Make Justice Normal: what’s in a name?

General

May 20

The name of our collective, Make Justice Normal, is a litmus test, not a slogan. If that is also your goal or purpose, let’s go!

Make Justice Normal. Our collective formed in response to a fundamental failure we were seeing everywhere we looked: injustice is normal. It is built into how our institutions operate, how decisions are made, how resources move, and whose voices count. To say make justice normal is to acknowledge that justice is currently treated as exceptional, conditional, or aspirational — not foundational. This is as true in the nonprofit sector as it is in large corporations.

We wanted justice to be the baseline. But who were WE to try to do the impossible? Even if we wanted it to be true, was the name too big for us? Should we really set a bar so high? Were we setting ourselves up for failure in a world in which injustice is normal?

As Margaret Meade so eloquently put it, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has.” (See also: every movement toward liberation ever – enslaved Africans and their allies in the United States, independence movements to unburden countries of their colonial oppressors, the civil rights movement, worker’s rights movements, the women’s rights movement, the indigenous rights movement, Rev. Barber and his vision of a multi-racial coalition for a true democracy.)

So we let go of our insecurity and realized that our authenticity was what mattered. Every time we say our name, we're asking ourselves if it is embedded in the systems that shape our everyday life: how power is shared, how harm is addressed, and how people participate in decisions that affect them. To make justice normal is as much an organizational mission as it is a personal manifesto for each of us. It was something we wanted desperately for our own bodies and lives, as much as we did for the systems that governed us at every level.

For us, this was how narrative change functions: To say it is to constantly challenge the way things are usually done. And the more we challenged it, the more we noticed it. The more we noticed it, the more we wanted to change it. And the more we wanted to change it, the more we have changed.

“Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.” — Alice Walker

Progress

When we founded MJN, we didn’t yet have a fully articulated framework for justice that we could live by. But we knew we needed one, and we knew that naming this commitment held us in care with one another. The name helped us find our people and move forward in solidarity.

Today, we’ve developed a meaningful framework to practice justice — alongside loving care and solidarity — and we are practicing it. We are working towards a world that is more just, where power and capital shifts more equitably into new hands, where people have more codified rights and more access to democratic participation. We are not original or unique, and that gives us gratitude, humility, and hope. In the words of the late, great Dr. Martin Luther King, “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”

Our contribution to the struggle is to add our energy to the relentless striving towards the goal of normalizing justice that preceded us and will continue long after we are gone. Is there a more worthwhile cause?