This has been adapted from assignment for an English graduate seminar in Spring 2025: “Writing Centre and Writing Program Administration for Social Justice”.
Justice, for me, has never been a fixed ideal. It has been a shifting constellation—sometimes divine, sometimes legal, sometimes relational—shaped by the cultural, political, and philosophical terrains I’ve traversed. This genealogy traces my evolving understanding of justice across life stages, not as a linear progression but as a series of negotiations between experience, ideology, and reflection. What follows is not a definition, but a journey.
Childhood: Yoruba-Christian Foundations of Divine Justice
The architect responsible for shaping my initial understanding of justice was my mother. Her understanding of justice was no doubt derived from her upbringing in a Yorùbá culture coupled with the Christian tradition that she followed. Consequently, I grew up going to church. Notions of rightdoing, wrongdoing, deservedness, sin, and punishment were wound tightly together into my understanding of Justice. At the crux I understood through Sunday school stories and charismatic preachers that just rewards and just deserts were for God alone to meter out to those who obeyed or defied him. According to the tradition, human beings had no real place to judge others, and even though we made law courts on earth, divine justice was above this and would be the final arbiter. Although the New Testament teachings are more about “loving thy neighbour” and “forgiving those who trespass against us”, the Church’s notion of justice seemed very Old Testament in a sense, more about retribution – “an eye for an eye” – than establishing a sense of fairness, or even equality.
Running alongside this Christian notion of justice – or perhaps underneath as we sometimes attended Nigerian Churches – would have been ideas derived from Yorùbá culture. Hierarchical in nature, notions of equality were not part of the everyday Yorùbá family or community. What was ‘fair’ for an individual was determined by their status in a given group. Status, which within a family was decided by birth order, conferred certain responsibilities as well as privileges: household chores or responsibility for the youngest members were not split evenly, but neither were gifts or pocket money (allowances). When my siblings and I would get money from relatives, I would often get the larger share, followed by my brother, and my baby sister the smallest. If that order was not followed by, say my mother, it would be commented on as “not right” by extended family members. On reflection I think this hierarchical order was accepted because by virtue of just living, each person rises up the social rank. When new siblings, cousins, children are born one ceases to be at the bottom. Everyone will eventually become an elder and there is a kind of justice that exists in this knowledge. The inherent inequality ensures that everyone experiences all levels of the strata at some point in their life. There should nevertheless be at least a feminist critique of this because women are virtually always subordinate to their male counterparts for no other reason than sex and traditional gendered expectations of one’s role within the society. Regardless, the hierarchical system I believe ensures the smooth running of Yorùbá communities so that although power was ultimately centralized in whomever was at the apex, it could be devolved in lower stake decision making, including those related to reward, reprimand, and fairness, with everyone in a group knowing and accepting to whom they would be answerable.
Adolescence: Multicultural Britain and the Politics of Fairness
For most of my primary and part of my secondary schooling, I was educated in, nominally at least, religious (Church of England) schools. Although morning assemblies consisted of singing hymns and reciting the Lord’s Prayer, the student body was culturally and religiously diverse, reflecting the neighbourhoods in which my schools were located. Rather than the Church component playing as much a part as one may think, it was the England element that was more salient in transmitting ideas of justice and injustice. At that time, The UK, and perhaps London specifically, was enraptured with soon to be prime minister Tony Blair’s rhetoric of multiculturalism. Collectively the children of the 90s were taught that Britain was proud of its diverse communities – yet another positive legacy of the Empire (the Greatness of Britannia was espoused by teachers almost all the way through my twelve years of schooling). The discourse of Leftist New Labour, who won the 1997 election with Blair at the helm, called for an integration of ethnic minorities into the fabric of British society regardless of their country of origin or religious beliefs. In what was a diverse student body at my religious schools, we learned about different religious traditions, and in the parlance of that time, we were taught that it was important to be tolerant of all cultures. At the end of the day we were all British and deserving of equal treatment in society, in politics, and economically. Justice as equality and fairness.
Before New Labour took office, the Conservative government used to spend public money on private tuition for high-achieving students to attend private schools. This policy was seen as a way to provide students from less advantaged backgrounds with access to some of the best educational opportunities in the country. In 1997, Tony Blair removed this elitist subsidy. My mother, despite voting for him, was apprehensive about what this would mean for my education and her bank balance. While I recognized that the thousands of pounds funnelled into one child’s education being distributed to a whole school that needed it was a more fair system, I still felt the sting of the realization that this would directly affect me. Although I never lost my scholarship because it was awarded in 1996, I remember feeling then that fairness, and by extension justice, for the majority would require some painful sacrifice from a minority.
University years: Ideological Awakening and Feminist Critique
My time at university was one of political consciousness raising and an internal critique of religion began to emerge. Although an inquisitive child, my oldest-sister status in a Yorùbá-Christian household had worked to keep me firmly in line and rarely challenged the status quo. While getting a Politics degree that encompassed the study of Liberalism, Marxism, Feminism and the social movements that emerged from these and other ideologies, I learned about the secular traditions of justice informed by The Enlightenment, Civil rights movements, and Anti-capitalists. I read Hegel, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke and came to understand how historical conceptions of ‘man’, the state of nature, and the function of a government (or a sovereign) was the justification for some of our political systems and provided the central tenets of social organization. Although I was enamored with these texts at the time, I was also critical of them from a feminist perspective as they overtly or otherwise excluded women from their theorizing. Throughout that time, my understanding was that of justice as equality: meaning both equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Accompanying that however was the caveat of “equality as difference” – which a google search attributes to Nancy Fraser, but I can’t remember a specific text I would have read. In economic terms, my understanding of justice was Marxian/socialist. This was perhaps not a large leap coming from a family of largely Leftist voters. However, I became more radical in my orientation. I saw the redistribution of property as the minimal solution to the injustices and inequality inherent in a capitalist system, with the ideal being the abolition of private property as a concept altogether. Politically, justice as equality meant a removal of the division of private and public spheres for the emancipation of women as the oppressed sex, and equal access to all areas of society for all members of society regardless of their identity.
Although for some of my uni days I attended Christian union meetings, as I began to interrogate the theology, I increasingly felt that the Church’s divine argument could not withstand the scrutiny of rational reasoning. The pivotal moment came when I was told that my entry into heaven was solely contingent on believing that Jesus died for my sins then resurrected, and not on how well I served my fellow human beings or lived according to moral codes. This emphasis on faith over works, for me, undermined the very essence of active, earthly justice. I struggled with the idea that one’s actions and contributions to the well-being of others held less weight than a singular belief for salvation. This intellectual tension between divine decree and rational ethics ultimately led me to leave the Church, and with it, the notion of sin and divine justice. In its place came the black letter of the law.
Early adulthood: Law, Racism, and the Bureaucracy of Injustice
After university I began to work for the UK Civil Service, specifically within the immigration and tribunals services of the Ministry of Justice. Between tedious administrative tasks, I took an interest in the English legal system and its role in maintaining order and delivering justice. At the same time, I was called to sit for jury duty and had the opportunity to deliberate on a few criminal cases. During my Bachelors degree, I had studied the role of the law in maintaining the perennial social contract and taken courses in criminology. However during this time, I witnessed how the law played out day-to-day. From a politics and policy perspective, the Ministry of Justice was primarily responsible for maintaining the status quo as much as possible through political party changeovers within government. Much of the work of the ministry was ensuring that before any changes were proposed or decisions could be taken, appropriate stakeholders were consulted. A disproportionate amount of my time was spent writing briefs and Consultation Papers. This was how I saw democracy playing out in the leviathan that was the Civil Service. It was tedious, cumbersome, but I believed necessary, and all that could be done at the nation-state level to ensure justice and order could be maintained within a democratic system.
The relatively short-lived career as a civil servant began in 2009 which marked the ten year anniversary of the Macpherson Report. This report was the culmination of The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (Home Office, 1999) into the unprovoked racist knife attack of 18-year old Stephen Lawrence in 1993. I mention this because working ‘for the government’ as it were, this case took on renewed significance for me as an adult. Over the preceding decade there had been a lot of coverage in the press over what exactly Sir William Macpherson had meant when he stated that the police investigation was marred by “institutional racism” (1999). This revelation seemed obvious to me and every other Black person in the UK because of the repeated failure to see anyone charged, let alone convicted for the murder despite witnesses. Stephen’s family were determined to see justice be served in the form of punishment for the crime. At that time, I agreed.
As a young adult, I knew intuitively that in any emergency situation, the police would never be on my side. There were enough examples, aside from the Steven Lawrence case and long before Goerge Floyd, that engagement of Black people with the police had dangerous consequences. This was injustice I knew from an evidenced and sensory perspective. Nevertheless, the Macpherson Report marked a watershed moment in public discourse in the UK on systemic racism. Although Critical Race Theory had been in academic discourse for decades, and Black people had been demonstrating against structural racism, discrimination, and inequality since the first generation of Caribbean immigrant were invited to the UK in 1945 fill the labour shortage created by the second world war, the the report’s candidness of systemic racism had not been part of mainstream news or (White) dialogue. It did not complement the multicultural rhetoric of the late 90s. It is difficult to recall now specific incidences of injustice that I would have experienced personally and interrogate why I would have considered them unjust. In earlier times I would have likely explained away isolated and personal incidents of racism, (as well as sexism and xenophobia) as idiosyncratic behviour of the individual who perpetrated them. Racism and other forms of discrimination was still seen as a characteristic of bad and amoral individuals. However, when I read Between the World and Me (Coates, 2018), and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s (2019) debut book Why I’m no Longer Talking to white People About Race, these texts furnished me with my first real understanding of how my local experiences were embedded within broader patterns of structural racial inequality. The system was rigged and injustice was the inevitable outcome.
Quarter-life: A Global education
Aged twenty-five, a little before this literary revelation, I decided to leave The UK and follow a long-time desire to discover the wider world for myself. Initially on a quest to do this by becoming a polyglot, I ended up a linguist. However, as I lived among different cultures, learned from different traditions, and observed different societies, experiential knowledge began to challenge existing book knowledge garnered at university. I became acutely aware of how different groups held vastly different values to those I’d grown up with, even in multicultural London. The myriad of experiences across the continents in the ensuing years ensured that I was confronted with poverty, privilege, discrimination, affluence and other manners of inequality and unfairness. I did not, and perhaps still do not see inequality as inherently unfair or unjust, but everywhere I looked I saw specific instances of injustice: the pay gap between local staff and ‘expat’ teachers in Shenzhen, China; the ill-treatment of domestic workers in Hong Kong; the skewed ratio of Chinese-Bahamian workers on construction sites in Nassau, Bahamas despite the high local unemployment rate. In attempting to determine why I think these examples represent unjust situations, I’d say that they are the outcome of discrimination and/or biases; they demonstrate some level of exploitation; and they create a situation of insecurity. These inequalities significantly disadvantage the vulnerable group in each example, or in Rawlsian terms the inequality does not benefit the most vulnerable members in each case.
Thirties: Postcolonial Awakening and Experiential Justices
Intellectually, I began to read outside ‘the canon’ for analyses of society. My worldview became increasingly post-/de-colonial, intersectional, and critical. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, bell hooks, and Paolo Freire facilitated a greater understanding of society through their guidance in the process of ‘unlearning’ all I had been taught. Also introduced into my perspective and orientation towards justice were vedic principles of equanimity and non-attachment as I explored where in the East the Western yoga-fad had originated. By cultivating balance and calm—not detachment, but a grounded dispassion—justice emerges as a practice of fairness unclouded by personal bias that would promote social harmony. Again, this in some ways resembles Rawl’s veil of ignorance, although not as abstract. Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” posits that just decisions are made from behind a hypothetical curtain where one is unaware of their own social status, class, or abilities. In contrast, the Vedic approach suggests that a person does not renounce or cloak their identity to make just decisions. Instead, there is a breakdown of the duality of the self and other, and a focus on recognizing the oneness between all people. In this there is also a reflection of the Hegelian philosophy of overcoming dualities and recognition of unity and resolution of contradictions through the process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, leading to a higher understanding that transcends initial oppositions (Hegel, 1998). So while I tend to eschew notions of universality, I can recognize that patterns of thought may emerge in seemingly unconnected spaces. In 2019, I returned to higher education with a renewed perspective, less political but arguably more radical.
Mid-life: Justice as Process, Agency, and Pedagogical Praxis
As I approach the end of this genealogy, I have yet to provide a definition of justice or of my understanding of what it is. At worst, I’m not sure I have a concrete understanding of the concept, or at best my understanding is still emerging from negotiations of the experiences and knowledge I’ve gained. At times justice may mean equality, yet inequality need not always result in injustice – this is where Rawls and Yorùbá people may be in agreement. I am increasingly tending towards social constructivist paradigms, influenced no doubt by my scholarly disposition shaped by linguistic inquiry, pedagogical practice, and my experiences travelling widely over the past fifteen years. I continue to shift away from ideas of objective, universal, or fixed truths. Consequently, if reality is socially constructed through human interactions, and in particular language, there are multiple definitions of justice that can exist in different spheres. Justice is therefore context specific and localized to particular interactions. As Mutua wrote “social truths are initially local” (2008, p.19).
In recent days I have come to think of justice as a process rather than a state; the act of maintaining balance (or equanimity) between individuals and/or groups in interaction. Agentive actors collaborate to redress inevitable imbalances, this practice is justice. It is restorative. I recognize that this conception does not lend itself very smoothly to judicial proceedings or national laws for social cohesion: dynamism is hardly quality innate to large, centralized organizations, especially democratic ones. However I think within education, in which students come into classrooms from different backgrounds with inequality, difference, and diversity being the starting point, it is crucial to have flexibility when determining what justice would look like in all the different spaces on a campus. Justice as agency might be how I would frame my understanding for now. In contrast to static definitions, justice as agency foregrounds the dynamic, relational work of redressing imbalance—especially in educational contexts where diversity is foundational.
The journey through my Yorùbá childhood’s hierarchical fairness, the equality-focused education of my adolescence, the critical perspective on systemic racism from my youth, and the global experiences merged with Eastern philosophies in my adulthood have all culminated in this understanding: justice is not a fixed definition but a dynamic, context-specific process of striving for balance and redress. If justice once meant divine retribution, and later equality of outcome, it now feels more like a choreography—an ongoing negotiation of imbalance, agency, and recognition. I do not claim to know what justice is. I only know how it feels when it is absent, and how it moves when it is pursued. Perhaps justice is not a destination, but a rhythm: one we learn to hear, to embody, and to teach.
References
Coates, T. (2015). Between the world and me. Text Publishing.
Eddo-Lodge, R. (2018). Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1998). Phenomenology of spirit. Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
Home Office. (1999). The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-stephen-lawrence-inquiry
Mutua, M. (2008). Human Rights in Africa: The Limited Promise of Liberalism. African Studies Review, 51(1), 17–39.
Adekunmi Olatunji 