More Than a Slice of Pie
What would it take to reimagine equity as renewable and abundant?
“If I commit to equity, won’t that mean I will lose out on opportunities or need to give something up?” This is a common anxiety among people with relative privilege. And internalizing this idea often leads groups to engage in the “Oppression Olympics” — a competition against other minority or marginalized groups for a share of equity. Equity isn’t pie, but it feels like it may be when we are taught to believe that it is a resource, and we understand resources to be finite and scarce, much like slices of pie.
What would it take to reimagine equity as renewable and abundant? Equity is a Jewish value because expanding access to resources and opportunity for everyone is a Jewish value. However, Jews scarcely make up 2.5% of the United States population (under .5% globally), making Jews a small minority group. We have every reason to be concerned about Jewish safety. But because whiteness is the dominant racial group in the United States, Jews who can access whiteness have done so, which leads to a misunderstanding that all Jews are white. This misunderstanding harms, isolates, and erases the nearly 20% of Jews in the United States who are not white, many of whom do not have access to whiteness (read: safety) under any scheme of race. (Need proof of the internalized belief that all Jews are white? Ask any non-white Jew how often their Jewishness is cross-examined in a Jewish setting by white Jews.) Jews of Color are the minorities within a minority.
But when leaders in the Jewish community compete for resources against those they believe to be in the outgroup, we often don’t realize that we are competing against ourselves — we are competing against Jews. When we talk about Black, Latin, Asian, and multiple other intersections of identity, we are talking about Jews. We cannot think about these minority groups as if they are wholly separate from the Jewish community. We are Jews. And, when our community competes for equity as if it is a finite resource, we are denying Jews slices of the pie.
“Moving Through the Wilderness: Recommitting to Equity After 10/7” is a collection of brief essays born out of Elevate: An Executive Leadership Equity Accelerator. Elevate launched in May 2023 and its first cohort consisted of eleven CEOs of influential Jewish institutions, who are committed to the Jewish value and responsibility of equity within our community. The idea for this project emerged in Montgomery, Alabama during one of Elevate’s in-person convenings in early 2024. To learn more about Elevate and the program’s co-founders and leaders, Gamal J. Palmer and Catherine Bell, click here.
Moving Through the Wilderness is presented in partnership with the Forward, the leading voice in Jewish journalism. Read more essays in the collection.
