What we’re getting wrong about social justice
Like many other politicized issues, social justice has become a divisive topic because of the differing viewpoints on how (or whether) to remedy a problem. Too often, conversations about justice issues are ripe with discord.
I’ve had a lot of those conversations because I’ve been writing about social justice issues for many years. I started by lending my time and writing skills to share the stories of young women who’d been rescued from sex trafficking by a U.S. non-profit organization working in the Philippines, Thailand and Cambodia. And I’ve written a lot about it here on my blog, too.
Whether the topic is human trafficking, immigration, hunger, race, or any other domain where unjust inequality exists, our paths usually diverge when it comes to what to do in response, to what degree, and how. We allow it to become a political issue, ascribing one another’s preferences to their leaning more to the “left” or “right.”
And that’s where we’ve gone astray… where we’ve forgotten what matters most:
That justice is a who.
Justice is always, first and foremost, about a person. And I’m purposefully using the singular term person instead of people because injustice affects individuals. When we debate policy and procedure, we usually fail to recognize the person affected by them.
Brené Brown spoke to this idea in a talk she gave to the National Council for Behavioral Health in 2018. Here’s an excerpt from the related article:
“People are hard to hate close up,” Brown said, and she illustrated her point with a personal anecdote. In the days after Hurricane Harvey devastated her Houston neighborhood, she recalled, “No one said, ‘I’m here to save you, who did you vote for?’ It’s not about which side of politics you’re on – it’s about which side of humanity you’re on,” she said.
One of my favorite things about Jesus, and the accounts of His public ministry in the gospels, is how “close up” He was to the gritty realities of life. He ate with “sinners” like Zaccheus, did conflict mediation between Mary and Martha, and stopped to tend to the needs of blind Bartimaeus who sat begging alongside the road. In essence, He was engaged with the person, instead of waxing philosophical about what (if anything) ought to be done about that blind beggar and how to best dispense the appropriate resources.
If we find ourselves debating what and how to deal with injustice, let’s first pause to remember the person who is affected by that injustice. It has helped me tremendously in such moments to imagine the person who suffers that plight as though he or she were in the room. What would I say if he or she were “close up” and looking me in the eye as I spoke? What if he or she were my daughter… son… cousin… parent… or friend? What if that person were Jesus?
“‘…when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’”
Matthew 25:40 NLT
If our preferences for what to do and how change based on that imagined scenario, then we’ve failed to recognize the humanity of the person for whom justice must be wrought.
Justice isn’t about policies. It’s about people. To emulate Jesus, we do need to be willing to take action. And we may disagree about what action to take or how. Yet if we first remember that justice is for a person who bears the image of God, we have a much better chance of overcoming our differences to make a meaningful impact on the many problems we face as a global community.