Early in a course on how institutions change, we were each asked to write a short statement of who we are as practitioners of equity work — our values, our sources, our sense of purpose. I wrote a confident, earnest creed. This is that creed, followed by me doing to it the only thing a quality person can honestly do with a statement of his own values: test it against the record. The record starts before the first class even met.
Everyone carries a creed they can recite and a record that quietly grades it. The interesting part is never the creed — anyone motivated can write a beautiful one in an afternoon. The interesting part is the distance between what you swore and what you did, and whether you’re willing to measure it out loud. This is me measuring mine.
Before any of us wrote a word, the class agreed on how we’d treat each other. We signed a set of community practices — a short covenant we initialed at the bottom, mine among them. A few of the lines, verbatim:
Experience / Embrace Discomfort. Speak Your Truth. Expect / Accept Non-Closure. In cases of hurt & harm: attend to impact; assume best intent. Honor the multiplicity of truths. Listen to learn, not to judge. Check our own biases.
Check our own biases. Keep that one in view. It’s the clause I’m about to hold the rest of this against.
The creed, as I wrote it
Here is the core of what I submitted, in my own words, unedited:
“As a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging practitioner and facilitator, my passion lies in fostering collaboration and transforming systems that perpetuate inequity. I believe storytelling has the power to reshape the world. By changing narratives, we challenge the status quo and open the door to meaningful change.”
I went on to argue the thing I still believe most firmly — that intent is not the mechanism:
“Even when no overt bad actors are present, processes themselves shape outcomes.”
I named my sources honestly. The call for reparations, as a response to deliberate historical harm. The “canary in the coal mine” — Guinier and Torres’s idea that we must not pathologize the experiences of marginalized groups, but treat their distress as an early-warning system the rest of us should be reading. The Johari Window, for keeping myself aware of my own blind spots. And a line I meant as a mission statement:
“In my leadership, I aim to fix broken systems, not broken people.”
I closed on a results-based standard I’d hold my own work to: How much did we do? How well did we do it? And is anyone better off?
Read on its own, it’s a good creed. I stand behind the ideas in it. That’s precisely the problem — a creed you agree with is the easiest thing in the world to mistake for a thing you’ve done.
The audit, using my own citations
I cited the Johari Window in that creed as a tool for finding blind spots. So let me actually use it, on the creed itself, instead of just name-dropping it.
Blind spot one: a statement about centering others that centers me. Count the pronouns. My passion, my leadership, my sources, my drive. I wrote a document about amplifying marginalized voices, and the only voice in it is mine. The genre invited that — it’s a personal statement — but “the format made me do it” is exactly the kind of process excuse my own creed says to distrust. Even when no overt bad actors are present, processes shape outcomes. The process here shaped a piece of equity writing with no one in it but the author.
Blind spot two: a question I asked about myself and then didn’t finish. One line of the creed has stayed with me because it’s the most honest thing in it. I wrote that my drive comes partly from “moments when I questioned whether these experiences of inclusion were intentional or incidental.” I asked that about how others had treated me. I never turned it around. So here it is, turned around: is my advocacy intentional or incidental? A creed is intention. My creed even says, in as many words, that “acknowledging diversity is not enough” — that inclusion “demands intentional efforts.” By its own standard, a statement of values is an acknowledgment. It is not yet an effort. It clears exactly the bar it says isn’t high enough.
Blind spot three, and this is the one that actually costs me something. Two weeks before the first class, we filled out an intake survey so the group could get to know each other. One question asked what roles I hold. I answered, verbatim: “QA Lead, Inclusion Advocate, Agile Coach, Husband, and Brother.” There it is — Inclusion Advocate, listed as a role I already held, on a form I submitted before the course had taught me a single thing. And one question later, asked what I most wanted to know about my classmates, I wrote: “What does equitable mean to you?”
Sit with those two answers side by side. In one box I am wearing the badge in the present tense; in the next I am still openly asking what the root word even means to other people. I had appointed myself an advocate for a thing I was admitting, in the very same survey, that I couldn’t yet define for the room. The creed you just read is what that self-appointment looks like a few weeks on: cleaned up, sourced, and sure of itself. What it costs me to notice is this — the confidence came first, and the learning was supposed to catch up to it. A title you hand yourself is not a practice anyone has watched you keep, and I had handed myself this one before the practice had a chance to start.
QA Lead, Inclusion Advocate, Agile Coach, Husband, and Brother.
The badge, in the present tense — before the course had taught me a single thing.
What does equitable mean to you?
Still openly asking what the root word means — one question later.
What survives
An audit that only finds failures isn’t honest either. Some of the creed holds up precisely because the failure proves it.
The load-bearing idea — processes shape outcomes even without bad actors — survived by demonstrating itself on me, right here in the writing. Look at blind spot one again: no villain wrote me out of my own equity statement. There was a standard format, a first-person prompt, and an author taking the path of least resistance — and the process quietly produced a document about marginalized voices with none of them in it. No bad actor; a bad outcome anyway. That’s the thesis, proven at my own expense in the very act of stating it. The canary idea holds too: the people a system serves worst are the ones who see its faults first — which means the real test of this creed was never whether I could write it well, but whether I’ll keep looking for that signal in the rooms where I’m comfortable and it isn’t.
The one line I’d temper is the boldest one. Fix broken systems, not broken people reads like a promise I’m always in a position to keep, and most of the time I’m not. Broken systems have a tendency to win — they’re older than you, better resourced than you, and patient in a way a person can’t be. More often than the creed lets on, you don’t have the authority or the leverage to fix the thing at all; the most you can do is refuse to call it working. And naming a broken system as broken — out loud, in a room that has quietly agreed it’s fine — is not the same as fixing it. But when it’s the only power you have, it isn’t nothing, either. It keeps the record honest for whoever inherits the problem next, with more leverage than you had.
What the audit changes isn’t the ideas. It’s their status. A creed states what I’d like to be true of me. It earns the right to be published only when it’s laid next to the record and survives the comparison — or, more often, when it doesn’t, and I say so. Is anyone better off? A creed, by itself, makes no one better off. It’s a promissory note. The only thing that pays it is the next project, and the next, measured one at a time.
Why this is the whole point of my writing
My throughline is negotiating for clarity — treating the visible effort of finding the exact word, and correcting myself when I’ve missed it, as the work rather than something to hide. This piece is that practice pointed at my own values. The imprecise, flattering version is easy: I am an equity practitioner; here is my beautiful creed. The precise version costs something: here is my creed, and here, from the same four months, is where I fell short of it, in my own handwriting. Refusing to let the flattering, unclear version stand — even when it’s about me, especially when it’s about me — is the entire discipline. I don’t post finished wins. A creed presented as a win is just a win with citations. A creed presented next to its own audit is a test report. I only know how to write the second kind.
Thank you for reading something I’d normally be tempted to leave polished. Here’s my question, and I’d genuinely like your answer: pick one value you can recite without thinking. Now find the most recent week your calendar actually tested it. Did the record match the recitation — and if it didn’t, have you let yourself write that down yet?
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