“For all of its struggles, equity holds the promise of restoring us all.”
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously observed he couldn’t absolutely define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it.
Some concepts like “art” or “equity” are very difficult to define. Your Community Foundation Boulder County has affirmed equity as its guiding vision. But, as Dr. Nita Mosby Tyler noted, one problem with equity is we’ve never seen it fully actualized.
The logic sometimes flows as follows: As we haven’t seen equity we can’t define it, and we can’t pursue something we can’t define. In fact, there is no shortage of attempted definitions. The Community Foundation adopts Dr. Tyler’s definition of equity as “Creating systems where all can thrive.” The gerund is intentional. Equity is more verb than noun.
Some insist it isn’t the quest for a perfect definition that impedes us. We want to understand, but we fundamentally don’t get the meaning of equity.
There is a paradox that shatters this conundrum. We know equity when we don’t see it. We feel it under our collar, in our quickening of breath, in our gut, and in our bones.
Even if we’ve officially done nothing prosecutable, we know it’s not equity to confront a man for being black. We know it’s not equity for the earth to be down to its last dozen trips around the sun before we take dramatic measures to prevent its devastation. We know it’s not equity when more and more people must leave our community while fewer and fewer are able to live in it. We know it’s not equity when kids of color imbued with the same brilliance as white kids must be exceptional to obtain a college degree.
For me, the problem with equity is less that I don’t understand it conceptually. It’s that I struggle with what it takes to achieve it. The unavoidable, painful starting point of equity is the confession that I benefit from inequity – not abstractly or collectively, but personally and individually. As I acknowledge that complicity, I hope I’m able to join others in the life work of dismantling longstanding structures that uphold inequity, and start building equity by creating systems where all can thrive.
This is the ongoing work of equity at the Community Foundation, too – beginning with ourselves and building equity in learning and partnership. There is a hopeful note to be sounded in striving for equity. For all of its struggles, equity holds the promise of restoring us all.
