Codifying Injustice

You can’t out-navigate a system that was never made to care for you.

The most vulnerable people in our communities are not broken.
They are not helpless.
But they are impacted first and hardest when systems harm, because they are rarely invited to the tables where those systems are designed.

Across the country policies and practices in housing, education, healthcare, or criminal justice are often crafted by people with distance from the consequences. Cultural power, financial security, and positional authority act like cushions, absorbing the shock of poor decisions. But if you live without those protections, you feel every hit. Every policy change. Every budget cut. Every decision to disinvest.

The system was not made with you in mind. And certainly not with your voice at the center.

Unfortunately, this is not new.

The prophet Isaiah called it out long ago:

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.”
— Isaiah 10:1–2

Isaiah doesn't mince words. He doesn’t frame injustice as an accident or a misunderstanding. He calls it out as something constructed, something made. Which means it can be unmade. It can be dismantled and remade.

But to do that, we have to radically shift who gets to speak into what is built. I believe the people most impacted by a system should be the ones who help shape its reimagining. Not in a survey. Not in a panel discussion. But in actual leadership, with authority, and a platform to direct change, not just react to it. Power is a privilege and those with the most privilege inherently have the most power, but it shouldn’t be so. I’m not asking for pity or charity, but co-creation.

Because justice isn’t just a series of policies, it’s a posture. And the question facing every nonprofit, church, politician, or neighbor who claims to care about justice is this:

Whose voices are shaping the future you’re building?
And who will pay the cost if you get it wrong?

It’s time to stop acting like injustice is abstract. It has names and it has voting records.