices that help us become more aware of what’s going on within us as we are entering into these often choppy waters. These help us notice when reactivity is arising and enable us to respond rather than react automatically to the various stimuli that come up in these conversations. So, just basic mindfulness practice can assist us in that very simple way.

But I think compassion practices as well—those practices that enable us to put ourselves in the shoes of other people more profoundly and more pervasively. That is, compassion as a regular stance to being more flexible in our listening to each other and in choosing how to respond.

And so finally, in addition to having this compassionate awareness, another helpful aspect of mindfulness practice is the grounding in the body that many of the trauma-sensitive or more body-focused mindfulness practices get us really thinking about. Not just noticing the breath but really feeling the interconnection between the breathing body and the ground beneath us; really feeling the way in which we’re supported by way of being consciously aware of our connectedness—the connectedness that extends from our body into the environment around us. All of these different ways can help us with the reactions, the triggerings, the fragility responses that can come up in these conversations.

BB: Thanks. Ram, would you like to comment on that?

Ram Mahalingam: For me, contemplativ