Neal Ortenberg
“Equality, Equity & Justice”
“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome… Justice can take equity one step further by fixing the systems in a way that leads to long-term, sustainable, equitable access for generations to come.”1
I was raised to know I am Jewish, and I have always felt that being a Jew is part of who I am. In my early teens I confronted my Jewishness in a way I did not expect. I was taking a walk and crossed the path of a group of Caucasian boys in their later teens aggressively bantering antisemitic barbs. Fear raced through me, but I knew I would be safe, because they could not know I was Jewish by my appearance. I looked white like them. I walked on silently without incident, wondering why those boys hated Jews, knowing that if I were a person of color, I could not have escaped safely from an anti-racial attack.
For the past 25 years I have studied the Dharma, the teaching of the Buddha, and I practice as best as I can in my daily life the Dharma teaching of showing loving kindness to all beings. Yet there are times when I have walked past a black man on the sidewalk and felt fear in my gut because the man is black, and then felt shame for having that feeling. What could I be afraid of?
Is it the tribal nature of the human species that makes the attainment of an equitable society so difficult? I read one article, Tribalism Is Human Nature 2, suggesting that “selective pressures have sculpted human minds to be tribal, and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups.” And I read another article, Humans are not Tribal 3, suggesting that “Humanity did not evolve with an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. Solving society’s problems requires that we first diagnose them correctly.”
Can we as a community take equity that one step further toward justice and find ways to fix our social systems in a way that leads to long-term, sustainable, equitable access for generations to come? What a huge task. I will continue to be as kind as I can to all human beings and when I experience anger or hurt or fear in reaction to the words or behavior of others, I will practice looking deeply into myself to find the source of those reactions.
1 Equity vs. Equality: What’s the Difference, Milton Public Health, George Washington University, 2020
2 Clark, Cory & Liu, Brittany & Winegard, Bo & Ditto, Peter. (2019). Tribalism Is Human Nature. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 10.1177/0963721419862289
3 Augustin Fuentes, John Templeton Foundation, The Well (2022), https://bigthink.com/the-well/tribalism-humans-not-tribal/