When the Road Rises
When I was taking high school physics (which I never understood) our teacher asked us to define “matter.”
“You know what?” he said. “We can’t define it. We can only describe what it is, in relation to something else.”
Is it any wonder I never understood physics?
I feel the same way about “equity.” I may not have read the perfect definition of it yet, but I know it when I don’t see it. Like any ideal that doesn’t yet exist, we can recognize it by example: “Does this feel like equity or inequity?”
My mother was a career school teacher. She started out in remedial reading and finished her work in special education. She volunteered in a juvenile detention center. When I was a kid, I asked my mother when she could tell how a child would fare in life. She replied she knew by the time a child was in the sixth grade. I was appalled. I accused her of predetermining and limiting the potential of a child. She told me I could call it whatever I wanted, but she knew. I understand this as “inequity” now.
By the way, my opinion didn’t stop my mother from pouring every ounce of her energy and belief into each child for over fifty years.
One day we will not be able to predict the wellbeing of a child by her race or gender or the wealth of her family. I suppose I would call this equity.
Angela Glover Blackwell writes, “Equity means promoting just and fair inclusion throughout society and creating the conditions in which everyone can participate, prosper, and reach his or her full potential.”(1)
But a rising tide does not equally lift all boats. Achieving equity is harder than it sounds.
A landmark study released in March 2018 reported, “Black and white boys have very different outcomes even if they grow up in two-parent families with comparable incomes, education, and wealth, live on the same city block, and attend the same school.” (2)
But we knew, long before we saw this data, that we can’t discuss equity without discussing race.
About a year after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon Johnson said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” (3)
The double helix of race and class is the DNA of our social fabric. We saw the evidence of this reality in our TRENDS report. We heard a yearning for connectedness and equity in our listening journey of Boulder County. We have heard the bell and we can’t unring it. Maybe we still can’t describe equity perfectly, but we can say something. Maybe we can’t achieve equity completely, but we can do something.
Writing on philanthropy, Vu Le observed, “Equity has become the next coconut water: refreshing, new, trendy, full of electrolytes, good for you…True equity requires us not to just throw around concepts…It requires us to change our ways of doing things.” (4)
On April 4, 2018, we will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. His words, published in “Why We Can’t Wait,” are just as urgent today:
“We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.” (5)
Let us walk the road to equity together. Some of the most painful steps will be on the journey within. We will stumble along the way, but the road rises toward justice.
Yours in community,
Jeff
1 “The Curb-Cut Effect.” Stanford Social Innovation Review. Winter 2017 Angela Glover Blackwell
2 [“Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” by Raj Chetty (Stanford), Nathaniel Hendren (Harvard), Maggie R. Jones (U.S. Census Bureau), and Sonya Porter (U.S. Census Bureau)]
3 Commencement Address at Howard University: “To Fulfill These Rights.” June 4, 1965 President Lyndon Johnson
4 Nonprofit AF.com: “Is Equity the New Coconut Water?” September 7, 2014 Vu Le
5 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” published in “Why We Can’t Wait”. April 16, 1963 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
