Anti-Bias, Pro-Earth
MJN currently thinks about biases as the default preferences or assumptions underlying the behaviors that we carry out each day. Justice requires us to identify and undo the harmful biases that stereotype, marginalize, and judge people because of their race, ethnicity, gender, appearance, religion, class, or identity.
We all have biases. But many are taught, rewarded, and reinforced by systems. Today, our systems default to biases that are supportive of structural white dominance. These are systems built to center and protect white advantage in terms of ideas, cultures, looks, lifestyles, and more. Even if you know this shouldn’t be true, systems in which structural white dominance is the default reinforce it every day.
Among defaults, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and other forms of racism and prejudice rooted in structures have led to wealth inequality, broken schools, broken elections, lost wisdom, and a broken justice system that has been designed to tear up the path to redressal, reparations, and healing for Black and Indigenous peoples the most.
Bias also influences how ideas move through our society. Ideas that do not originate from groups with structural power—especially Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and global-majority cultures—are often dismissed, extracted from, or suppressed. This shows up clearly in how we relate to the Earth. We are taught to admire her beauty, but not to respect our interdependence with land, water, air, plants, and animals. This “anti-Earth” bias is rooted in a colonial worldview that treats land as property and living systems as resources to be owned, extracted, and monetized. Pro-Earth worldviews, long practiced by many cultures, are routinely erased or undervalued.
It is a constant uphill battle for diverse cultures and systems to show their genius — including those that teach sustainable strategies for long term collective benefit, respect for the Earth of which we are a part, and alternatives economic paradigms.
With an anti-bias, pro-Earth mindset, we hope to collect system strategies that expose defaults we take for granted and give us pathways to redesign with a fullness of diversity at the center. Here's what we're asking to continue evolving our philosophies:
What ideas, groups, and cultures are suppressed, oppressed, and undermined by dominant systems? How? And how will we center them, as a daily practice? For example, what does it look like to design our system to center Blackness and Indigeneity in everything we do?
What stereotypes and racist ideas are programmed into our consciousness by broad cultural narratives? How will we undo them, in our own minds, organizations, and societies?
What are specific and practice-able anti-bias strategies that we will turn into daily habits?
“The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.”
