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

Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

“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)