Imagine Equality

Equality is fundamental to a society. Can you imagine a society that prioritizes it? Next in my Imagine series: imagine equality, and why equality matters.

What’s so great about equality? It seems to be en vogue lately in some circles to bring the value of equality into question. Let’s be honest: diversity, equity, and inclusion, three keystone concepts propping up the equality tent, are under assault right now by the President of the United States, imposing his will across the entire executive branch.

When it’s your questionable uncle at the family reunion trash-talking DEI, then maybe you can weigh whether or not to sully yourself by stepping into the ring with him. But when it’s your President, and his cronies, attacking DEI, along with his waning but still volatile MAGA supporters, then you have a serious problem.

…and when your President is carting people away based on the color of their skin into concentration camps, then you have a very real problem…especially when you claim he supports the cause of justice.

Justice can’t work without the blindfold.

But this is where we are in history.

We have hundreds of people being tortured (inadequate drinking water, interrupted sleep, and even reports of putting people in boxes like what you saw in Django Unchained—thought that didn’t happen, didn’t you?) Here we are, having to again make the case for equality. And what better case can you come up with than the one of your own imagination?

Fear. That’s what entrenches inequality. It’s fear of the other, based on unmentionable stereotypes that get rooted in the brain and come out in the worst ways. Imagine if there wasn’t that fear. What then?

The late, deceased, croaked, basically dead Charlie Kirk has a now-famous question that goes something like: “what happens when you see a black woman flying a plane?” to which he answers for himself. To paraphrase, he got nervous because he thought she might be there due to DEI.

Friends, that is a common sentiment.

It doesn’t matter how qualified you are. I can say (being half-black and able to sometimes pass, depending on what I do with my hair), this is a common experience. People will question your qualifications more if you are a minority. Just the flat truth, meant to inform, not to judge.

Now on to the imagination part: imagine if it weren’t that way.

Imagine if Charlie Kirk had recognized that fundamental proverb of Buddhism: “preceded by perception are the mental states.” In other words, before you experience emotion, you impose on the situation your own expectations, real or otherwise, and react to those more than the reality of the moment.

I’m not pushing Buddhism here; it’s just that it’s a very perceptive tool in the Buddhist tool-belt. Imagine if Charlie Kirk had realized, at that very moment, that he’d brought his own biases to his thinking. Imagine if he’d understood that his rejection of someone’s qualifications to fly, which have very rigid controls, and for good reason, was completely founded on his own personal biases? Then he wouldn’t have had to tour college campuses complaining about DEI. He could have, instead, simply enjoyed a safe flight.

Inequality isn’t some magic problem that suddenly society has to deal with. It’s a thousand interactions, every day, that reinforce the negative stereotypes. This is why the microaggressions conversation matters, by the way. Imagine being on the receiving end of bias every single day of your life, in subtle ways that don’t quite meet the standard of hard-core racism, but are racist even while straddling the line of “what did he really mean?” But I’m not just talking about racism. I’m talking about disability as well. It’s easy to say that someone can’t do [pick a job] because they’re disabled. Only by imagining that they can do the job can you begin to understand how that might be possible. Personal biases block that.

Perpetrators of bias and those who’ve internalized it and refuse self-reflection suffer daily. They suffer the fear of the black pilot, for example.

Here’s another example: I met a couple who moved to the Seattle area once because there weren’t enough white people where they’d been living to work. Sure, there were all kinds of rationalizations they added, but at the end of the day, that was the basis of their decision: not enough white people. Imagine the mentality of such people, the fear that I’m certain they experienced, based largely on their own biases. Now, imagine a world without such fear. Imagine if they’d actually been able to see the people they were near as people, and not as “non-white” people. They would have experienced so much less fear and anger, two toxic emotions that can affect a person’s health.

My point in all of this is that fear is often based on bias, which is often based on ideas that we make up, over any real truth. The biases that we cling to build fear in our hearts and cause us to suffer, which we then take out on others. So imagine equality instead.

Imagine a world where the pilot, who passed all of their certifications to be a pilot, is just a pilot. Imagine a world where other people aren’t non-white, but are instead just people, and the anxiety that realization could save you.

I imagine equality as the one giant dial that can turn down the temperature of a society, if only we could internalize that concept and truly believe it. If every time we reacted, first we thought about what our reaction meant in our minds, and only once we’ve filtered out the bias, did we share whatever edgy opinion it might be we’ve latched on to. There’s a world in which this is true, and that world is friendly and peaceful. That world has no ICE agency because let’s face it, 90% of the mission of ICE is based on biased fears of the other. There would be no toppling over of nations because we thought their people were all bad people (which makes no sense on the face of it). There would be no separate system of justice for wealthy people because we would do the same there: no inequality means no inequality in the eyes of the justice system as well.

So many social problems would cease to exist if we worked toward equality. We don’t even truly have to get all the way there. We just have to get to the point where we’re comfortable questioning our own impulses and checking ourselves. It’s not complicated, but it does take commitment and time. We’ve got to put in the energy. If we do, the rewards are peace, happiness, and justice, things which, right now, it seems we could use a little more of.