Community Equity

Abstract

A good friend recounted to me a story about her experience holding a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training session for a group of professionals at a private company. At the first meeting, one participant raised her hand to ask what the hiring and treatment of nonwhite people on the job had to do with her home value. Her definition of “equity” prompted her interest in attending the training, but to her dismay, the event seemingly had nothing to do with increasing her real estate portfolio. It is clear that the woman held no reciprocal understanding of “equity” in relationship to the history of structural racism and exclusion. She had no advantageous framework that could hold an accurate view of “equity” and demands for reparations and repair. For her, “equity” was necessarily detached from creating equal and mutually beneficial outcomes for her colleagues, but she was clear that the DEI workplace convening posed a distraction from and a threat to the protection of her individual economic interests. Unfortunately, she is not alone in her assessment. Her affective impulse to protect her privatized gain is part of what compels the cancellation of not only DEI programs and initiatives but the underlying, community-based knowledge about the social unity that emerges from shared histories and shared resources as well. If the “haves” among us are only able to ponder, forget champion, community with the “have nots” when there is no cost to doing so, then collectivity will be baseless and performative because our interests will necessarily be divergent and oppositional. In times like these, who cares about your interests? My friend’s anecdote got me thinking about how the over-investment in home value can obscure the appreciation of community equity. Where do we go from here?