The other day I was writing something about “weathering the storm” and Janet, our ED, reminded me: we don’t use weather metaphors.
Why? Because weather is out of our control. But the policies we put in place, the words we use and the society we create are a byproduct of our actions and thoughts.
And it turns out, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund agrees:
The article went on to explain:
She was speaking this week at a discussion on concentrated neighborhood poverty hosted by the Economic Policy Institute. And what she means by this is that suburbs didn’t become predominantly white and upper income thanks solely to market forces and consumer preferences. Inner city neighborhoods didn’t become home to poor minority communities purely through the random choices of minorities to live there. Economic and racial segregation didn’t just arise out of the decisions of millions of families to settle, by chance, here instead of there.
I couldn’t agree more. We do what we do because we know our actions can make a difference. It isn’t up to fate. It is in our hands.