The Inner Work of Racial Justice

Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness

By: Rhonda V. Magee, Jon Kabat-Zinn - foreword

Narrated by: Rhonda V. Magee, Jon Kabat-Zinn

“Illuminates the very heart of social justice and how it might be approached and nurtured through mindfulness practices in community and through the discernment and new degrees of freedom these practices entrain.” (from the foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn)

In a society where unconscious bias, microaggressions, institutionalized racism, and systemic injustices are so deeply ingrained, healing is an ongoing process. When conflict and division are everyday realities, our instincts tell us to close ranks, to find the safety of our own tribe, and to blame others. This book profoundly shows that in order to have the difficult conversations required for working toward racial justice, inner work is essential. Through the practice of embodied mindfulness - paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations in an open, nonjudgmental way - we increase our emotional resilience, recognize our own biases, and become less reactive when triggered.

As Sharon Salzberg, New York Times-bestselling author of Real Happiness writes, “Rhonda Magee is a significant new voice I've wanted to hear for a long time - a voice both unabashedly powerful and deeply loving in looking at race and racism.” Magee shows that embodied mindfulness calms our fears and helps us to exercise self-compassion. These practices help us to slow down and reflect on microaggressions - to hold them with some objectivity and distance - rather than bury unpleasant experiences so they have a cumulative effect over time. Magee helps us develop the capacity to address the fears and anxieties that would otherwise lead us to re-create patterns of separation and division.

It is only by healing from injustices and dissolving our personal barriers to connection that we develop the ability to view others with compassion and to live in community with people of vastly different backgrounds and viewpoints. Incorporating mindfulness exercises, research, and Magee's hard-won insights, The Inner Work of Racial Justice offers a road map to a more peaceful world.

©2019 Rhonda V. Magee (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"This book opens doors for all of us to better understand the conditioning that keeps us feeling so separate and apart. Rhonda Magee is a significant new voice I've wanted to hear for a long time - a voice both unabashedly powerful and deeply loving in looking at race and racism. Most important, Rhonda's voice is a practical one, illuminating a path each of us can follow to a life filled with far greater awareness, connection, and peace." (Sharon Salzberg, New York Times best-selling author of Real Happiness)

“With warmth, knowledge, and personal storytelling, Rhonda Magee offers us a path to look into the painful truths of structural racial oppression with mindfulness and compassion, which provides the necessary emotional grounding to skillfully work through the pain to generate new solutions through authentic connections to more communities. It may take generations to undo the harms of systemic racial oppression, but with this revolutionary book, Rhonda brings us many generations closer.” (Helen Weng, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco)

“A powerful and important book on how to apply mindfulness to address racial, social, and economic divisions in a way that nurtures individual and group healing and integration. Rhonda Magee models the compassion, courage, and wisdom needed to understand, examine, and deconstruct very painful manifestations of racism in our society.” (Due Quach, author of Calm Clarity)

gentle

The narrator has a gentle voice as she presents very challenging perspectives that normally give rise to uncomfortable or defensive feelings. Dr. Magee encourages one to breathe and accept those emotions that might come up, examine them and move forward.

Inner Work of Racial JUSTICE

I enjoyed this book from beginning to end. It is excellently written, inspiring, and educational, prompting deep reflection on my own inner journey as a BIPOC woman and the profound impact of growing up in a racist society. The book provides valuable insights into mindfulness-based inner work and has helped me recognize and address my own biases, as well as their effects on others and myself. Additionally, it has empowered me to advocate for both myself and others.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in delving into aspects of our country's history and breaking free from the anguish of living within imposed beliefs of not belonging, undeservingness, and unfair treatment due to race. It serves as an instructional guide for personal growth, offering practical steps towards achieving inner peace and freedom. I believe it is essential for all of us, regardless of race, to engage in this work, as it sheds light on the struggles of BIPOC individuals globally and offers a path forward through radical racial understanding and action.

life changing

this book offers each of us the opportunity to look inward deeply. this is about doing the work to support sustainable change.

Deeply insightful & engaging

Magee took her time to not only convey the beauty of what her mindfulness practice has provided her in this life, but also her sincerest commitment to seeing the good in each and every one of us on the path to making our country and our world more racially just.

Informational. Humane.

What a gift to our society! A gift to oneself. I'm thankful Rhonda has dedicated her time and energy to bring us such a development.

A gift to everyone working to bring about a more just world

Listen to this essential book for its thoroughness in exploring social, historical, and legal backgrounds and contexts as it provides illuminating examples and personal histories. These lived experiences and her compassionate, wise responses to them will move you and provide a model for how you might navigate similar moments. Her training in mindfulness practices and understanding of their valuable applications to racial justice work may inspire you to continue the journey of working to transform the world through love and action when you had almost given up in despair. Listening to her narrating her own book is almost as good as attending one of her workshops in person. You can hear the sincerity and compassion in her voice.

Good back story

The author’s history was engaging. Beyond that, the message does not stand out in a sea of supposedly required reading from academics.

Confused word salad

This book was required reading for a talk given by the author at my school. It turns out the book itself seemingly related little to the talk, so the assigned reading was more or less just the school kicking money the author’s way, but I digress.

While Ms. Magee was lovely and engaging, and while I believe mindfulness is a powerful tool for the human spirit and body and I believe that racism is very real and something that needs to be talked about frankly, with an eye toward making this world a better place, I really struggled to find more than a passing overlap between the two themes. Given the fact that this overlap was essentially the thesis of this work, it was a real challenge to get through it. As a liberal myself, I found that it essentially read like a word salad of liberal concepts jumbled together with no throughline. In speaking with my classmates, I was not alone in this assessment. Perhaps it makes sense to someone in this very niche school of thought but a group of reasonably intelligent grad students were pretty lost overall.

After attempting to read it on the page and struggling mightily — I found myself reading entire passages over and over without having any idea what she was trying to say — I got the audio version in the hopes that it might make sense in the author’s voice. Ultimately I found the medium was irrelevant to my grasp of the content, though, and I eventually stopped even bothering to hit rewind. The anecdotes and stories of her and others’ experiences were engaging and thought provoking but generally the book was just all over the place and at times felt like it was simultaneously written for everyone and no one in particular.

I’m open to the possibility that perhaps these two concepts do actually cohere in some fashion and if that’s the case then unfortunately this book did them a great disservice.