Why Dignity?
A personal Take

My understanding of dignity didn’t come from theory — it came from growing up in Montana in the 1960s and 70s with brown skin that tanned even darker in the summer. That meant I lived in a shifting space: sometimes treated as a minority, sometimes welcomed by the majority, always aware of how fragile acceptance could be. My childhood moved between rural Moccasin, college‑town Bozeman, and later Great Falls, before I earned my degrees at MSU and eventually headed to New York for graduate school.

But one of the most formative lessons came earlier, during the years my father was finishing his PhD at the University of Hawai‘i. Our family lived in Mānoa for parts of my second and fourth grades. That’s where I met George.

I arrived in the middle of September, a new kid dropped into a classroom where the social hierarchy was already cemented. George was the classmate everyone targeted — emotionally, physically, relentlessly. He carried himself like someone who had learned to expect harm. For reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time, we became friends. And something shifted. The bullying didn’t vanish, but it slowed. Sometimes the simple act of standing next to someone changes the weather around them.

Anthropologists like Margaret Mead later wrote about the risks of becoming too close to the “social pariah,” but I hadn’t read Mead yet. I was just a kid who saw another kid being hurt.

Then, as quickly as I had arrived, I left. My family returned to Montana before the school year ended. The very next day, George was beaten badly enough that his parents finally pulled him out of the school.

That experience has stayed with me for decades. I’ve watched the same game of dignity versus contempt play out in classrooms, workplaces, communities, and politics. I’ve lived it from both sides — as someone marked as “other,” and as someone occasionally welcomed into the majority. And I’ve seen how quickly contempt spreads when no one interrupts it, and how powerfully dignity grows when even one person chooses to stand with someone who’s been pushed to the margins.

This is why dignity is not an abstract value for me. It is a fundamental human right — and a daily practice. It is the foundation for the work we do here, and the reason this page exists.