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This
January, the ������Ƶ Weekly’s writers are proposing a series of policy
resolutions. These are actions that policy makers and ordinary citizens can
take to make the world a better place in 2017.

Before
Donald Trump took the oath of office, Washington’s chattering classes were
abound with speculation about how the then President-Elect might govern. As a
secret moderate? As a foil to Congressional Republicans? As an authoritarian?
Less than a week into his term, the new president has made his intentions
clear—he plans to govern as he campaigned. The problem for the American people
is that candidate ������Ƶ campaign promises flowed from bias, stereotype, and
“alternative facts.” As Slate’s wrote:

Presidents, in other words, … Above everything else,
Trump promised to bring the power of the federal state to bear against the
domestic enemies of the people, defined in explicitly racial terms. From his
perch in the Oval Office, Trump would “protect” from Muslim refugees,
“dangerous” Hispanic , and groups like Black Lives Matter. On
this, Trump was consistent. This wasn’t mere rhetoric; this was a set of
serious promises to deal with literal threats. And this week, the newly minted
president has begun tackling them, one by one, in rapid succession.

As
abhorrent as ������Ƶ actions may be, they’re not anomalous. To the contrary,
they are part of a long history; one that finds the United States repeatedly
subverting its ideals of broadly shared freedom and opportunity in the service
of maintaining a hierarchy that can only exist through oppression and
exclusion. Over the next four years, then, it won’t be enough to fight mounting
injustices.��We must also ruthlessly identify and eliminate ways that this hierarchy already exists within our policies and institutions and embrace an alternative model of policymaking that honors and thrives on diversity instead of marginalizes it.

As we
argue in a paper out today, ������Ƶ has documented
evidence of a hierarchy that permeates the very social policies that bear the
responsibility for securing these ideals. From financial security and
education, to child care and workforce development, we have a separate and
unequal set of social policies that exacerbate inequality instead of combating
it.

This bifurcation
is created by sorting Americans demonstrating some indicator of merit or virtue
(once upon a time, simply whiteness), like having full-time employment or
living in a nuclear family, into a set of policies on the top-tier, while
slotting everyone else in at the bottom. Importantly, the gate-keepers to these tiers have been
shaped by long histories of racial and gender discrimination and fail to
reflect the diversity of forms taken by modern American families. So, by
conditioning benefits on these criteria, the social policies that have been
constructed to advance equality of opportunity are, in fact, replicating
patterns of bias and exclusion within the economy and society.

This
pattern exists throughout our social policy, but here is how it plays out in
the context of wealth: A successful society needs to give its citizens pathways
to wealth accumulation, not least of all because wealth is an essential buffer
against hardship, whether it comes in the form of lost income or some
unexpected expense. It can also seed investments that increase financial
stability over time, like obtaining a college education or enabling a secure
retirement. Building that critical resource isn’t just about the value of
individual thrift. To the contrary, it has always been shaped by government
actions. The trouble is, those actions follow a longstanding historical pattern
of systemic exclusion.

, farm workers and domestic workers,
predominantly African-Americans, were intentionally excluded from Social
Security coverage for the sake of securing the political support necessary for
the legislation to pass. Other wealth-building initiatives that helped give rise
to a prosperous white middle-class, such as the Homestead Act and GI Bill, were
administered along this pattern. Restrictive residential ordinances and
“redlining” further restricted access to the credit necessary to purchase
homes, maintaining segregation that depressed home values in majority-black
neighborhoods.

Though
wealth-building policies today are less overtly racialized, they overwhelmingly
privilege wealth held by the already-wealthy instead of creating on-ramps for
new wealth creation. Today, the average net worth of white households is 13
times that of black households, a at its highest point in
since the 1980s. That’s a direct result of both this legacy of racial
discrimination and of our society’s ongoing failure to atone for the
consequences of past approaches to social policy.��

Rather
than recognize these disparate outcomes as the predictable result of distinct
policy choices, they are often portrayed as the product of poor personal
choices and individual failures, affirming the false narrative that justified
the policies in the first place. This stigmatizes not only the programs but
also their participants.

In our
view, the only way to disrupt this cycle and safeguard against attempts to
assign greater value to some Americans than others is to replace our current
separate and unequal system with one that embeds the ideals of inclusion and
equity directly into our policies—and into
the processes that design them.��

Our model,
which we call the family-centered social policy, applies the principles and
methodology of human-centered design to social policy. That means originating
policy design around the needs and wants of the families the policy is intended
to serve. It also means democratizing the process to include direct
participation by the families themselves. There are promising examples of participatory
policymaking already in practice across the country that can serve as models
for adoption. By centering design choices around those who have been placed at
the margins by existing policies, giving these families a meaningful voice in
the design process, and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions according
to their outcomes, this model marks a radical shift in the power dynamics of
how policy is made and who it works for.��

Seeming to anticipate this moment in our national history, John F. Kennedy told the 1962 graduating class at Yale “For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

This
approach offers a powerful alternative model that builds from the truth that
all Americans are deserving of the same dignity and respect, not the myth some
of us are better than others. By putting the people marginalized under our
current approach at the center of policy design, we can affirm that this is a
commitment made to all, not just some, of us. It’s in living up to these values that we make America great.

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