About The Book: Six Stages Framework: Understanding and Dealing with Everyday Racism
This podcast explores our understanding and ability to engage and deal with biases, inequity and racism.
Offering reflections on everyday psychology and explores the impact of discrimination and racism on different sectors of the community from schools to businesses and Universities
Exploring challenges faced by individuals and organisation and offering ideas, support and strategies for equity and inclusion.
The Six Stages Framework is an intersectional tool used to assess where individuals and organisations are in their journey and support them to grow in their understanding and actions.
My Dear White Friend – Letter Four: Please Don’t Make Me Your Textbook
Episode description:
Dear White Friend,
When you ask me to explain racism, have you considered what that conversation might cost me?
For you, it may be a fifteen-minute conversation. For me, it may mean reopening experiences I have spent a lifetime learning how to carry.
In Letter Four of My Dear White Friend, Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah explores the hidden emotional labour of explaining racism, the importance of taking responsibility for our own learning, and what happens when curiosity encounters a boundary.
The letter also asks a more challenging question:
How are you with other Black people when I am not there?
Does your allyship extend beyond the people you know and love? Does greater understanding lead to changes in how you behave?
Through the Six Stages Framework, this letter invites us to move beyond knowledge towards reflection, accountability and meaningful behavioural change.
Read the letter on the Six Stages Framework website.
Read. Listen. Reflect.
#MyDearWhiteFriend #SixStagesFramework #AntiRacism #EmotionalLabour
1 Sept 2026
My Dear White Friend — Letter Three: When a Story Arrives Before You
Letter Three of My Dear White Friend, read by Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah.
What does it mean to enter a new workplace believing you are beginning again — only to wonder whether a story about you may already have arrived?
In this letter, I reflect on professional networks, reputation, belonging and the unsettling possibility that impressions can travel faster than context.
I also ask what race adds to the experience of entering a new professional space.
Do people see your qualifications before they see your race?
Might confidence be read as arrogance, directness as aggression, or authority as something you have overreached to claim?
And what is the psychological cost of having to anticipate those possibilities before you have even begun?
At the heart of Letter Three is a different way of thinking about privilege:
Perhaps privilege is sometimes most visible not in what you receive, but in what you are spared having to think about.
My Dear White Friend is a reflective series exploring race, friendship, belonging, defensiveness, accountability and the difficult work of looking inward.
Read. Listen. Reflect.
What have you been spared having to think about when entering a new professional space?
#MyDearWhiteFriend #Psychology #HumanBehaviour #RaceAndWork #Belonging #Privilege #WorkplaceCulture #Racism #SixStagesFramework #BiasDominoEffect #BiasDominoes
24 Aug 2026
My Dear White Friend - Letter Two: The Discomfort of Looking Within
What happens when understanding racism is no longer only about recognising what happens “out there” — but begins to ask us to examine ourselves?
In Letter Two of My Dear White Friend, I reflect on the discomfort of looking within.
Having Black friends, loving a Black person, raising Black children, doing anti-racism work or considering ourselves an ally may all be meaningful.
But none of these things necessarily makes us immune from bias.
Perhaps the more difficult questions are:
What have these relationships caused me to examine?
What happens when someone I care about tells me something about race that makes me uncomfortable?
Do I become curious — or do I reach for evidence that reassures me that the problem cannot be me?
A central idea within this letter is:
Proximity is not the same as reflection.
When racial bias becomes associated only with being a “bad person”, recognising bias within ourselves can become psychologically threatening.
Sometimes one person may be trying to describe an experience while the other is trying to protect an identity.
Can we hold something more psychologically realistic?
I can be kind and carry bias.
I can love someone and misunderstand something important about their experience.
I can oppose racism and still reproduce racial assumptions.
I can do anti-racism work and still have work to do.
Perhaps the question is not whether we can prove ourselves beyond bias.
Perhaps it is:
What happens when bias becomes visible?
Do we defend?
Do we retreat?
Or can we remain curious long enough to look again?
https://www.sixstagesframework.com/my-dear-white-friend-discomfort-looking-within/ (https://www.sixstagesframework.com/my-dear-white-friend-discomfort-looking-within/)
https://www.sixstagesframework.com/my-dear-white-friend/ (https://www.sixstagesframework.com/my-dear-white-friend/)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-dear-white-friend-letter-two-discomfort-looking-within-m-gadzah-fnhee (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-dear-white-friend-letter-two-discomfort-looking-within-m-gadzah-fnhee)
My Dear White Friend draws upon lived experience, memory and reflective inquiry. Identifying details are changed, generalised or omitted. The “White friend” across the series should not be understood as one person. The letters may draw upon different relationships, encounters, conversations and questions that have emerged over many years.
Read. Listen. Reflect. Lean in together.
Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah
Creator, Six Stages Framework
Contact The Book: Six Stages Framework: Understanding and Dealing with Everyday Racism
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