I grew up in Washington, D.C., of mixed Native American, African American and Filipino descent, simplified to “colored” on my birth certificate in 1947. I can still remember the great African American teachers in my formative kindergarten and first grade years of segregated schooling. They well prepared me for integrated classrooms when I entered second grade in 1954, as a result of the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (decided May 17, 1954). My first White teacher would regularly call me to the chalk board to work addition and subtraction problems and spelling for the class. She saw nothing inferior about me at all.

Every human being is an analog of African ancestry going back approximately 60,000 years, according to genetic science. Yet, the history of African diaspora in what came to be the United States of America has been fraught with violent, oppressive, and often murderous denial of this sameness of heredity. In today’s Trump world, with its backward, er … not slide … nosedive into rampant racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and bigotry of every sort; the unlikely joining of geometry and equality might add perspective.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) ended “legal” slavery in the United States… Following the war, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, with Congress establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau for assisting the integration of former slaves into Southern society… 

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, former slave-holding states enacted various laws to undermine equal treatment of African Americans, despite the Fourteenth Amendment and federal Civil Rights laws enacted during reconstruction guaranteeing their equal status. Southern states rejected the idea that the amendment imposed an injunction on state autonomy regarding state citizenship, and so the federal government adopted a general policy of leaving racial segregation up to the individual states… 

This was reflected in its acceptance of Southern state’s end run around the second Morrill Act’s (1890) prohibition on segregated land grant colleges, “provided” federal dollars were not paid out for the support and maintenance of such institutions basing their admission on race and color…

Thus, the concept of “separate but equal” (coined by the Supreme Court’s decision terminology in Plessy v. Ferguson [1896]), which applied to railroad cars, schools, voting rights, and drinking fountains… 

It was extended to the public schools in 1899 [Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education]. (Segregation was fine as long as it was separate but equal.) Whatever equal meant to subjective minds, it is clear that even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education [1954] blacks and coloreds continued to receive poorer services and suffered under Jim Crow Laws, which denied the granting of more political and social power than before… 

It took another ten years for the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for the application of separate but equal to be extinguished from all areas of public accommodations such as transportation and hotels… 

Three years later the Supreme Court declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation legislation, Racial Integrity Act of 1924, unconstitutional, ending all race-based legal restrictions (anti-miscegenation laws) on marriage…

So here we are in 2018, still shadowed by ideas of racial/ethnic differences and perceptions of inferiority and superiority. And therein lies the human dilemma debate over sameness and equal treatment: where and how to integrate life’s paradoxical makeup of oneness and multiplicity. Oneness implies an indivisible whole; multiplicity denotes a large number/variety. This duality of one but many implies a common nature and common needs shared by all human beings. This commonality stands alone as true, whether or not we view life through the purview of sacred or divine themes. There is a sanctity of sorts bestowed by the nature of existence that supersedes religious, philosophical, or political credo.

This sameness among human beings, this necessity to access physical, material, and emotional resources to support our existence is incontrovertible. This right to life is not merely a philosophical bone of discussion, but a fundamental truth. Applying this idealistic right in our present world of relativity and imperfection is a thorny path of winners and losers, where ideas of higher rights, worthiness and entitlement vie with equitability, essentiality and critical priority. An unabridged right in its pure form becomes a denied, negotiated or stolen right — according to the whims of society or the vagaries of political, religious, and ideological tides. Homogeneity versus human diversity. Equal opportunity vs. equal but separate.  

Human beings often relate as upright triangles – their personal worlds and universes not touching, or only so on one side of each at the angled point where their bases bump together. Yet, the geometry of life reveals existence to be a cross-patterned circle of varying lights, colors, and shapes. This intricate mosaic is an interrelated whole: Squares, triangles, rectangles, arcs, circles, etc., commingle and affect one another as its sustaining dynamic. Thus, there is an equality between each configuration populating the circle of life – each contributes life force, awareness, and interactive energy. Like cells in complex organisms, each contributes functionality. 

The health of the organism is dependent on harmonious intercellular and intracellular interactivity. Qualitatively then, all cells are equal regardless of the organ they constitute. Liver failure disadvantages the health of all the body’s organs. Interdependence is quintessential to the nature of existence. We can surgically remove parts and organs to “safeguard” the organism’s continuation: warfare, imprisonment, fiscal cuts, voter suppression, etc., but the organism functions at less than full capacity. And the more we cut, slice and dice, the more the organism must compensate for the missing geometry. And does this timely intervention continue the whole of the organism or merely a status quo of certain parts?

All things equal then is not about addition and subtraction. It’s about inclusion, where the living geometry of creation – living beings whose parts, properties, points of relation, lines, and surfaces – can have full interplay in the rhythm of life. Equality is the higher math of life itself.