Conscious Policy-making Is Key For A Better Future
How do you theorize poverty?
How do you quantify and decide which children deserve to live without the risk of lead poisoning just because they live in public housing? Or how many nonviolent marijuana offenders to pardon? Or which homeless families to subsidize living costs for?
I ask myself these questions as I try to fight the desensitization that often arises when we use statistics, memos, and reports to capture the human experience.
I also pause, thinking of my own childhood. I remember moving across county lines in hope of attending a well funded public school. I think of my own family’s brushes with financial strife in the wake of the 2008 recession and how that shaped my resolve to do the best I could to make our tribulations worth it.
But now, I feel a pang in my chest whenever I have to defend the help the communities I come from and those that I can relate to with data that is often biased across racial and socioeconomic lines.
Pursuing a Master of Public Affairs has further convinced me that the callousness with which we discuss such pertinent policy challenges is indicative of the state of policy making and governance in the United States. I still recall a professor, although during undergrad, critiquing my focus on the global south by saying I “gave way to my sympathies too much.”
But, what is governance without sympathy? How can one attempt to lead without the ability to empathize?
As I maneuver the labyrinth that is elite higher education, the white-washed syllabi, the cringe worthy comments from professors, and the lack of nuance are all reminders that a daughter of Nigerian immigrants from Lawrenceville, Georgia was never truly their imagined candidate.
Times have changed, but when spaces weren’t created with your experience in mind? It takes more than diversity pamphlets and empty promises to gloss over the distinct holes in understanding.
So what do I do when the Harvard case on lead poisoning of children in New York City public housing brings me to tears?
I talk to the 16 year old Odemi who dreamt of a better future. Sometimes I can’t even comprehend how she maneuvered life’s challenges, most of which I now know were out of my control in more ways than one. Yet, I was so sure that there was a way out.
It is that same hope, that faith in the potential for change and progress, that propels me on this journey. Even now, as I enter my second week as a consultant at The World Bank, I hold on to that belief that within the pain is the opportunity for dreams to manifest and the world to become better. Everyday I am surround by economists, researchers, analysts, and so many more people who come to work each day in hopes of alleviating the suffering and inequities across the globe.
Yet, institutions, both academic and government, still have some ways to go in how they exercise research and policy making in a manner that humanizes instead of generalizes. People are more than subjects, they are more than the quantitative data and cases studies that try to encompass the human experience in a way that is palatable, yet woefully reductive. And, I know that far too often the degrees of separation between those who implement laws and policies and those who they affect the most are far too wide.
So, the question now becomes: What can we do to change that?
Let me know what you think about the current state of policy-making and governance in the comments below and be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with new blog posts!