We need the wisdom of cool heads and open hearts more than ever, and part of how we achieve that wisdom is (counterintuitively) allowing the fullness of our human experience, including our anger. Here again we go through the questions and answers from Rhonda Magee as she explores the complexity, frustration, and intimate beauty of learning to create and be peace in the world.
Stephanie Dummett: In your book The inner workings of racial justiceyou describe in detail the steps you took to help one of your students process his attitudes and biases. What energy does this work need?
Rhonda Magee: It requires a certain kind of commitment, a certain willingness to turn to what we might so easily reject, turn away, deny, minimize, avoid. It’s very important to me that when these opportunities arise to understand what’s going on around it, that we address to this opportunity, not from it. I also think it needs some foundation in a certain kind of love—kindness, loving kindness— for me, it requires some sense of value, of being able to connect across multiple differences, and of the importance and value of trying to do it again and again, even when it’s hard.
SD: Why should you do this job?
RM: In my view, absolutely everything is connected, which means we are all connected, and so it seems to me that if we have these opportunities to expand our sense of our common ground, but we don’t take advantage of them and do what we can to heal, restore, and transform the world, then it seems to me that we are essentially creating barriers and obstacles to deep well-being. And for me, it’s worth it because it’s about practice. For me, it comes from deep practice—from the deep ethical foundation of my practice.
SD: Who is this work for? Is it for yourself, for the other person, for the greater good of society? In honor of the practice?
RM: It serves life. The gift is literally to be alive. Actually, for me, it’s not about either of us. Being alive is a great gift, and so the only true response to such a gift is this gratitude. And the way to show gratitude is to try to minimize the damage, wherever it occurs, as best as possible. Acknowledging that we are not perfect, that we cannot always see clearly how what we do contributes to harm, that we are all vulnerable and fallible in our own ways, I say this with great humility. But ultimately, I think it’s a question of who benefits, it benefits lives.
SD: For a racialized person, a racialized 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 stems from a sense of my own agency and what I often call personal justice. The idea that justice begins with us, with how we treat ourselves. Taking care of myself feels like a first approximation of what I’m trying to offer the world. There’s a reason I live in San Francisco and not in North Carolina or Virginia, where I was born and raised. The environment San Francisco seems a little more conducive to that way of accepting people, working across cultures, being multicultural, working with people who have different ways of expressing themselves, whether it’s about race, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status. Specifically, I’m talking about the environment first, and then the practice. We tend to think that with practice we can overcome almost anything, and that’s a good way to think, but I don’t want to miss this opportunity to call out the importance of our embeddedness in the world, and what is possible is to some extent facilitated, prompted, and shaped by the circumstances, environments, structures, and systems in which we find ourselves all the time. I live in a community that provides a certain amount of buffer against some of the worst kinds of disrespect a person like me can find in the world. From this place of relative safety, I can truly give even more. We must continue to fight for opportunities for people who are suffering under new oppressive systems today.
SD: I’m wondering how you feel about callout culture or cancellation culture. Is there value in this approach? Your approach to each other, which seems righteous, but slow. But what about other high-impact approaches? Do they also move the ball down the field?
RM: In Art social justice in the arenas, we may have over-amplified some of the more drastic ways of dealing with it. That’s not to say that there aren’t times when we really need to take a firm and sharp stance. It takes a certain skill to act firmly and clearly and to do so in a way that minimizes rather than exacerbates patterns of dissociation and separation. For me, it’s never just about switching places with people or processes that cause harm. It’s about creating a new way of being with each other. There is a certain urgency in figuring out how to work toward some vision of justice and how to end oppression, but how to do it in a way that opens the heart and expands the capacity of all of us to be agents of social love that can help us sustain human life. Because the universe will go on either way, but human life is now vulnerable because of our inability to figure out how to live together more gently and effectively on this planet and appreciate this brief opportunity we have between birth and death to make a positive impact on this world.
“There’s a way that even in the darkest of times—dark intergenerational times when there’s no reason to think your kids will ever get out of it—there’s a way to love.”
SD: Do you ever lose your cool?
RM: I often lose my cool on purpose, as a tool for my own healing. When I feel excitement and despair or something sudden fury in regards to something that I hear seems completely insane, my own practice at the moment is to let these feelings come out and do it as regularly as possible so as not to create a cauldron that might explode. So when I’m here, at home, where it’s safe, it’s part of my practice to let the anger and rage I feel because of the injustice come out. There are so many things going on that if you want to look at these hard issues, I mean my heart breaks every day. Today, I sing, hum and sing with others more often. Singing, holding hands, humming are all ways that people in different times and cultures have been able to get through difficult times together. Sometimes I forget how many generations of human beings there were before recorded human history – in hundreds of thousands of years we don’t know the amount of fighting, anger, despair, inhumanity to each other, and yet we survived, and yet we didn’t burn the planet, and yet we figured out how to keep getting up every day and feeding our children. There’s a whole planet of wisdom out there about how to get through tough times and the holistic nature of what it takes, so that’s what I’m talking about today.
SD: I thought the loss of self-awareness would be more like, I don’t know, would you ever want to take all those books off the bookcase in the back?
RM: I mean, sometimes! When I hear that, 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 feel like most moms and most of us in these communities that have suffered a lot over time, you know, we’re here. We’re usually not the ones to say let’s burn it all down. Because our children are in it. What we lovingly protected from the worst as we could for generations, whether through slavery or what our cultures and heritage suffered, we suffered to live another day and find sources of hope and rebirth. I think that maternal instinct, I think we all have it on some level, that instinct that will protect, that will go into the fire and pull out what we can and start again, paying attention to that, cultivating that is something that I feel called to uphold, and it comes at least in part from my own lineage as the granddaughter of the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people. There is a way that even in the darkest of times, intergenerational dark times, when there’s no reason to think your children will ever get out of it, there’s a way to love, to help create places where joy and healing can happen, and my God, if people could do that in much darker times, the holocausts of our history, the enslavement periods of our history—if it could be done then, we can do it now. I have some love and compassion for those who feel so besieged that it calls to just burn it. And I say: before you light a match, look into a child’s eyes, take a friend’s hand, understand this these very human gestures matterand look for that will, that ability to live another day in love.
SD: When I look at what is happening in the world today, the level of unrest and aggression, hatred and smoking, I see a lot of “men in the room”. What do you think about the role of women in bringing about this “new way of being with each other”?
RM: Sometimes I think about it in conventional terms of identity—it seems obvious that we need more women in power! But I also think that more fundamentally and importantly, we need to see a stronger feminine energy in the world: the energy that lives in all of us—to a greater or lesser degree—the energy that nurtures, that cares, that sees the imprint of the future and the past in everyone and everything we do. This can be done by each of us. And each of us should.
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