Flattening is one of the habits through which power protects itself. It takes people with distinct racial locations, national histories, class positions, political commitments, family lineages, relationships to land, and experiences of consequence, and places them inside a category that can be managed from a distance. It turns a living people into a demographic. It turns a community into a voting bloc. It turns difference into a branding opportunity, a funding strategy, a constituency map, or a story of inevitable political alignment.

As we begin to engage more intentionally with White activists and healing practitioners, we are encountering more clearly a habit that reaches far beyond any one community: the habit of flattening.

Many people are sincerely seeking a more just, relational, and accountable way of being. They have committed meaningful energy to healing, repair, inclusion, and social change. Yet sincerity alone does not free us from the habits of the systems we are trying to transform. Flattening enters even well-intentioned spaces when people approach communities through broad categories, presume political alignment from identity, seek quick coherence through shared language, or use relationship to confirm what they already believe.

We are also becoming increasingly aware of how the superclass of changemakers participates in this pattern. Across philanthropy, nonprofits, universities, media, electoral politics, policy, social innovation, technology, and movement-adjacent institutions, people with access to resources and legitimacy often decide which communities are legible, which leaders are credible, and which forms of knowledge are worthy of investment. They may speak the language of equity, inclusion, participation, migration, democracy, and care. They may sincerely seek greater voice, visibility, and access for communities that have been excluded. Yet access alone does not create political clarity.

A community can be visible without being understood. A leader can be recognized without being accountable to the people whose lives are invoked. An institution can expand representation while continuing to reward the people who make themselves most legible within its existing imagination.

This is how managed recognition operates. Some people are elevated as representatives of change while deeper histories, contradictions, grief, refusal, and political analysis remain outside the frame. Institutions recognize identities while leaving untouched the forms of power that determine whose knowledge counts, whose leadership receives support, and whose reality is treated as consequential.

Flattening can feel like inclusion because it brings more people into view. Yet a category is not a relationship. Representation is not responsibility. Visibility is not political formation.

The work before us is to become more capable of presence, connection, discernment, and consequence. It is to enter relationship without reducing people to what an institution, campaign, healing practice, or political narrative needs them to be. It is to build a practice strong enough to hold complexity, conflict, difference, and accountability without retreating into abstraction or false unity.

One place this becomes especially consequential is in the way liberal and left movements often claim immigrant communities as though identity itself determines political alignment.

I will write more about that tomorrow.