The mission of the Mary Moore Institute for Diversity, Humanity & Societal Transformation is to raise awareness about the unprecedented ways we're changing, combat injustice in all its forms, and help us become a society committed to Looking Deeper, Doing Better, Drawing Closer and Reaching Higher (or wisdom, justice, kindness and conscience) – This Land Is Your Land'sFour Actions.
We assert that in a post-majority society, we only survive by:
1. Fostering what Martin Luther King called the "Beloved Community" -- a place that embraces and honors everyone's differences and nurtures the best in all of us;
2. Helping make true, participative democracy -- rule of the people -- real; and
3. Creating a generative, fair economy -- the kind that can be the end of poverty.
We believe that inalienable rights are for all, that everyone has a line in the human story that only they can write, that each of us deserves to lead our best lives and be our most authentic selves, that only a society that works for all of us will work for any of us, and that only by enlarging the tent -- by allowing everyone to participate in the forming of "a more perfect union" -- do we become "a nation that can endure".
Our starting point is that any society that lets itself get locked into AREAS of the DGC, the Degenerative Cycle (Alienation, Rationalization, Exploitation, Automation, (adverse) Socialization, and back to Alienation), engaging in everything from paying workers less than it takes to survive; preventing people from owning their homes, the companies they help make successful or their vote; practices that result in those who have the least paying the most; and weaponizing societal culture against its members; to:
Depriving people of the vote and using institutions meant to protect them to oppress them, requiring that young people who want a chance to escape poverty take on massive education debt, denying the undocumented and persons with convictions employment they can live on, using credit scores as rationalization for charging the poor more and fostering callousness and human disregard among us is a society already in trouble.
It can’t sustain. It’s a Jenga tower, and the question is not whether it will fail, but when.
As such, three core principles guide our work:
1. This is the defining moment where we either forge a way forward for all of us or accept that there’s no way forward for any of us,
2. We can't solve our problems using the same divisive and exploitative practices that created them, and
3. We're running out of time. The 2024 presidential election notwithstanding, we're a nation barreling toward a crisis point; one that's every bit as consequential as the Revolutionary or Civil War and that's rooted in the fact that we can't "un-diversify".
There’s simply no unwinding of the clock to the nation we were in the 1950s. That America no longer exists. And that leaves us with a handful of choices:
1. Game democracy so that the brown majority doesn't have a vote (South Africa), 2. Exterminate millions of "undesirables" (Nazi Germany), or 3. At long last, reify the dreams that birthed us.
Two of those have been tried before. Only one buys us a future.
Our How.
Catholic sisters - Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. March 10, 1965.
What makes us unique is our approach, a combination of the hope in humanity held by Mary and that’s the legacy of her family, the goodness of many who’ve come before us, including the people of Birmingham who, in millions of small ways, made us better and modeled for us how to do the same, Me and Mary's 40 Humanitarian Virtues, and the insights we’ve gained about how societies work, how they’re changing, and how, together, we can make them more perfect.
If it’s true that every system is perfectly structured to get the results it gets, then the only way to get different results is to change how the system works, and behind every aspect of systemic advantagism is someone using it to gain something. Dismantling it starts with discovering what that something is. We want to understand the economic, political and social drivers that make it work; which gives us insight into how to make it not work.
This insight, along with the above social orientation led to our five-step process for societal transformation:
We believe this strategy can be applied to almost any societal problem, but especially the three existential threats facing us today:
A. Our Dissolution of Unity: the severing of the ties that bind us together as a united people. "You made a vow. Before God and your white brothers. How could you go against that?" Said to ex-Klansman Elwin Wilson on one of the many harassing phone calls he received after publicly apologizing to John Lewis for being part of the group that beat him 50 years prior.
But it's Elwin who was in the right, and who, with what would turn out to be only four more years of life, would give the rest of us a powerful example of what reconciliation looks like. It un-breaks what we've broken and brings us together. And in a post-majority America, "together" is the only way we survive.
B. Our Dismantling of Democracy: "Fuck democracy," declared a speaker at a religious nationalist rally, "I stand with Jesus Christ."
Democracy has been imperiled in three equally problematic ways. 1) Redefining it to mean "majority rules", which absolves us of our responsibility to the collective, 2) Gaming the vote so that only the "right" people have a voice, and 3) Assertions that we are a religious state -- or, in the words of those asserting this -- a Christian nation. Each will have to be addressed and reversed if democracy is to have a place in our future.
C. Entrenched poverty: An economy that enriches some of us by impoverishing the rest of us. Look closely and we'll discover that opportunism and economic cannibalism, combined with a belief that only some people have inherent worth, has been a core driver of everything from the three-fifths compromise and exploitative laws to child labor and wage slavery.
It's why the economy is volatile, why people born into poverty also tend to die there, why so many seniors can't retire and veterans end up homeless, and why we continue to experience one economic crisis after another.
Navigating these troubled waters will require a collective step forward; disavowing nationalism, dismantling opportunism, and demolishing every toxic narrative that moves us further away from "liberty and justice for all" rather than closer to it. Doing so will rob every corrosive framework built upon them of their power and render them obsolete.
In the grand human story, every life gets to write a line. What's yours going to be?
Live your Diversity. Enact Democracy. Reform Society. Elevate Humanity.
