Short Essay
Who Sets the Standards of Equality?
Curatorial Note: This short essay was originally posted Thursday, June 25, 2020 on LinkedIn by E’lana Jordan. It underscores the consequences of failed practices & policies, and the troubling ripple effects that result in a normalized fear culture. It underpins the necessity to reconsider who gets to define “good enough” or “better off.” Inaction carries unintended consequences that become intentional once known. The time for action is now.
“Who sets the standards of equality? We often work with the assumption that equality already exists.” — Angela Davis
Three years ago, I heard Prof Davis speak these words at the Oakland Book Festival, which hosted a conversation between her and Judith Butler on inequality and accessibility. In a painfully ironic moment, a Deaf individual stormed the event, and called out the organizers for not being inclusive and accessible to Deaf people due to the organizer’s failure to secure a certified ASL interpreter. After the commotion, Davis went on to talk about democracy, police brutality, the prison system, and reform. Eventually, she posed another question to the audience, “Why do we assume the old structures are going to be the ones that lead us to a new world?”
Sitting on the floor of an overcrowded balcony, I stopped trying to peer around the large column that blocked my view and just sat in stillness, mentally soaking up her words, searching inside to find answers to her questions.
Two weeks prior, my cousin was murdered by police near Sacramento — the capital of the great liberal state of California. 5am: the phone rang. The voice on the other end, “Something happened to Mikey.” After the brief call, I laid reflective in my bed for a while. In darkness; in shock. Eventually mustering the will to rise, I told my cousin, who I was living with at the time. We looked at each other and cried.
On May 8, 2017, a community lost their baseball coach. A mother lost her only son. An infant son lost a father he would never know.
When the Ferguson protests were erupting, I was conducting fieldwork in Colombia. From afar, I watched as my beloved country of America fell apart and burned. I felt helpless. Angry. Enraged. Sad. All at the same time. When I read headline-after-headline of Black men dying by the hands of police, I never imagined that one day I’d read a name I knew. That they'd try to paint him as a criminal instead of an individual who needed mental help that day. That they'd say in the police report that 28 shots were a "justified" & "reasonable" response to an unarmed man. Never would I have imagined. And for many, thank god you haven’t had to...
Barely a week after my cousin’s death, dozens of cop cars were outside my building. A helicopter hummed above my head. I saw a searchlight and tried to follow it, which led me to a building directly across the street. Several police stepped out of their vehicles and lined up behind their cars. Most of them with rifles pointed toward the spotlight. One officer came into my building asking the units above me — I live on the bottom floor — if they could use their balconies. He wanted to know if they had a clear vantage point. Inaudible requests were coming through the megaphone. The standoff lasted for about an hour. At that point I see a young, frail-looking woman being carried away on a stretcher.
I was a wreck. I couldn’t stop crying and shaking. To this day, I don’t know what caused so much escalation. I don’t know why she left in a stretcher. Nonetheless, it was all unsettling and again too close to home.
Black people have had enough. We’ve had enough of the violence. Enough of the fear. Enough of the repeated trauma again, and again, and again. Enough of the gaslighting. Enough of the diminishing of our voices. Enough crying. Enough worrying. Enough is enough.
Let’s get one thing straight: when America’s forefathers wrote The Constitution in hopes of a “more perfect union,” they had slaves.
Consider: when they signed their names on this foundational document, slaves counted as three-fifths of a person. They failed to see the humanity of my ancestors and never intended to. And it has showed: in their horrific treatment; in the structure of the institutions they created (e.g., law, housing, education, employment); and in their inability to tell the slaves they were even free after emancipation. These structures still exist today.
So to be clear, the “system” is not broken. It is working as intended. White supremacy and White privilege are calculated processes that ensure a small group of privileged individuals hold the majority of power and influence. We see the results of that stronghold on power, born out of a “free” society with slaves, as evidently as looking at mostly White companies, boards, and leadership teams.
We don’t need to reform our systems, we need to radically transform them. Build anew. Black people don’t want to bandaid on a broken system.
What I loved about Prof Davis, during her talk, was that she made abolition accessible. Plain and simple. She explained how abolition gives us a modern framework to think radically different. It allows us to imagine a world we have yet to create. Abolition may sound scary to many. But if it weren't for abolitionists, slaves would not have been freed. Abolitionists worked tirelessly, putting their lives on the line so Black folks could be free. I owe abolitionists everything that I am and everything that I have yet to become.
When COVID-19 hit, it exposed all the weaknesses in our political, health, economic, and social institutions. People began to see these holes in a way they hadn’t before. Stuck at home in lockdowns with business at a crawl, the world was forced to stop and listen. We had to shift into a new way of being. We began to deeply question our priorities as a nation, as institutions, and even as individuals, in a way we really hadn’t had to before. Some say COVID-19 created an aperture moment to reset. Radically transform. Build anew. Who shall be the ones to rebuild our society in this moment? Those who have courage; the courage of abolitionist thinkers who refused to accept the status quo; who moved society forward.
In this significant historical moment, as folks scramble to update their summer reading lists, as companies release various statements & commitments to racial equity, as we learn how to navigate tough conversations, we have a real opportunity to radically change what our future world would look like.
Recently, I started reading a lesser-known collection of essays by James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name). At the end of his essay, “In Search of a Majority,” he leaves the reader with the same words I’ll now leave with you: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” As I think back on Prof Davis’ words, “Who sets the standards for equality?” I now am ready to answer: We, the People, all the People. And that includes Black Americans.