Social justice is often used to connote a progressive move to justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. But what does this really mean? Who does it serve? Who gets to decide when justice and equity have been reached? And what does it mean to engage in social justice-based liberatory praxis?
The concept of social justice comes from the 19th century and early use was tied to economic privileges and opportunities in societies where social contracts levied and protected individual rights. For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, calls for social justice came from labor organizers and unions that demanded equal wages and great economic privilege to the working classes. Much of this activism around social justice was not racial/ethnic identity-specific, and truthfully, many of the labor organizers engaged in social justice campaigns represented mostly white laborers. There were certainly deep connections to Marxist theories about economics, but this does not erase the fact that race and ethnicity were not part of the organizing.
Color-blind social justice laid the foundation for labor activism and only belatedly engaged with real concepts of racial capitalism. There was no early recognition of what Charles Mills called “the racial contract,” which was a social contract between white people globally that allocated wealth, power, privilege, and resources. The blindfold only shifted amid the Civil Rights and Power movements (1950-1980) to expand human rights to include race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and ability, among others. During this same period, we saw the rise of affirmative action as a social justice project meant to directly correct the legacy of racism in the United States.
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Social Justice as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
Dr. Eddie Cole, education scholar and historian, studies the history of U.S. higher education with a specific focus on leadership. In that work, Dr. Cole states that social justice-informed policies and practices have developed over the last few decades, but their foundations are markedly different from policies that started in the Civil Rights Movement. During Dr. Cole’s presentation on October 26, 2023, he briefly discussed the history of affirmative action and its relationship to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that claim to be social justice informed. While affirmative action’s original goal was to correct the long history of racism in the United States, the goal of DEI programs today is to make college campuses more diverse.
On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, thus eradicating programming meant to correct generations of inequities. In the wake of the decision, some argued that DEI campaigns were there to be the new affirmative action in higher education. Yet, in DEI campaigns designed to build rainbow campuses, once again social justice has become a buzz word that de-centers race, racism, and systemic white supremacy. In this post-affirmative action moment, history has been all but removed from educational leadership spaces in lieu of programming that highlights a laundry list of minoritized populations as hypervisible subjects to be utilized for the institutional assuaging of guilt.
Alright, I will break the fourth wall and state that this might be strongly worded, but I believe there is something to this shift that will also impact how student leaders build liberatory campaigns on campuses. But how do we engage in social justice praxis that centers race?
The Need for Intersectional Racial Justice
“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” —W.E.B. Du Bois
Intersectional racial justice centers race in liberatory praxis to intentionally highlight the systemic white supremacy embedded in power, privilege, opportunity, and resource allocation generationally. How do we do this work? We call it what it is. As Du Bois highlights, racial capitalism is deeply embedded, and the work requires us to highlight its ties to racial exploitation over many generations. We often write out the use of inheritance as a tool to retain a racial capitalist system of wealth; we couch this conversation in the language of the American dream. In order to do this work of liberatory educational leadership, we need to engage with the concept of racial justice as the base tied to other intersectional identities. This may help us to move beyond the color-blind and the rainbow to that which is liberatory.
“The goal is never to be parallel; it is to go beyond.” – Dr. Tonikiaa Orange
Works Cited
International Labour Organization (ILO). (2015). Infostories: Laying the foundations of Social Justice. InfoStories: Laying the foundations of social justice – InfoStories. https://www.ilo.org/infostories/en-GB/Stories/The-ILO/Laying-the-Foundations-of-Social-Justice#the-ilo-constitution
Mills, C. W. (2022). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press.
Deborah Anna Brown 
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