FACULTY FOCUS ON THE RECORD
PROFESSOR RHONDA MAGEE
Professor Rhonda V. Magee is an expert in teaching mindfulness-based stress reduction interventions for lawyers and law students and minimizing social-identity-based bias. She has been a Dean’s Circle Scholar and served as co-director of USF’s Center for Teaching Excellence and co-facilitator of the Ignatian Faculty Forum faculty development program. Most recently, she published in the Florida State Bar Journal and the Georgetown Law Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives, and she has written a series of articles for the American Bar Association Journal. In the past two years, she contributed chapters to two books, Resources for Teaching Mindfulness: An International Handbook (Springer International Publishing, 2016) and Transforming Justice, Lawyers and the Practice of Law (Carolina Academic Press, 2017).
What do you think are the core causes of implicit bias, explicit bias, and structural discrimination? Explicit biases arise from cultural ideologies and practices with long and meaningful histories. They are deeply ingrained in our society, and most human beings carry them. Implicit biases arise from unconscious mental categories that result from our social interactions in particular places and times. When these categories encompass human beings, we associate whole groups and associated individuals with capabilities and values — a process called stereotyping. Though we may all do it, stereotyping can be lessened. And that’s a good thing because biases lead to structural discrimination, and go against the principles of inclusivity and equity that we endorse today.