Berkeley Talks transcript: john powell on targeted universalism

john a. powell: Targeted universalism in a sense is a deeper understanding of equity. And equity as opposed to equality recognizes that people are situated differently. The goal is not to treat everyone the same, but to treat everyone fairly.

Marc Abizeid: Welcome to another episode of Who Belongs?, a podcast produced by the Haas Institute for a fair and Inclusive Society. In this episode we hear from john a. powell, who is our director, and a professor of law and African American Studies here at UC Berkeley. In the interview we discuss a brand new primer we’ve just published on the Targeted Universalism policy approach, a model conceptualized by professor powell. The primer was co-written by professor powell along with Assistant Director Stephen Menendian, and Wendy Ake who is the director of the Just Public Finance program.

To summarize, targeted universalism is a platform to put into practice social programs that move all groups toward a universal policy goal. It supports the needs of the most marginalized groups, as well as those who are more politically powerful, while reminding everyone that we are all part of the same social fabric. In the interview I refer to the publication as a report, though it’s more accurate to describe it as a kind of instruction manual and working document to help guide policymakers and others to develop their own targeted universalist strategies and put them into practice. Now enjoy our conversation with professor john a. powell.

Marc Abizeid: Hi john. This is I think your first time on our podcast, Who Belongs. Welcome and thank you for joining us today.

john a. powell: It’s good to be here, Marc.

Marc Abizeid: So you’ve just published this new report on targeted universalism called “Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice” along with Stephen Menendian and Wendy Ake. So, let’s just start of by defining what does it mean broadly targeted universalism.

john a. powell: So, targeted universalism is actually, you could think of it, I refer to it as Equity 2.0. A lot of the people listening I assume will be familiar with equity. So targeted universalism in a sense is a deeper understanding of equity. And equity as opposed to equality recognizes that people are situated differently. So you don’t… The goal is not to treat everyone the same, but to treat everyone fairly.

So equity basically says, because people are situated differently, you treat them differently. But the way most people understand equity is that you want to close the disparities between the favorite group and everybody in the most marginal group. That’s too narrow. That’s really not what we want to do. An example would be, two years ago, I would say about 75% of whites as the favorite group in this discussion have adequate healthcare and only about 45% of blacks and Latinos had really good healthcare.

So we closed the disparity. Where there are a lot of ways to close the disparities, you can say, let’s meet in the middle. So 60% of each group should have adequate healthcare. Or you might say we take up the other groups all the way to 75%. But that’s not the goal. The goal is for every person to have adequate healthcare, good healthcare, to live a full and productive life.

So what targeted universalism does is to say, we actually have universal goals we’re trying to achieve. We need to state what those are. The universal goals is not simply closing disparities. Now there is a way of actually defining what those universal goals are and the process. But once we actually have those goals, then we have to say in order to get to those goals, the goals are universal, the strategy to get to those goals are targeted based on how different groups are situated, both in terms of our structures and in terms of our culture.

So a couple of examples. Let’s say we have an escalator that takes people to the second floor from the first floor. Well, it turns out that someone in a wheelchair can’t use an escalator effectively. So the goal is to get people to the second floor. The structure that we develop to do that is the escalator. The escalator has hidden biases in it. Every structure has some hidden bias or normative practice associated with it.

Usually, we’re blind to it. You go to a baseball game, you to the bathroom, the bathrooms literally are designed for men, men in and out. They’re not designed so well for women. So you see women in these long lines. So what targeted universalism says is that people are situated differently.

Groups are situated differently, and it’s racialized oftentimes and it’s gendered, and it’s based on people’s ability. And saying, okay, let’s look at the goal. The goal is not to get what we think the favorite group has, but think of the goal independent of favorite group. Then let’s actually develop targeted strategies based on that.

A couple of things. One, the goal is not to just focus on the most marginal group, which oftentimes we do in terms of equity as well. We say, this is the favorite group and most marginal group is this group. It could be native Americans. It could be any group you want it to be. What about everybody in between?

So targeted universalism is clear that the goal is to get everybody to that universal goal. But to do that we have to actually develop different kinds of strategies. And it’s not because we prefer one group or the other group, it’s because people have different needs. People are situated differently both in structures and in culture.

That’s the heart of targeted universalism. It actually takes the idea of equity and sort of shifts the way we think about disparities, which are important. But say that’s not the major focus. The major focus is that universal. We need to be explicit what the universal is, not just assume. We can debate what the universal is, but then to develop the appropriate strategies to get people there, and to get all people.

Marc Abizeid: Okay. Having you mention healthcare a little bit earlier because I think that’s something a lot of people can relate to, everyone can relate to. So it provides a good frame for the next question is, how that sort of approach differs from a universal approach. So let’s use a Canadian style single-payer healthcare system, for example, that covers everyone. What’s wrong with that?

john a. powell: Well, oftentimes when a universal approach oftentimes really is not a universal goal, but a universal strategy. Oftentimes if people are situated differently, and you treat everybody the same, I’m going to give everybody $10. Well, if I have nothing, $10 is then all I have. If I have $1 million, I have $1000010. So if you look at the healthcare issues in Massachusetts that govern around what you put in place, what we said is that we need to have universal insurance, which is what they have in Canada, so that everybody has an insurance.

Okay. Is the goal for everybody to have insurance? We’re going to treat everybody the same. Everybody can have insurance. Here’s the problem. People are not situated the same. So what happened in Massachusetts is that the increase in insurance actually pulled healthcare providers out of the black and Latino community.

The goal wasn’t for everybody to have insurance, and it wasn’t even having everyone to have access to adequate healthcare, or there is a deeper goal than insurance. The goal was for everyone to have positive health and an effective way to actually engage the system to get positive help.

You can imagine, for example, there are some places where in rural America where you get health insurance, which you live a hundred miles from a hospital. So you’re not situated the same as people who live next door to the hospital. So we don’t treat those people the same because they’re not situated the same. The goal is to get them in to see a doctor or a nurse or health practitioner, you have to look at how they’re situated, and treating them all the same simply won’t do it.

One of the exercises I often do with audiences is I’ll say, look at the slide on my PowerPoint. There’s a bunch of words up there, but I see a lot of you are wearing glasses. Take your glasses off. Now read it. Then no one has some glasses. We treating everybody the same. People without the glasses are squinting and laughing and they can’t read it, right?

And I say, “Okay, all right. Take your glasses and give it to your neighbor.” They can’t read either because they’re situated differently. When we talk about race, when we acknowledge our gender or sexual orientation, we think, we focus on the people and we say, you’re treating black people differently than you’re treating white people.

You’re treating gays and transgender people differently as you’re treating straight people. And maybe, maybe not, but black people are situated differently oftentimes than their white counterparts in relationship to both the goal and the structures.

So we want to explicate that. We want to talk about how people are situated. Are you situated in a place where there’s no active grocery store. Are you situated in a place where the schools don’t work? Here in California a few years ago, to get into UC Berkeley, the average student needs like a 4.3, which means all four points are all As. So what’s a 4.3? It means you have basically all A’s, but you have AP classes.

There were thousand black and Latino kids who had 4.0s, and they went to schools where there were no AP classes. So when I say we’re going to treat everybody the same way, if you got a 4.3, you get in. But we are bleaching out. We are literally saying to black and Latino kids who go to these schools, where they don’t have access to this, that they don’t get in at all.

So targeted universalism calls our attention to how people are situated, and then asks us to develop strategies, not just for the more favorite group, but for everybody. I’ll give one more example which I like is that, think about airplane. I spend way too much time on airplanes. But people who design luggage racks, so that’s the structure.

You get in an airplane, you want to carry your luggage, what’s wrong with that? Well, here’s the thing. Luggage racks are small. They’re also overhead. Women as a group tend to carry more luggage. Women as a group tend to be shorter, and they have less upper body strength. So that structure is actually privileging men over women.

If the goal is actually to have everyone to have them to use the airplane to store the luggage, is actually biased against women in favor of men. But most people don’t notice that. Most people don’t think about it, although women often do. When I tell that story, the women laugh and they say, “Yeah, I check my luggage because I can’t lift it up over my head.” So again, if you’re designing luxury luggage rights for everyone, you would think about it differently.

Marc Abizeid: One of the points there is actually that sometimes universal approach exacerbates an equality among the groups that you’re actually trying to help.

john a. powell: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. I give you another great example. A lot of people think social security is universal. Well it’s not. You see, at 40 quarters, in order to be get full benefits for social security unless they change it. But then 40 quarters in the formal work. What’s formal work? Housework is not formal work. It used to been, housework was not formal work. Domestic work was not formal work. Agriculture was not considered formal work. So what’s formal work? They defined formal work based on the practice largely of white men.

I’m not saying most white men didn’t work hard, but the women who stayed at home taking care of the kids were also working. They don’t count. That doesn’t count as work. So we have this what looked like a social, a universal program because it didn’t say anything about women, it didn’t say anything about the African Americans who worked as domestic workers or agriculture workers who were Latinos.

It just said work, but defined work in such a way that it actually cut a lot of people out. So when we look at the universal programs as well as the practice, we have to be very careful that we’re not building in our own hidden biases.

Marc Abizeid: Let’s move on to the next approach then, which is the targeted approach. We can list some examples of that. Antipoverty programs that were enacted in the 60s for example, like SNAP food stamps, programs like affirmative action, they all use targeted approaches. So, what’s the problem there?

john a. powell: A couple of things. One is just practical. So if you say targeted approaches oftentimes focus on a group or sometimes… So if you say for example, affirmative action, we’re going to focus on, you could say blacks or Latinos. And then people always say, what about poor whites living in the Delta, or poor whites living in Appalachian.

And we say, “No, this is not for them. This is for blacks and Latinos because they’ve suffered from historical discrimination and segregation.” That’s true, but so have some whites. So if that’s the issue, we don’t say we are untargeted group, instead you should say we’re targeting people who are situated in a certain way. When you look at that, you find there are a range of people.

And now, Robert Sampson at Harvard said, based on some indicators around concentrated poverty, only about 5% of whites maybe last live in concentrated poverty in urbanized areas. Maybe they should be included. I’m not seeing anything what’s wrong, what’s wrong with that? Because we’re not talking about someone’s skin color. In fact, we forget when we talk about race been socially constructed, how it’s constructed is by those structures and conditions.

To be black largely means yes, you are isolated from the resources and opportunities and culture that will allow you to thrive. But there are always some other groups maybe in small numbers that also, and if you just say, I’m focusing on blacks, you immediately invite resentment. If you say you’re focusing on people who are poor, then people who are a dollar over being poor are left out.

We live in the Bay Area and if they talk about housing, a person living below the poverty line cannot afford housing in the Bay Area. But at the US level, middle-class is somewhere about $50000. And there was this article in the paper today saying a family in $50000 cannot afford a studio in the Bay Area. So if you say, and what they said about this particularly, they talk about teachers, they said they make too much money to qualify for those targeted programs, but not enough money to actually buy housing.

So targeted universalism doesn’t say we’re just going to focus on a group. It says we going to focus on getting everybody to that universal goal, which means the most vulnerable group. But it also means the group whose $1 above the vulnerable group. You may have a different strategy for them.

In doing that, targeted universalism becomes a way of operationalizing program, but it also becomes a communication strategy because when we say we’re picking one group over the other, you build in resentment and also what we call breaking. If you do it based on targeted universalism and do it right, you build the cultural foundation to actually have people see their shared situation.

Marc Abizeid: One thing you touched on is that it’s vulnerable to, it’s susceptible to attack by a lot of times the right-wing conservatives. They want to get rid of these programs, cut back on the programs. We saw it with SNAP, for example, welfare reform in 96. And so how does this targeted universalism approach, it has to be more resilient than these other two approaches. So, how do you still target populations but then prevent those vulnerabilities that are a part of the other types of systems?

john a. powell: Well, most of the conservative attacks in claims is what’s called formalism. That is, we’re not going to pay attention, either could create these binaries like you’re in or you’re out as opposed to a gradient saying you may be partly in and maybe partly out. Targeted programs tend to be vulnerable politically because you focus on oftentimes groups that are marginal, by the very fact they’re marginal also means they’re marginal politically, and oftentimes there’s hostility directed toward them.

There’s a lot of literature showing that when you focus on a vulnerable group, especially if the group is stigmatized, you invite greater resentment. Part of the resentment is just because the group is already stigmatized. But part of the resentment is that if I’m close to being poor, but I’m not, and then I feel like my resources, my tax dollars are going to a group that is poor, in the meantime, no one is actually acknowledging my suffering.

Targeted universalism avoids that. It’s not saying, we’re just going to focus on the most vulnerable. It says, yes, we’re going to focus on them, but we also focus on those who are near vulnerable. We’re focusing on all the groups to get them to that universal. Now, universal programs tend to be more resilient because it purports to bring in everybody. So that’s part of is political resiliency, but it doesn’t really uplift oftentimes the most vulnerable. Targeted programs may uplift the most vulnerable, but it tends to be politically unstable and politically vulnerable.

Marc Abizeid: I want to make a connection between this and an interview I had a couple of episodes ago with Hilary Hoynes who’s an expert on SNAP and social safety net programs. One of the things she looked at was actually the purchasing power of SNAP. The thing about snap is that these vouchers, they’re the same across the United States.

So even if you’re living in a kind of a rural area somewhere in middle America where the cost of living is a lot lower than somewhere like in the Bay Area, you’d have more purchasing power, it wouldn’t be the same amount. So you’re actually a little bit better off over there than you are over here. One of the proposal she had was to adjust the purchasing power of that voucher, that food stamp voucher. So would you consider that something like a targeted, using a targeted universal-

john a. powell: That’s getting close. So, if the goal is to say everyone should have the ability to buy so much for their family, then you can’t pick a number because what something costs in the Bay Area as you suggested, as opposed to rural America, it’s going to be quite different. The same in terms of housing. If you say, which we fought for years, there’s a voucher for housing and they say we want to treat everybody the same.

That’s what fairness is. It’s not what fairness is. It’s so interesting because the idea of equality and fairness in Western society actually comes from Aristotle. Aristotle understood the concept of targeted universalism. He talked about arithmetic equality and geometric equality.

Arithmetic equality was the assumption that everybody’s situated the same. He says when people are situated the same, you should treat everybody the same. But he said when people are situated differently, you treat them differently. We sort of embraced, and especially the conservatives embraced arithmetic equality. We going to treat everybody the same. But people are not all the same.

So sometimes, an example might be here in California, there was an issue about people who didn’t speak English, students. They wanted to be given instructions in their native language. Now this may seem ludicrous now, but the idea is that we treat all students the same. We don’t discriminate. All the students instructions are in English. Where if you’re Chinese, a student and you speak Chinese at home, you are speaking Mongol or whatever your language is, you don’t feel like you’ve been treated the same.

The same in terms of initially when students couldn’t hear. It’s like, well, we’re not going to teach you sign. You have to learn to read lips. We’re going to treat you just like we treat these. And the difference, now we’ve gone beyond that. But that case on language had to go all the way to the supreme court because we were so tied to this notion that fairness mean treating everybody the same. And it’s just simply not.

I would like to give the example, I taught at the Ohio State University for many years, almost 10 years. And we had a rule there at the Ohio State University, that if you rented a car, even if you paid for it off your own pocket, but if you’re working on Ohio State time, you had to rent a subcompact.

Marc Abizeid: You had to rent a what?

john a. powell: A subcompact,

Marc Abizeid: Like a small SUV?

john a. powell: The smallest car there is. I’m around 6’4″. And I said no. I’m not even asking for you to pay for it. I’ll pay for it. And they said no. The universal rule is we treat everybody the same. And I said, “I’ll bet you a dime to a donut the person who wrote that rule was under six feet.” What happened was that issue, I mean, one of the deans came to talk to me. I called him the dean of all things unimportant. He was saying, “Professor powell, we have to treat everybody the same.” I said, “No, you don’t.”

It went all the way to the chancellor. The chancellor of the largest university in the country was dealing with this issue. The chancellor, who at the time our president was Gordon Gee, he made a special dispensation. He said, “Okay, you can rent a full-sized car,” but he didn’t change the rule.

What that meant is that I was stigmatized. People didn’t see the structure. All they saw is that there goes professor Powell who thinks he’s fancy because he has a big car. But that’s the problem with sort of this notion that we treat everybody the same. So equity and even more so targeted universalism helps us see how people are situated differently and then develop the appropriate treatment based on that.

Marc Abizeid: Let’s talk a little bit about implementation. Now I mean, this is still a concept, this report that you’ve put out, it’s meant to be I guess kind of like a working report. It’s subject to some changes.

john a. powell: Sure.

Marc Abizeid: But I want to know where do you go now. Actually it has a five step little guide that you’re supposed to follow to be able to achieve targeted universalism. So let’s go through them quickly and then just talk about each one. And then let’s try to use a real life example, maybe we can stick to healthcare because everyone can relate to it. So if we start with the first step, it’s the established universal goal based upon a condition of a broadly shared problem.

john a. powell: Yeah. So again, what is it we’re trying to achieve? You mentioned healthcare, but it could be healthcare, it could be food, it could be education. We generally agree that that’s important and we want to help people achieve that goal. And so we say what the universal, and what we oftentimes do is we get locked in process. It’s like we… Again, with healthcare, we’re going to get everybody insurance.

Well, for some people that’s not the problem. As I suggested, if I live in rural America where I’m 150 miles from a hospital, giving me a piece of paper saying I have insurance has done nothing to affect my access to the doctors or access to nurse. So, we have to be clear on what the goal is, and then how I’m situated in relationship to the structures and culture in terms of getting that

Marc Abizeid: The second step is to assess the general population performance relative to the universal goal. And let me combine number two and three. So number two is the general population. Number three is identify groups and places that are performing differently with respect to the goal and the overall population.

john a. powell: Basically what we’re doing, we’re disaggregating groups. As I say, if Bill Gates walked in here, the average person in this room, there are two of us, would be a billionaire. But you and I actually our conditions haven’t changed. We just sitting in a room next to Bill Gates. So we have to disaggregate and say… And that’s, data is useful in that way.

So we have a process where women are constantly not achieving the goal, or are made of Americans. Dennis says, let’s look at the structure and see if the structure is doing something. Structures are not simply neutral. Structures are designed to do something affirmative. And so when we see a group historically not performing well in relationship to the goal, then we suggested, maybe something’s off. It causes us to do more investigation.

But I also want to suggest that it’s not just the groups that are doing worse than the average, or are doing worse than the general population. We also have to see how the general population is performing when they shift to that goal as well.

So that data then tells us to look more carefully at how the structure and culture works. And then see if there’s something that’s actually particularly pernicious for each group. For example, being blind or being a long way from healthcare, or not having a healthcare that actually is sensitive to the cultural or specific needs of different groups.

Marc Abizeid: Number four is assess and understand the structures that support or impede each group or community from achieving the universal goal. So, looking at the structures.

john a. powell: So we tend to be, we oftentimes say being colorblind or gender-blind, not seeing that’s actually not appropriate. We want to be sensitive to how race and gender and sexual orientation, ableism actually functions in society. And the way they function all the times is not simply some nefarious person saying, “I don’t like black people.”

Oftentimes the way they function is through structures. And so, we need to not only be race and groups sensitive. We also need to be structural sensitive as structures are the most invisible. We don’t notice them. We don’t notice the airplane. We don’t notice the bathrooms at stadiums. We don’t notice the escalator. We don’t notice rather someone has money or not. So part of the thing is to bring attention to that and to see how the structures are interacting with populations.

But it takes a special effort because United States in west tends to be what Tilly calls methodological individualists. We focus on the individual as opposed to, is there a structure that’s actually affecting groups differently? So we have to sort of develop that sight for structures.

Marc Abizeid: Who was the author that you cited?

john a. powell: Tilly.

Marc Abizeid: Tilly.

john a. powell: He wrote a book called Durable Inequality.

Marc Abizeid: The last step is to develop and implement targeted strategies for each group to reach the universal goal.

john a. powell: That’s right. And so when you do that, if you achieve that, you’ve actually addressed disparities. If every group gets to that universal goal, the disparities are gone. But too often under equity, and this is why I prefer Target Universalism Equity 2.0, it’s that people say want to close the gap. You do want to do that, but you don’t want to just close the gap, you actually want to get everyone to that universal goal.

We need to state with that is, and you can’t assume that the favorite group, whether is whites or men or straight people, that they have what they need. Nor do you want to just focus on the most vulnerable. Targeted universalism actually takes every group into consideration in relationship to structures, in relation to culture, and then look at, how do you get them to that universal?

Marc Abizeid: And then lastly, where do we go from here as far as pitching it to policymakers, the people who can help implement it and use it actually to be able to start creating some of the changes that we’re talking about.

john a. powell: Well, it’s interesting because about 20 years ago, actually longer now, it’s almost 30 years ago in early nineties, there were three of us that really was pushing the idea of equity. I’m sure there are others as well, but these two people I worked with, I was one of the people. Another one was Angela Glover Blackwell from PolicyLink. Another one was Manuel Pastor.

We go around the country talking about equity and literally we’d get uninvited to meetings. It’s like, why you talking about equity? We want to treat everyone same. It seemed like, other that matters, it seemed like a radical idea. When you actually saying structures don’t work, you’re talking about transforming the structures themselves, not simply adopting people to these flawed structures.

I think to some extent that’s where we are with targeted universalism, as we’ve gotten into the equity work and there’s been some slippers because the work around equity has actually, from my perspective, oftentimes been narrowly defined to only focus on disparities. So if you go, you mentioned health, I’m chair of population health for Southeast Michigan.

If you go on any website on health, there’s all this talk about closing disparities, but there’s very little talk about what are the goals that everyone should achieve, including the group that’s considered favorite. As I said, we do this right. It’s not just how to operationalize things, but it’s also how to talk about it.

The good news is, there are number of efforts around the country that actually use targeted universalism. I just came back from Washington and they’re looking at pre-care. They have a universal pre-care program that they’re trying to implement in the state of Washington. But they recognize that not all the students, not all the young people are situated the same.

So they trying to figure out, what does that mean in terms of operation? There’s healthcare, again we’re working with people in different parts of the country, they’re basically saying, how do we actually look at healthcare if we acknowledge that people are the same? And then some of it I mean, for example, if you look at suicide, which is very high and growing in the black and Latino community, excuse me, black and white community, but its highest in the native American community. They have this question, why?

Are there some cultural and structural things that help us understand what’s going on in native American community that we might miss? And we just have a universal approach. And the answer is yes. We know what some of those things are, but we have to look for them. They don’t just appear. So there’s already, and we’re involved in a number of these efforts with the native American communities with the schools, with healthcare right here in California.

There’s a lot of work with a number of the large groups who are beginning to sort of apply this. So I found the people when they begun to understand it, and there’s some simple things like universal goal target strategies based on system structures, that’s pretty simple. But it becomes very nuanced, it becomes very layered.

We worked with groups in Sacramento, which had young babies dying right after birth. And the highest rate was among African American populations. Pretty high rate among Latinos, but a rate that was unacceptable even among white babies. There was a debate, do you just focus on the black babies, or do you focus on all?If you focus on all, how do you sort of think about the different approaches? This was actually the Sacramento Foundation. I think it’s, they’d be pleased for me to mention it, but they focused on, they did targeted universalism.

There are a lot questions about priorities. Do we have enough resources? One of the things about target universalism is that resources oftentimes are elastic, and if the groups you focusing on is marginalized groups, those resources tend to tighten. If it’s a popular program, that is, if it’s a we that we care about, if it is my family, I’m willing to spend a lot of resources. If it’s other people’s family, maybe not so much.

So, what happened in Sacramento is that the amount of resources for this effort greatly expanded in part because they did focus on it through a targeted universalism approach. But that also meant that special or different resources were going to the black community in this case. Also, I should say that different communities should participate in helping to develop those universals. We shouldn’t just assume all the time that we know what they are and impose them on groups.

Marc Abizeid: And that concludes our conversation with john a. powell, director of the Haas Institute, and professor of law and African American studies at UC Berkeley. To obtain a copy of the Targeted Universalism primer check out our website at haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/targeteduniversalism. There we also have a short animated explainer video on Targeted Universalism which is worth checking out. For a transcript of this episode and links to many more interviews on the variety of topics we cover visit us online at haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/whobelongs. Thank you for listening.