When john a. powell arrived at the University of California at Berkeley about a decade ago, he found a competition that spoke to a struggle outside academia.

The nationally renowned civil-liberties scholar (who spells his name all lowercase) had been picked to lead the Haas Diversity Research Center, which was divided into clusters, each of which examined a way that people marginalize others — by race, by faith, by gender, and more. Individually, the clusters were doing great work, powell says, “but they were largely competing to be the real and ultimate example of marginality and discrimination. It wasn’t healthy to have these competing narratives about who was the most discriminated against or oppressed.”

Today, the center has a new name: the Othering & Belonging Institute, a reflection of the framework by which powell views marginalization after more than 30 years as a social-justice advocate. He explains this approach in a new book, Belonging Without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World, which he wrote with institute colleague Stephen Menendian.

Not at Bottom Yet

In a conversation with the Chronicle, powell and Menendian talked about Belonging Without Othering and the implications for philanthropy. This excerpt is edited for clarity and brevity.

Why do you consider racial equity a limiting framework for addressing marginalization?

powell: There is the theory of it, which is very different sometimes than practice. The practice is that you pick a group “at the bottom,” and focus on that group. Well, that process itself is problematic and fraught for a whole lot of reasons.

Equity has often been associated with racial justice, so race has already been chosen as the defining factor for equity. There are many different ways in which people are marginalized, and it’s not stable. One group might be marginalized in one situation and a different group in another situation. A focus on equity blinds us to those nonracial ways in which people are marginalized.

Menendian: In practice, the emphasis and focus on equity interventions tends to be on disparities. While it is important to illuminate the nature of inequality, it is also limiting in terms of galvanizing a response to address it. It doesn’t give everyone skin in the game, whereas a belonging frame does.

At the moment, there is, in a sense, a universal crisis of belonging. It’s not just marginalized populations and marginalized communities that feel a sense of not belonging; it’s also those who traditionally have been higher up in the societal hierarchy who feel they don’t belong. This crisis is shot throughout societies.

Read the full article about pursuing racial equity by Drew Lindsay at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.