SACRED FOOLS EDI

Let’s imagine that we live in a community connected to the outside world by a single road. On this road there is a large pothole that cannot be avoided. Kind-hearted individuals from the outside world hear that our community has been plagued by tire trouble and jump into action. They raise money, and on a day filled with pomp and circumstance they give out a truckload of free tires to the members of our community. Their mission accomplished, they pat themselves on the back and move on. This simple analogy illustrates why many traditional social justice practices and ideologies have fallen short and why we are so committed to finding a better way.

The problem facing our community is not that we are plagued with tire trouble, our problem is that there is a pothole between us and everything we wish to accomplish in the outside world. Some of us missed an important interview, others missed a dialysis appointment. Some of our children fell into the pothole and were injured, burying our families in debt. Many of us got so frustrated with the situation that we accepted our fate and stopped going out at all. Some of us even taught our children to do the same, hoping they could avoid our fate.

What our well-intentioned neighbors actually did was the social justice equivalent of security theatre. To the casual observer their actions appeared to be a step in the right direction, but in reality they wasted vital time and energy on actions that had zero impact on the actual problem at hand. Even if they had an infinite supply of tires and an infinite amount of time to distribute them, they could never hope to address the real problems that my community faces.

Every moment wasted is another moment that my community’s past, present and future is adversely impacted by a single obstacle our would-be rescuers seem completely unaware of. Worse yet, many of our would-be rescuers are so convinced that they are right that they actually pressure and even bully others to duplicate their ill-conceived actions. Even members of our own community are recruited into the cause and do the same. In this, a single piece of broken logic has become the foundation upon which an endless supply of flawed ideologies are based. “My community has tire trouble too!” “In my neighborhood we have engine troubles so we should take priority.” “What about us??”

As we go deeper into the weeds it becomes clear that, a world flooded with broken ideologies is an obstacle that must be faced by anyone hoping to make a real difference. Broken ideologies and the emotional attachments to them are in a very real sense another pothole that cannot be avoided…

This analogy is truly the gift that keeps on giving, and will become its own pothole if we are not careful:) We will continue this thread in later posts, but for now let’s discuss our reason-based approach and how it differs from the status quo.

The real world analog to the pothole in our analogy is resource disparity and the dynamics that nurture and protect it. At its core, it can be defined as the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and the disparate variables one encounters, based on their identity, when maintaining (or changing between) states.  We live in a capitalist society where access to education, transportation, housing, nutrition, even basic healthcare are dictated by one’s financial resources.  The ‘haves’ exert enormous influence over our environment and the have-nots must navigate that environment just to survive, let alone to achieve their goal of becoming a ‘have’ themselves. As history will attest, the ‘haves’ are usually comprised of a single identity group (that of the majority) and thus there is another factor nurturing and protecting resource disparity in our society.

The chart above is a pre-Covid snapshot of a tragic situation that has only gotten worse over the past few years. A chart cannot convey the centuries of heartache, stolen time and wasted potential its numbers represent, but it can provide us all with a much needed reality check if we allow ourselves to see it for what it truly is. It is a numerical depiction of the systemic imbalance that is the root cause of our societal ills. It is a grainy polaroid snapshot of the mother of all potholes and our entire approach to social justice is dedicated to addressing it as directly as humanly possible.

Our EDI Mission Statement
Resource disparity is the river from which all the streams of inequality flow. By focusing our efforts directly on the heart of the problem, we simultaneously impact every inequity that stems from it. Through this we will bring real and lasting change to our community.

In part two, we will continue the discussion by going into the specifics of our approach and identifying some of the obstacles that we will face along the way.