At our nation’s inception, inequity continues to steal our collective wealth and progress, destroy the well-being of our families and communities, and abuse the intellectual and physical bodies of our children. However, it is our focus on policies and structural powers, not race or class polarities, that will ensure the precision and efficacy of our social justice efforts in schools, health, and every area of society. We are more than our privilege or lack thereof, our best intentions or worst assumptions, the charities we patronize, the inner-city schools we erect, the demonstrations we attend, the social media posts we write, and the partisan groups we subscribe to. We are more than the labels, rationalizations, and justifications of inequitable policies and structures of racism that penalize, suspend, exclude, and criminalize us due to our single-parent childhoods, socioeconomic realities, immigration status, the perceived intent of skin color, nonwhite cultural and social norms, and our experiences with racial trauma, other, or neither. We love deeper, lead better, and live richer when we are liberated from an identity earned only by our paternal care for those we perceive to be in need and a socially constructed identity dependent on what others perceive about us. We, in all of God’s Glory and by Grace, were intended to be and forever remain equally capable and sufficiently adequate groups of culture, gender, and class, not despite our differences, but because of our differences.
