Defined: Equity & Social Movements

I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive “othering” of people and language…

- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

The purpose of this collection of essays is to think through problem that has yet to be recognized as a problem: the problem of definitions. The problem is that words mean things. This sounds foolish and facile, I know but the core problem with language has always been meaning and where meaning is or isn’t. What I mean to say is that when we don’t all agree on what a word means then the results actually become nonsense. When I say nonsense, I mean literally the absence of sense. We speak to each other, but we don’t know what we mean and therefore we cannot account for why the products of our arguments are different, why our work produces things that do not align—do not speak to each other.

But definitions are tricky. Because the work of a definition is foundational it’s also the easiest thing to get wrong and end time is the thing that creates the most conflict. If we offer a definition here we run the risk of upsetting those who have operated under different definitions either in the past or concurrent with the work that we are doing today. However, if we don’t offer up definitions, we are failing to account for the simple fact that we are currently without one.

I should say here what we are most interested in defining is the term “equity”—it would probably be helpful to specify that. But I should note that (in a slightly performative way) it’s possible to drag on for quite some time without the specifics, isn’t it? Anyway, the term “equity” has seen a proliferation of usage across a number of policy spaces over the last 10 years but has a painfully thin literature around what it means. The public health field has, without a doubt, done the most work around creating a working definition that can be operationalized in all field related activities. In 2003 Dr. Paula Braveman wrote,

Equity in health can be defined as the absence of systematic disparities in health (or in the major social determinants of health) between social groups who have different levels of underlying social advantage/disadvantage—that is, different positions in a social hierarchy. Inequities in health systematically put groups of people who are already socially disadvantaged (for example, by virtue of being poor, female, and/or members of a disenfranchised racial, ethnic, or religious group) at further disadvantage with respect to their health (Braveman & Gruskin, 2003, p. 254).

However, when turning to other fields the definitional issues become substantially murkier. The justice system does not seem to be operating under a unified definition of what equity means or what it would mean for their outcomes and most of the education literature (both K-12 and higher ed) traces its work back to Brown v. Board of Ed and so therefore is predominantly concerned with Black children having access to segregated space—which notably does not align with the definition put forward by public health. Perhaps most interestingly in a 2016 review of philanthropic activity at 15 major foundations it was found that most did not have a clear definition of equity. The authors note:

Definitions among our interviewees included viewing “equity” as a synonym for “social justice” or “equality” or “race equity.” Many spoke of equity in terms of providing opportunity. However, most of the foundations we spoke with admitted they had no “official” definition of equity. This was a curious finding, since having a clear definition of equity (or at least a working definition) would seem paramount to galvanizing staff around an equity lens or framework and moving the work forward. Many foundations appear to guide their work via intuition rather than a clear definition. (Putnam-Walkerly & Russell, 2016, p. 2)  

This is remarkable. Particularly given that it is these foundations that have driven ‘equity-based’ transformations across a number of fields over the last 20 years.

With that in mind we hope to contribute to the (start of a) conversation in several ways. Our hope is to offer a complex definition of equity with multi-field applicability using higher education as a testing ground (Trapdoors: Equity and Higher Education); fully integrate that notion of equity with a systems-level approach (It Doesn’t Have to be Mysterious: A Case for Systems Theory in Higher Education); and finally to make the case that none of this can truly be done without including the voices of those who have been historically excluded from the conversation (Nobody Had Ever Asked: The Future of Education from the Perspective of People of Color).

However, the real purpose of this forward is quite simple: to make you suspect of everything that follows. I say this because while the theory that informs these essays is quite sound (if I do say so myself) they are still missing precisely what they argue that we center: the voices of people. While the final paper, Nobody Had Ever Asked, includes the voices of a limited number of people of color from within the higher education sector this kind of sampling can hardly be called representative. Moreover, there is an absence of the voices of those who are not currently connected to higher education. And, as we discuss, systems are often normed around those we presume will benefit from their construction rather than attempting to actually ascertain what would be most valuable to those who previously (or currently) do not see themselves and their desires reflected in the design of systems.

There is no remedy for this absence. No amount of theory that can disguise the void that’s created when real people are not given the license to speak about their lived experience. So we will put this here not as the final exercise in definitional clarity but rather as placeholder. Or perhaps as a sort of early cartographic exercise. We have circumnavigated a space that only other voices can flesh out, fill in. An apt metaphor since it is maps that tell us where to go, which rivers to cross and what mountains we’ll need to climb.

Another voyage then. How exciting.