We need the wisdom of calm minds and open hearts more than ever, and part of how we access this wisdom is by allowing (counterintuitively) the fullness of our human experience, including our anger. Here we revisit the Q&A with Rhonda Magee She explores the complexity, frustration, and intimate beauty of learning how to make and achieve peace in the world.
Stephanie Dommett: In your book The inner work of racial justiceyou detail the steps you took to help one of your students address his attitudes and biases. What kind of energy does this work require?
Rhonda Magee: It requires a certain kind of commitment, a certain willingness to turn toward what we can easily divert, turn away from, deny, minimize, or avoid. To me, it’s really important that when we have these opportunities to look at what’s emerging around this, we’re transformed to That opportunity instead of walking away from it. I also think that it takes some kind of grounding in a certain kind of love, which is kindness, Loving kindness– For me it requires some sense of value, the possibility of communicating across many differences and the importance and value of trying to do so, over and over again, even when it is difficult.
sustainable development: Why is doing this work worth it to you?
RM: From my perspective, everything is so interconnected, which means we’re all interconnected, and so it seems to me that when we have these opportunities to expand our sense of common ground, and we don’t take advantage of them and we don’t do what we can to heal and repair and transform the world, it seems to me that we’re actually contributing to the barriers and obstacles to deep well-being. And so it’s worth it to me because it’s about practice. It arises from my deep practice, and it arises from the deep moral foundation of my practice.
sustainable development: Who does this work serve? Is it for you and the other person for the greater good of society? To honor this practice?
RM: It serves life. The gift of literally being alive. To me, this isn’t about any of us, actually. To be alive is a great gift, and so the only true response to such a gift is Gratitude. The way to show gratitude is to try to minimize harm wherever it appears, as best we can. Realizing that we are not perfect, and that we cannot always see clearly how what we do contributes to harm, we are all weak and misguided in our own ways, so I say this with a lot of humility. But in the end, I think this question of who benefits from it, benefits life.
sustainable development: For a racist man, or woman, there are microaggressions everywhere. How do you take care of yourself to make sure you can do the work you want to do and feel called to do?
RM: It came from my sense of agency and what I often call personal justice. This is the idea that justice starts with us, how we treat ourselves. Taking care of myself feels like the first approximation of everything I’m trying to offer in the world. There’s a reason I live in San Francisco and not North Carolina or Virginia, where I was born and raised. the environment San Francisco seems to be more suited to this way of accepting people, working cross-culturally, interculturally, working with people who have different ways of expressing themselves, whether it’s race, sexual orientation, religion, or immigration status. I’m specifically talking about the environment first and then the practices. We tend to think that through practices we can overcome almost anything and that’s a good way to think, but I don’t want to miss this opportunity to determine how important our immersion in the world is, and what is possible is, to some extent, supported, abetted and shaped by the circumstances, environments, structures and systems we find ourselves bathed in all the time. I live in a society that provides a certain amount of protection against some of the worst disrespect a person like me might discover in the world. And from this place of relative protection, I’m actually able to give more. We must continue to fight for opportunities for people who today suffer from a new set of oppressive systems.
sustainable development: I wonder what you think about callout culture, or cancel culture. Is there value in this approach too? Your approach is individual, which sounds right, but it’s slow. But what about other high-impact methods? Do they also move the ball down the field?
RM: in Social justice We may have exaggerated some of the more obvious ways to deal with this. This does not mean that there are not times when we really need to take a strong and resolute stand. It takes a certain skill to act assertively and clearly and to do so in a way that can reduce rather than exacerbate patterns of dissociation and disconnection. For me, it’s never about changing places with the people or processes that caused the harm. It’s really about finding a new way of being with each other. There is an urgent need to know how to work for some idea of justice and how to end oppression, but how to do so in a way that opens the heart, expanding the capacity of all of us to be agents of the kind of universal love that can help us sustain human life. Because the universe will continue in any way, but human life is now at risk because of our failure to figure out how to live together more kindly and effectively on this planet and to appreciate this short window of opportunity we have between the date of birth and the date of death to make a positive impact on this world.
“There is a way that even in the darkest times — the dark generational times where there is no reason to believe your children will ever make it out of it — there is a way to love.”
sustainable development: Have you ever lost your temper?
RM: I often lose my temper on purpose, as a tool for healing. If you feel agitated, desperate or a bit sudden anger In something I hear sounds completely crazy, my coaching journey right now is to allow those feelings to be expressed and to do so as much as possible on a regular enough basis that a kettle is not created that will explode out there. So, if I’m here, at home, where it’s safe, it’s part of my practice to let the anger I feel toward injustice come out immediately. There’s a lot of things going on, and if you’re willing to look at these tough issues, I mean my heart breaks all day every day. I’m humming and singing more these days. I’m humming and singing with others more these days. Singing, holding hands, humming – these are ways that people across the ages and cultures have used to get through difficult times together. I sometimes forget how many generations of people go before recorded human history – for hundreds of thousands of years we know how many battles, and rage, and despair, and brutality towards each other, and yet we survived, and yet we didn’t burn the planet, and yet we figured out how to keep waking up every day and feeding the kids. There is a planet’s worth of wisdom about how to get through difficult times and about the holistic nature of what it takes, and that’s what I’m all about these days.
sustainable development: I thought losing your cool would be like – I don’t know – do you ever want to clear all those books off the bookcase behind you?
RM: I mean, sometimes! When I hear this, I’m tempted to think of those who say: We just have to start over. Blow it up and start over. I don’t have kids, I’m not physically a mother, but I kind of feel like most mothers and most of us in these communities that have suffered a lot over time, you know, here we are. We’re not usually the ones to say let’s burn everything. Because our kids are in it. The things that we have lovingly protected from the worst, as much as we could over the generations, whether through slavery or whatever our cultures and heritages suffered through, we suffered through so that we could live another day and find sources of hope and renewal. That maternal instinct, I think is in all of us on some level, that instinct that would protect, that would go into the fire and pull out what we can and start over, and realizing that, and nurturing that is what I feel called to help support and that comes at least in part from my own lineage as a great-great-granddaughter of formerly enslaved people. There’s a way that even in the darkest times, the dark intergenerational times where there’s no reason to think your kids are going to make it out of this, there’s a way for love, to help bring places where joy and healing can happen, and, my God, if people can do that during the dark times, the holocausts in our history, the periods of enslavement in our history — if it could be done then, we can do it now. I have some love and compassion for those who feel so trapped that the invitation is only to be burned. And I say, before you light a match, look into a child’s eyes, hold a friend’s hand, realize this These very human gestures are importantAnd find that will, that ability to live another day in love.
sustainable development: When I look at what is happening in the world today, the level of unrest, aggression, hatred, and burning, I see a lot of “men in the room.” What do you think the role of women is in helping to achieve this “new way of being with each other”?
RM: I sometimes think about this in traditional identity terms – it seems clear that we need more women in power! But I also believe that what is more fundamental and important is that we need to see a more empowering feminine energy in the world: that energy that lives in all of us – to greater or lesser degrees – the energy that nurtures, that cares, that sees the imprint of the future and the past in everyone and in everything we do. Any one of us can do this. And every one of us must do it.
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