by James Nordin

The American Society for Public Administration, with its more than 8,000 members, has adopted social equity as one of its core values. Each year it presents the Gloria Hobson Nordin Social Equity Award to a deserving recipient who has made lifetime contributions to the cause of social equity in public service.

The congressionally created National Academy of Public Administration has a standing panel on social equity that defines social equity as: ?The fair, just and equitable management of all institutions serving the public directly or by contract; the fair, just and equitable distribution of public services and implementation of public policy; and the commitment to promote fairness, justice and equity in the formation of public policy.?

NLC has designated Sept. 25-29 as the 7th Annual Race Equality and Inclusive Communities Week and its current president, James Hunt, councilmember, Clarksburg, W.Va., has led a year-long Partnership for Working Toward Inclusive Communities.

Here are three organizations with different charters, different foci and different membership, yet each emphasizes social equity or equality. What would lead three such diverse organizations to the same issue?

It seems to me that the reason is simple. As a nation, as communities, as individuals, we still don?t always get it. We seek global economies for our goods and we look for inexpensive labor around the world, but we aren?t quite ready to include all those buyers or laborers in our society. We are a nation that espouses diversity, both at the corporate level and at the governmental level, but we really are much more comfortable with others who look and speak and believe exactly as we do.

This is not so surprising from an evolutionary perspective. As humans evolved, it was very helpful to be able to discriminate between a bear and a person. Being able to identify the differences among objects in the environment (to discriminate) was essential to survival. In addition, it was essential to be able to complete the picture from incomplete data to see the pattern from only parts of the picture.

Eventually our brains became accustomed to these tasks and accomplished them largely without having to think about them. We became extremely adept at identifying finer and finer distinctions among objects in our environment until we could distinguish within our human contacts who was a member of our tribe or clan and who was not.

Not only could we make these distinctions almost automatically, we became adept at completing the picture describing what ?others? were like. Soon we learned that we could express complex experiences simply by identifying a group of humans.

While this was happening, human brains got better and better at lots of other tasks, like mathematics and engineering and science and technology. Our pace of technological improvement was rapid while our pace of social advancement was glacial. We had learned too well how to see differences and how to create stereotypes in order to survive in a world that no longer existed.

The open issue is whether we will be able to use our superior intelligence to overcome our very basic survival instincts. If we are to live up to our lofty ideas, we must learn to recognize what is common about our neighbors in this world community and learn to lessen our fixation on what is different. And if we must focus on differences, then let us hope that we use our intelligence to find the advantages and strengths in those differences.

The American Society for Public Administration, the National Academy of Public Administration and NLC are all trying to support our movement from survival in the wild to achievement in a linked world. Such movement requires a focus on social equity and inclusiveness. It isn?t just a good thing to do. Our survival in the current world requires it.

James Nordin is the coordinator for the American Society for Public Administration?s Social Equity Committee.

The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the National League of Cities or Nation?s Cities Weekly.