When Mindfulness and Racism Intersect

Barry Boyce: Welcome everyone to Mindful’s podcast, Point of View. I’m Barry Boyce, editor-in-chief of Mindful and mindful.org. And today I have the pleasure of talking with my good friend and colleague Rhonda Magee. Rhonda is a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco and she’s a mindfulness teacher who’s been focused for some years on issues having to do with mindfulness and the law, mindfulness for lawyers in their everyday work, justice, public policy, and in particular focusing increasingly on issues of inclusively, ingroup/outgroup, bias, and she is pioneering something she calls Color Insight, which we’ll talk about later on. So, welcome Rhonda.

Rhonda Magee: Thank you very much Barry, it’s good to be with you.

Barry Boyce: You and I met for the first time, quite a few years ago now, it must be, at a retreat in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in a beautiful forest. I recall we had an opportunity to take a couple of walks around there and get to know each other, and I got a good chance to begin to know you. If you don’t mind, if you could tell a little bit of your background for our listeners, you know how you grew up and where you grew up and then work your way towards how you ended up practicing mindfulness.

Rhonda Magee: So I grew up in the south. I was born in 1967, right, so 50 years on the planet—50 good years, I would say, although the last few have been more challenging than many in the past. So, born in South, born actually in the last year of Martin Luther King’s time on earth. A very poignant time in American history where we were bringing the civil rights movement, in a certain sense, to a kind of peak in terms of articulating the promises of a movement for inclusivity that would be supported by law and public policy and might change the culture. And so, I think my own journey here was influenced, in some not insignificant way, by the fact that I was born then and there, raised in a family that was Christian, and particularly influenced by a grandmother and others in the family who were deeply committed to religious practice and to a kind of a discipline of daily, what they would call prayer and study, but look very much like a kind of daily meditation, and discipline, if you will.

So, witnessing as a little girl, seeing my grandmother practice every day, get up in the morning before dawn, commit herself to a kind of centering, and then going out in the world and working very hard. She didn’t have a glamorous job, she cleaned houses for other people and took care of the family and on the weekends helped to support community—She had become a lay minister in a particular Christian tradition. So, I grew up then in a family that was already kind of deeply engaged in the idea of practice and daily practice for one’s own sustenance, in a world that wasn’t necessarily created for our thriving. But also to support us in the work of trying to make the world as livable and kind as possible for ourselves and for our communities.

There are ways we can call people into conversations about white supremacy with compassion for the fact that we all are in this together. We’ve all been trained away from this conversation.

I moved from North Carolina to Virginia, did most of my schooling in Virginia, went to the University of Virginia, studied law and sociology at the graduate level, and then ended up teaching at the University of San Francisco. For me, mindfulness came, first of all, in an organic way. I was always very drawn to solitude and drawn to my own developing inner work and found mindfulness in particular or meditation, I should say, first in 1993, the year I came out from the south to San Francisco. And at this moment of new opportunity—I was starting a new job as a lawyer having trained and focused and done all these different things, but also was in this brand new place with everything around me sort of new and different, and starting this fancy job at a law firm where I was the only African-American, only young woman of color at the time in an office of about 70 or so lawyers—I just already knew there were going to be some additional challenges that would come with that beyond the everyday challenges of being a young lawyer.

So, I felt at that time a need to be more consistent and committed to my own personal practice regimen, and so started exploring ways of deepening my own ground, my own sources of inner support, that were more aligned with who I had become by then. I’m still very inspired by Christ’s message and teachings, and yet, at the same time, for me I needed a way of entering into a spiritual journey that was a little more informed by practices that specifically would assist me in working with my own mind, knowing my own kind of conditioning and habits, and specifically putting myself in a position to deal with stress and to deal with my own reactivity and ways of being in the world that might make for more suffering than I needed to endure.

So, I was drawn to meditation, I was drawn to mindfulness, and from there just developed a regular practice that led me to teaching and training through a variety of wonderful teachers, including Norman Fischer, a former abbot of The San Francisco Zen Center who has been a teacher of mine for years, and then actually, more recently, 10 or 12 years ago, met Jon Kabat-Zinn along the way, and through his inspiration prepared myself for mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention-type teaching by going to the teacher training program at the Center for Mindfulness. So that’s in a nutshell.

Barry Boyce: Yeah, that’s a beautiful nutshell. And, you know, it seems to me that you grew up in what we might call today, in the jargon, an intentional community. Your grandmother, you say, who was a lay minister, is it fair to say that you derived a lot of strength from that community growing up?

Rhonda Magee: Yeah, I mean, it is fair. And it’s also fair to say the community had its back up against the wall, in many ways, right? So, it was still very segregated. My kindergarten school, despite the fact that it was by then 1972 when I was entering kindergarten, it was still officially segregated in the South, nothing had changed, despite Brown versus Board.

Barry Boyce: Yeah, you hear: “well, during the Jim Crow period” as if that ended.

Rhonda Magee: Right, it still continues. And yet, it had a certain kind of flavor when it was completely, and in very intensive ways, supported and endorsed by our legal system and by our police and by our churches. Right? So, while segregation continues, actually, in a way that I do think is important to really be clear about, the difference between the kind of very official commitments and explicit endorsements of white supremacy that were in place throughout, even starting my lifetime, between what was in place then and what’s in place now, which is not as much. We’re re-entering, I would say, a period where people are re-embracing white supremacy in a way that actually is quite meaningful and it’s important, and we need to talk about that, it’s part of why I do the work that I do.

But yeah, I had