No Wonder They’re Mad
In a series of essays this fall, john a. powell advocates for a renewed and strengthened commitment to belonging. Powell leads the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
On its website, the OBI defines belonging as a powerful way to realize a vision of “a world where every person is seen, valued, and empowered — a world where each individual's humanity is recognized and celebrated, and the planet itself included in the circle of human concern.”
powell asks, “What is the story that rejects ... dehumanization and division ... and offers [instead] an expansive story where all people have dignity, recognition, and the right to participate equally?”
It seems to me that in these lines, powell sums up the question that’s driven decades of movements for social justice.
Yet, for the years I’ve been involved with those movements, the ‘people’ to which this work applied seemed, to many, not to include them — men, white people, some people of faith, some people with conservative political inclinations, some who live in constant states of economic instability. When they complained, they were called “fragile” and worse.
Stay with me here, if you will. I know this is tender territory.
The assumption in many parts of movements for social justice has been that those folks should get over their complaints, acknowledge the unearned privilege afforded to them by dint of their assigned gender or race, or their chosen or inherited faith or political perspectives, and let that privilege go. Sometimes that assumption is delivered as derision.
The problem with that assumption is that not all people have the capacity to take that in, let alone act on it. Because people are, well, human — possessed of unending varieties of emotional resilience, intelligences, abilities, cultures, world views, and traumas both generational and very much in the present.
In the small circle of my own life, I can think of dozens of people whose perspective on life and society is framed by their very real day-to-day challenges — money, physical health, grief, jobs, addiction, mental health, past or very much present abuse, housing, and aging, to name just a few. They make sense of all that through the lens of beliefs that help them hold on to a sense of self and of community.
A lot of those beliefs are at odds with mine, but these are good-hearted, well-meaning people. A few of them are as close to my heart as anyone gets.
They don’t respond well when they hear that their troubles don’t matter in the context of what, to them, are abstract ideas. Ideas like privilege, social structure, and systemic, historic oppression. The very ideas that have grounded my own activism since I was in my twenties.
In fact, to them, the brushing away of their experience feels diminishing and dehumanizing. Exactly the opposite of belonging.
No wonder they’re mad. No wonder they suspect the ideas and strategies that have been at the forefront of social justice work for decades.
I still believe that those ideas are essential affirmations and illustrations of injustice and exclusion. For some people, strategies that shed light on histories, structures, and systems can be transformative.
But I don’t think insisting on those ideas and focusing on those strategies has worked as a one-size-fits-all approach. They ignore the variety of human experience and capacity. They leave too many people feeling left out.
And they play right into the hands of those powell calls, “conflict entrepreneurs and demagogues” for whom social division and mistrust drive power and money their way. “People’s emotions,” powell writes, “especially fear and resentment, are highly susceptible to influence.”
People are also remarkably imaginative and capable of complex thinking; in that lies oceans of hope. Because we can, as powell argues, “create space where we can move through fear together without breaking into smaller ‘we's’, and without disengaging, betraying our stated values, or staying silent.”
I can leave room for many beliefs and ways of being in the world, and still insist on behavior that makes it ever more possible for anyone to thrive as who they understand themselves to be. If I hold lightly to cherished ideas and strategies, I’ll be open to new ones. In that way, I can honor what it means to be human and build new paths to change.
Lucinda Garthwaite
Founder & Executive Director, ILI
PS. I went out on a limb a little with this one — and that’s what we do at the ILI. We honor ideas and strategies that came before, look honestly at their impact, and then come up with new paths to change. This newsletter's a window into our thinking. I’m grateful to know you read it, and I hope you can help us keep going.
References
About john a. powell
Othering and Belonging Institute
The Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute that brings together scholars, community advocates, communicators, and policymakers to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society and to create transformative change toward a more equitable world.
“A Belonging Story.” john a powell. (October 9, 2025.) Fighting Forward essay series published by Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.