Equity Is Not Dead. It’s Evolving.
I didn’t expect to feel anything when I heard Hulk Hogan died.
I thought I’d shrug it off. Move on. Chalk it up as another headline in a world already too loud with loss and legacy. But something in me paused. And that pause turned into reflection.
As a child, I loved wrestling. Not just the drama or the chaos, but the simplicity of it. There were heroes and villains. People got knocked down, got back up, and sometimes even turned heel in the middle of the match. I didn’t fully understand the violence, but I understood the story. I needed that kind of clarity as a kid. I needed someone to cheer for. Hulk Hogan was that person. Golden-haired. Muscled. Always yelling about courage and prayers and vitamins. He felt invincible.
But then I grew up. And like so many people raised on half-truths and cable TV, I had to reckon with what that hero really stood for. The racist comments Hogan made years ago hit hard. Not because I was surprised, but because the letdown touched something sacred. That childlike part of me that had found joy and belonging in the performance was now holding something ugly. Something that smelled like the truth. And I was angry.
My first instinct was judgment. Righteous, clear-cut, and firm. But another part of me, a quieter, deeper part, asked a harder question: What would it mean to see this moment through the lens of equity? Not forgiveness, not forgetting, but equity. What would it mean to look at a person shaped by systems, soaked in supremacy, and still ask, “What happened to you?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?”
Sketch taken from https://www.deviantart.com/vinceart/art/WWE-Hulk-Hogan-50031374
This reflection didn’t come out of nowhere. I recently wrote a paper called When Ignorance Becomes Identity, and it cracked something open for me. In it, I explored how misinformation, especially racialized misinformation, fuses with identity formation during adolescence. Not because young people are weak or naïve, but because they are becoming. Their brains are still building critical pathways. Their souls are trying to make sense of what it means to belong.
When we talk about ignorance in this country, we too often make it about individuals. But ignorance, as I define it in my work, is systemic. It’s taught. It’s inherited. It is sometimes all someone has access to until they are given the tools to imagine something else. As Jerit and Zhao (2020) explain, people can hold incorrect beliefs with confidence, especially when those beliefs are wrapped in cultural familiarity. Dull (2025) calls this “white ignorance,” a form of socialized unknowing that protects dominant groups from the discomfort of truth.
So what does this have to do with Hogan?
Everything.
Because my anger was valid. But so was the realization that he, too, was a product of a system that lied to him. A system that told him whiteness meant greatness. That being loud meant being right. That power was the same thing as value.Equity, if I’m being honest, asks us to look beyond the noise. It doesn’t mean we ignore harm. It doesn’t mean we excuse racism. But it does mean we look deeper. We ask about roots, not just branches. We try to understand how hate gets inherited, how fear becomes policy, how misinformation becomes identity.
When I work with young people or train organizations, I often return to the same question: What did the system teach you about who deserves to win? Because that’s the root of it. That’s what we’re all carrying. And if we don’t interrogate it, we recreate it. Even in our resistance.
This is why I don’t believe equity is dead. I think it’s uncomfortable. I think it’s evolving. And I think too many people were only ever introduced to it through shame, slogans, or political noise. But equity is not a campaign. It is a lens. It is a way of seeing people not as problems, but as stories. As choices. As context. As contradictions.
And maybe, as I sat with the grief of what Hogan once represented to me, I realized I wasn’t just mourning a man. I was mourning the part of me that once needed that kind of hero. The part that hadn’t yet learned that power and righteousness are not the same thing. The part that, before learning to name systems, absorbed them.
That’s what identity work does; it peels back the layers. It asks who we were before the world told us who to be. And it asks what we’re going to do with all the pieces.
So no, equity is not dead. But it does require courage. The courage to look at people we disagree with and still see their full humanity. The courage to name harm without becoming hardened. The courage to hold grief and accountability at the same time. And the courage to change ourselves when we know better.
“ No one is coming for your job, your child’s education, or your version of safety. People just want the freedom to live without fear. To exist without performance. To belong without explanation. “
If you have privilege, let it mean something. Don’t let it go in vain. Use it to ask better questions. Use it to disrupt what you inherited. Use it to build something more honest than what you were given.
We don’t need more heroes. We need more people willing to see clearly.
And when we can see clearly, when we are not numbed by nostalgia or paralyzed by fear, we start to remember that this work is not about guilt or blame. It’s about responsibility. It's about choice. It's about becoming someone our future selves won’t have to forgive.
Citations
Erford, B. T. (2017).
An advanced lifespan odyssey for counseling professionals. Cengage.Sugimura, K., Hihara, S., Hatano, K., & Crocetti, E. (2023).
Adolescents’ identity development predicts the transition and the adjustment to tertiary education or work. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 52(11), 2344–2356. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-023-01838-yJerit, J., & Zhao, Y. (2020).
Political misinformation. Annual Review of Political Science, 23, 77–94. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050718-032814Dull, A. (2025).
Learning “not” to know: Examining how white ignorance manifests and functions in white adolescents’ racialized development. Child Development, 96(1), 123–140. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14191