Our Journey to a Consciousness of All

A quarter century ago, PolicyLink’s founding leaders undertook a bold experiment to build a Black-led policy organization, headquartered about as far as possible from the DC Beltway, with the mission of advancing racial equity. Today, this might not seem so audacious, but the idea was radical at the time. It went against the well-intended advice of close friends and allies who didn’t think the nation was ready for such a concept. People understand equality and justice, they reasoned, but you will lose them with equity.

There was some truth in their counsel: The nation wasn’t ready. But readiness is a luxury we’re rarely afforded at pivotal moments in our history. Commonsense ideas of equality and justice, while good and necessary, were not expansive enough to help us realize our potential as individuals and as a society. The vision of society that PolicyLink was founded on required an imaginative new worldview to lift our collective gaze to the horizon of possibility. Ready or not, that vision demanded equity—just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential.

Since our founding, the world has continually changed—and so must we. 

The country has grappled with race in new, often painful and sometimes promising ways. Our movement has worked to craft the framing and surface the data to position people impacted by structural oppression in public discourse; to elevate the principle of equity and build the political will to act on that principle; and to lift up the voice, wisdom, and experience of people long excluded from consideration in policy debates and decision-making. Now “equity” is a ubiquitous part of the daily lexicon across all sectors.

The equity movement has also enjoyed policy victories at all levels of government, including presidential executive orders, as well as in the private sector. With these achievements, our collective efforts have helped shape the nation’s history. Our dedication, connections, and solidarity have proven our greatest strengths.

And yet the political whiplash the nation has experienced in the last 25 years serves as a stark reminder that none of our victories are fully secured. Despite incremental progress, the systems that produce inequity and injustice appear immune to transformation, and ideological divisions seem deeper than ever. We have seen binary thinking and ideological polarization incubate in the American body politic, feeding not only the cancer of human suffering but also a malignant uncertainty about the credibility of our civil institutions.

But this is not a moment to retreat. Instead, we must strengthen our commitment to the world we want to create. We are the heirs of a nation that can still live up to its noblest ideals, which is both a gift and a humbling responsibility. We should remember the words of John Gardner, the former US secretary of health, education, and welfare, who cautioned against the risk of atrophy for institutions, societies, and leaders that fail to address the need for reflection and renewal. “High standards are not enough,” Gardner wrote. “A society that has reached heights of excellence may already be caught in the rigidities that will bring it down. An institution may hold itself to the highest standards and yet already be entombed in the complacency that will eventually spell its decline.”

To take seriously this warning against the atrophy of our institutions and leadership, we must pause and reflect on our own actions with humility and loving accountability. 

Which of our habits have outlived their usefulness? What practices are stuck in outdated paradigms? Where have we idealized solutions and romanticized ideas that would be better served by concrete action? Where has the power of our movement been siphoned away into symbolic battles, semantic debates, and cosmetic adjustments in the face of oppressive systems?

PolicyLink’s leadership has wrestled with these questions in an ongoing process of self-reflection. Time and again, we have asked ourselves, as all organizations should, “Do we deserve to exist?” Our organizational result, the North Star against which we want to be held accountable, is that all people in the United States of America—particularly those who face the barriers of structural oppression—participate in a flourishing democracy, prosper in an equitable economy, and live in thriving communities of opportunity. Are we stewarding our resources and marshaling our efforts to produce actual, meaningful progress toward that end?

For better or worse, the political and social environments in which we operate have changed, and we know that yesterday’s maps do not accurately reflect tomorrow’s terrain. “Adapt or perish,” wrote H. G. Wells, “is nature’s inexorable imperative.” This is the crossroads we have reached as a movement and as a nation. If we intend to continue changing the world, we must prepare to change ourselves, our institutions, 

and our ways of being in the world.

This is the hard truth our movement now confronts: If we are going to achieve our aims, we must be willing to think and move differently, lest the contentment of our successes become our downfall. 

“Renewal,” Gardner observed, “is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.”

To renew ourselves and the nation, we must occupy the highest ground, spiritually and politically, and fortify ourselves to be ready to advance change. We have to envision and build a shared future so expansive and uncompromising that it becomes irresistible. We must operate with indomitable love, attending to both the soul work and practical revolutionary thinking that the future demands.

Moral leadership requires acknowledging difficulties, considering objections, and demonstrating a willingness to do what is right and just, and to take responsibility for the consequences.

Six years ago, we published a report, “100 Million and Counting: A Portrait of Economic Insecurity in the United States,” to provide a clear-eyed and data-driven assessment of the economic challenges facing so many in the nation. As we were beginning to move into a more disciplined approach to our organizational results, we found that there were more than 100 million people in the United States living in or near poverty—and that half of them were white.

In the data we found structural oppression—and we found that it had metastasized. Exclusion, alienation, and exploitation have spread across systems, inflicting deep personal and community wounds across race, gender, class, or geography. We saw plainly the depth of pain in which so many people are living.

This moment turned out to be soul-searching for our institution: Would we center the 100 million people and serve who the data tells us to serve?

Our mission and legacy were built on centering racial equity. Our staff was, and remains, composed mostly of people of color and entirely of individuals committed to remedying racial inequities. Some among us were troubled by the implication that PolicyLink would name a target population (the 100 million) that seemed to undercut our focus on racial equity. Should we focus on the needs of the roughly 50 million people of color within that group? This discomfort was not unreasonable. For Black and Brown people who have lived with structural racism, the frustration and fear that they might be asked to sacrifice or suspend their hard-won visibility is understandable. For individuals who have dedicated their lives to this work, the perceived threat to their identity and ways of operating in the world is not unfounded.

We confronted questions about who we would serve and who we might deny. Would we let go of the familiar and even “successful” constraints in which we operated to honor a deeper, if more difficult, principle? It was a moment of trembling: We heard objections that to serve all would be naive and self-defeating. We heard trepidation that widening our gaze would amount to surrendering our mission, which remained incomplete. But this was a moment of steadfast resolution, when we reaffirmed that we would follow the clarion call of equity, no matter what.

We could not in good conscience deny anyone. 

For PolicyLink, embracing all of those 100 million people aligned with the definition of equity that was always at the heart of our mission: Just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential. In other words, the ends of equity have always been ends for everyone: the transformation of our society—our laws, regulations, customs, institutions, and ways of relating—so that everyone can flourish.

The task of leadership is not to avoid discomfort. Rather, when leaders grasp what is right, just, and true, fidelity to these ideals must be nonnegotiable. Moral leadership requires acknowledging difficulties, considering objections, and demonstrating a willingness to do what is right and just, and to take responsibility for the consequences.

We know that embracing the “all” as the fullest expression of equity is not an easy ask, but it is the only path to the future we envision: 

A society where a person’s race or zip code does not predict their life outcomes. A nation where no one is expected to experience violence or poverty or hunger or privation. The dismantling of social systems built on oppressive hierarchies of human value.

Our generation’s most important work is neither to relitigate the challenges we face nor to reframe their solutions. No better case could be made for inclusion or belonging than has already been made, and our movement has demonstrated all the brilliance, technical sophistication, and dedication we need. But these qualities alone will not be enough to realize the promise of equity.

Now we must summon the courage and discipline to remake our society so that all people can prosper and thrive, working at the scale of the opportunities that confront us.

The psychotherapist Alfred Adler wrote, “It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.” This is doubly the case when the society that would allow us to live the promise of equity doesn’t yet exist. We have been socialized to fight the good fight in a world that could hardly tolerate, much less demand, that we live up to our highest principles. We must make that demand of ourselves, and in so doing call forth a world that is worthy of our ideals.

This is the journey we are on today, and it is the journey we invite you to join. 

In this essay, we have shared a glimpse of our path to embracing all. In “A Revolution of the Soul,” we impart some of the insights we have gleaned and the challenges with which we have wrestled, and we make the case for why we must learn to love everyone.

The task before us is to make an evolutionary leap to build social, cultural, and governing systems that work in service of human flourishing while manifesting within our souls an abiding love for all.

AUTHORS

Michael McAfee is CEO of PolicyLink.

Ashleigh Gardere is president of PolicyLink.