It's Time to Redefine Equality
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It is no secret that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers owned hundreds of slaves when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. So then—as we approach July 4th, many of us with a new lens during what is being proclaimed as the most significant civil rights uprising of our time-- whose independence are we commemorating on July 4th? Mainly, the freedom of white, wealthy men. They were the only free people in the land. Equality was for them and shared among them only.
How then, on July 4th, 2020, in this moment of global, collective awakening and a widespread acknowledgment and reckoning to the reality of systemic racism, police brutality, and inequality intentionally built as the foundation in the United States, do we reclaim Equality? What does it look like for all of us to be equal?
Audre Lorde, American writer, feminist, librarian, and civil rights activist, cited by author Ibram X. Kendi, in How to Be An Antiracist, states we have no roadmap for relating to other as equals:
"We have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals."
We may have no roadmap, little to no examples, but we must start paving the road by redefining, experimenting, and practicing Equality. Our collective liberation depends on our mutual Equality. We are not free—or able to connect to our collective genius-- until we are all free. And we are not all free until we are all equal.
For more than 20 years, we have been practicing a new definition of Equality within our team and with our clients. We define Equality, one of the four pillars of our Shared Leadership Framework™, as "relating as equal learning partners in full acknowledgment of what we can contribute and learn from each other." We emphasize the practice of Equality because practice is how we learn to embody our values.
And though we are no experts, here are a few things we have learned: First, it starts with the individual. We must see each person as a human being first and honor one another's individuality and differences. Historically, attempts to create neutral environments devoid of difference usually default to a culture where dominant power is normative.
Secondly, we've learned that Equality requires us to care beyond our current paradigms and to learn and grow together beyond our current comfort and imagination. This expansion looks like sharing power, stepping back to make space for each other, and creating new policies in government, school, and in the workplace, which contribute to a race equity culture. (Look for an upcoming post as we share our learning regarding the differences between Equity and Equality).
We've also learned that teams at work, where most of us spend the majority of our waking hours, are an excellent place for the regular and intentional practice of Equality. Our emphasis on practice within teams at work reflects the reality of how much time we spend in organizations and how what happens in our organizational lives shapes our culture, economy, and political systems.
Forty-nine years after Martin Luther King Jr's dream for his "four little children to one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," Barack Obama, reflecting on the Supreme Court's marriage equality decision, said, "When all Americans are treated as equal we are all more free." Two weeks ago, we made history as the racist police secrecy law was banished, and many states banned police chokeholds. Simultaneously, the police who murdered Breonna Taylor, walk free. Justice comes for some and wanes for others. We have come so far in our pursuit of Equality, and yet there is much more to do. We must-- we must---keep practicing.
It's time to redefine equality.
Next week we will share a few ways your team can begin the immediate practice of Equality.