What Do You Think About Malala?: A Selection from Jacqueline Novogratz’s Manifesto for a Moral Revolution (2020)

“We each maintain a ‘hierarchy of identities’ that rise and fall depending on whether a particular identity is threatened. When one of our identities is attacked, it becomes easy to perceive ourselves only as that identity, for how others see us can have a significant impact on how we see ourselves.

Think about your own diverse identities—your gender, religion, race, ethnicity, tribe, sexual identity, citizenship or refugee status, your schools. Which parts give you pride? Which parts shame? I’d be surprised if most didn’t give you both. You might be a vegetarian or a carnivore; an extrovert or an introvert; an athlete; someone who loves classical music or hip-hop, novels or nonfiction; a nature lover or an urbanite—likely, your mix includes at least a few contradictions. Our personal commitments form aspects of our identities, too. Now think of those times when a single part of you felt threatened and you were reduced, either by others or yourself, to a single identity. The world plays along in these moments, flattening our sense of self to the point of caricature.

My own identity shape-shifts when confronted with the world around me. I feel more American when I am being questioned at a dinner party in Karachi about U.S. drone policy. When I am held at U.S. immigration for questioning because of all the Pakistan stamps in my passport, I become equally a global citizen and an American who wants my country to treat immigrants with greater respect. Perhaps, instead, we could start by understanding the many identities inside ourselves, avoid the temptation of labels and the demonization of others, and search for common ground in those who might seem different at first blush.

If holding our multiple identities and recognizing that all people carry myriad identities within themselves is a crucial step toward navigating difference in an interdependent world, a second essential skill is understanding how others perceive you, especially with regard to power and privilege. Throughout my twenties, I sharpened the first skill by interacting with other cultures. In my early thirties, a painful confrontation with the more privileged parts of my identity had to take place before I could fully learn the second skill.

In 1996, Peter Goldmark and Angela Blackwell, president and senior vice president, respectively, of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, determined to build a leadership program to confront ‘the fault lines of race, class and ideology in America.’ Four years earlier, Los Angeles had exploded with riots over the acquittal of police officers who’d brutally beaten Rodney King, an African American motorist. The 1991 beating had been caught on video and seen hundreds of millions of times (before smartphones or Facebook). Because of the riots that followed the beating, more than 2,300 people were injured, 62 were killed, and the city experienced a loss of more than a billion dollars. Over the next four years, across the United States, identity politics grew more hostile.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s most senior leadership wanted to try to do something about a deteriorating civic conversation in America. The two leaders of the foundation tapped me to create and lead this new program. I had already learned something about navigating differences while working in Rwanda, and I had tried to become a respectful listener as well. I loved the idea of confronting the fractures of American democracy through investing in diverse young leaders and was elated to build a program that would support their development. At the same time, I also felt that I was exactly the wrong person to lead that program. I was white. My orientation was more global than local. I had dreamed of investing in businesses that served the poor, not supporting individuals to lead.

However, the need was there, the opportunity was there, and no one else had stepped in to build something like it. My mentor John Gardner . . . reminded me to be more interested than interesting. ‘You will learn to understand the rest of the world better if you do the work to know your own country,’ he said to me. ‘You’ll be able to speak with greater humility if you can speak from experience about the challenges that your own country faces.’

After much thought, I decided to start a new chapter in my life and let the work teach me. Together with a small, diverse and mighty team, I helped create the Next Generation Leaders program. The scope of our ambition thrilled me, though when we started, I had no idea of all that I’d have to learn to give the program even the slightest chance of success.

On the first evening of the NGL fellows gathering, as everyone sat down to dinner, I formally introduced myself. Twenty-four fellows sat around a horseshoe-shaped table, representing diverse slices of the American pie, including a Korean American leader of a community group from New York City, an African American leader fighting to eliminate the death penalty, a fighter pilot in the marines, and a gay Latina activist for immigrant rights, just to name a few. After welcoming these fellows, I began: ‘I hope we will use the group itself not only to explore differences but to understand one another, so that we in turn might better understand ourselves.’

Heads nodded as I spoke. Though I was nervous, I thought, So far, so good.

Given our diversity, I continued, we also hoped to define rituals as a means of creating shared experiences and, thus, bonds among us. Each night, before dinners together, I suggested that a different fellow start the meal by sharing a poem, a blessing, a quote, or silence. Each fellow could choose whether to share his or her own tradition, whether religious or atheist, or to honor another one. What mattered was the fellow’s gift of reflection and an openness from the rest of the group to receive it.

An African American minister from Chicago stood up that first evening, choosing traditional words of thanksgiving for the meal we were about to eat and ending with a quiet ‘Amen.’ Many in the group repeated the amen, but a young African American activist stood and accused me of ‘making this a Christian thing.’ I reiterated that we hoped to create the space not for what separated us but for what we shared. He fired back that people shouldn’t be forced to hear dinnertime prayers. Heads nodded in agreement.

The evening had barely begun, and I’d lost the group.

Over the next few months, the group regularly devolved into arguments about identity rather than focusing on how we might actually solve problems. I hired two elderly white scholars to lead ‘Good Society’ sessions, a powerful exercise taken from the Aspen Institute, in which participants reflect on their own values by interacting as a group with the writings of philosophers and activists spanning from Plato to Hobbes, Rousseau, King, and Mandela. Upset that the readings mostly came from ‘dead white men,’ some of the fellows refused to participate.

I did not know how to handle the situation, and the two facilitators ultimately left the session. The same young man who had raised issues around having a minister share a prayer made it clear from the beginning that I, a white woman of privilege, should not run a program built for a diverse collection of emerging American leaders.

Part of me thought he was right. My own insecurities stunted my ability to bring my whole self forward, though that was precisely what I was asking the group to do. Ultimately, the group avoided rigorous debates about how society might do better at encompassing our diversity. Opinions, not reason, dominated. Some fellows remained so busy defending their own identities that we collectively failed to make the effort to engage with the identities of others.

The lowest point of the year occurred at the end of a seminar, during a go-round in which each fellow shared an insight or question from the week’s activities. When it was the African American activist’s turn, he suggested that this was the right moment for me to resign. I thanked him for his comments, but I had no answers, not for the unasked questions swirling in the room and not even for the questions I’d posed myself.

The weight of the room’s silence and the staring eyes of the fellows pressed in on my chest, intensifying my feelings of shame and guilt. Even though I’d put heart and soul into working with my team to create and fund this program, and had delivered on the promise of a group that reflected America’s diversity, I had failed to facilitate difficult yet constructive conversations. For nearly an entire year, I had been unable to build a sense of wholeness and a connected group that could learn from itself. And rather than share the burden of failure with the group, I erred in thinking that the program’s deficiencies were the sole responsibility of me and my team.

Later that night, after a good cry, I finally came to a reckoning with myself. The young activist had pinpointed one of the most unresolved parts of my identity: my privilege. It didn’t matter how I perceived myself. What mattered in that moment was how others saw me. Until that experience, I saw myself as an industrious woman from a big, middle-class family who had paid her way through college and business school and who would face the monthly stress of school debt repayments for yet another decade. As a young person, I was aware that being a white American afforded me vastly better opportunities, but I also wanted to claim the ‘scrappy independent woman’ part of my identity that was unafraid of sweat and hard work.

Yet, if I did not fully see myself as a woman of privilege, my identity had expanded to include working at the Rockefeller Foundation with a well-used passport and a Stanford MBA. If I hadn’t been born an elite, I had certainly become one, regardless of how I saw myself. Only when I was able to integrate the person I had become with the person I once was would I be able to serve in ways that mattered.

Finally, I understood: by hiding parts of my identity, I had been denying myself and others what I could bring to the table. Because I had not laid the groundwork to know myself and claim a legitimacy for running the program, I had never been able to address the polarization that held the room hostage to identity politics and made it difficult for everyone to focus on the other issues at hand. I had failed to recognize that identity, our own and that of others, is always in the room.

Given all this, should I then resign? My resolve came slowly but clearly. No. Absolutely not. That young activist did not have the sole hold on what was right and fair. There were many in the group who told me privately, and repeatedly, that they were acquiring new insights and skills, and they urged me to stay the course. So, I would take this as an opportunity to grow personally and to expand my understanding of both the challenges and opportunities identity brings. I also realized in those days and weeks of reflection that we would succeed in building a cohort of diverse leaders who worked across lines of difference only if we selected people who were open to changing themselves. Without personal transformation, a moral revolution is impossible.

By the second year of the fellowship, I was able to lead with greater self-awareness and confidence. Rather than simply ‘checking,’ or distancing myself from, my privilege, I learned to know when and how to use that privilege of authority as an asset to create space so that other voices could be heard. I was more able to recognize, and call out, when a fellow, holding tightly to an ideological stance on either extreme of the political divide, was making constructive conversation impossible. When a fellow complained in that first year that the Rockefeller Foundation represented the imperialist capitalist elite, I simply stared, almost fearing to respond. But during the second year, I made it clear that everyone in the room, by virtue of choosing to join the fellowship, would have a new element to his or her identity. As fellows, they would have greater access and privilege that, in turn, required additional responsibilities. . . .

My painful stumbles at the Rockefeller Foundation gave me a powerful new set of skills with which to navigate identity. First, know yourself. Second, be open to the multiple identities others might carry within themselves. Third, the person or organization with greater power in a particular moment must be the bridge that extends understanding to those with less power. Without this bridge, real conversations won’t happen. . . .

Though I could not have known it at the time, in pushing me way beyond my comfort zone, that painful year with the Rockefeller Foundation’s leadership program broke me open and allowed me to stretch to find new parts of myself. I don’t say this lightly; I realize that knowing all the parts of ourselves and being aware of how others see us is more of a struggle for some than for others, and it can be more challenging at various stages of our lives. Moreover, some people have single identities imposed on them in ways that can be life threatening. This is precisely why understanding identity—which is wholly different from learning to play identity politics—is such an important skill to learn and teach. We grow not in easy times but in difficult ones. In our moments of greatest division and fear, might we all become less comfortable and forge more nuanced understandings of our own identities, thereby opening ourselves up to explore the identities of others?

In 2015, I traveled to Bahawalpur, Pakistan, to discuss values and principles of moral leadership with a group of young Pakistani Acumen fellows who hailed from all parts of the country. Some young men wore jeans and polo shirts; others, traditional Pakistani shalwar kameez, long tunics with loosely fitted cotton trousers. Women, representing about 40 percent of the room, wore a mix of modern and traditional clothing as well. It was the first time I was meeting this particular group, but I felt a kinship given our shared global community.

After I asked which living people would qualify as moral leaders, I mused that the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner in history, Malala Yousafzai, Pakistan’s own daughter, was the Antigone of our times: courageous, noble, and powerful in her pursuit of justice.

Half the room agreed with me, some with a sense of national pride. Half shook their heads in disgust.

‘She is a CIA agent,’ one young man said.

Another chimed in: ‘She’s simply a tool of the West. The rich Americans love her because it fits within their story.’

When I pushed to understand, the group began arguing with one another, their words flying past me. One of the members, a young bearded man, sat silently, scowling. I asked the group to quiet down, and I turned to him: ‘Why have you opted out of the conversation?’

‘Malala is no hero of mine,’ he explained. ‘Her story has been manipulated to make the West feel good about itself.’

People around the table jumped in, both to protest and to agree. I asked them to hold back and give the young man space to say more.

He continued: ‘I’m from Swat, just near Malala’s village. We were one of the most progressive places in the country. We educated our daughters and sons in our valley. But after the 2004 earthquake, the Taliban came down from the mountains. They said Allah was punishing us for our evil ways and began to rule the area. Since then, we have lived with violence and fear in our midst. Schools were shut. Life became more difficult for us. Yet the world sees Malala and thinks we are barbarians who need to be saved by the West. It is not right. Those same people who love her and despise us don’t want to acknowledge that the U.S. created the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. And now the U.S. blames the Taliban for any of the violence to justify dropping drones on Northern Pakistan, on civilians. Why don’t we ever hear about girls who escaped U.S. drone attacks? Why don’t we ever make them heroes?’

He didn’t stop there, but instead described wounds inflicted on his sense of identity from Pakistanis themselves. ‘Even those Pakistanis who say Malala is an angel,’ he said, ‘don’t hide their surprise that she is so educated. They think our region is backward, that we are second-class citizens. It makes us feel more separate and, somehow, disgraced.’

We could have paused, agreed to disagree, honored his reaction as one justified by his being part of a wounded community. But we would have lost the chance to dive into the layers of what Malala represents to so many in Pakistan. We would have lost the chance to collectively unpack the statement that ‘the West loves Malala and despises people from Pakistan’s northern territories.’ Moreover, had we stopped, that young man may have been known from then on through the single story of being a Muslim from Swat. And he is so much more than that. He is a proud Pakistani; a lover of literature, of dancing, of sports; a university graduate. He is a father, a son, a brother, too. Also important, he’s a teacher who runs a school for boys and girls in his home city, and he has gone to great lengths to protect girls’ rights to education.

The conversation about Malala threatened his Pashtun identity. As Amin Maalouf would have predicted, in that moment, the Pashtun man spoke only from the part of himself that felt personally wounded—and thus, ‘Pashtun’ was raised to the top of his ‘identity hierarchy,’ reducing his story to a single narrative. If we had not had time as a group to consider the complexities of this man’s life experiences and the story of Malala herself, we could have become even more divided. Instead, we deliberately created space and time for uncomfortable conversations among people who, above all, valued listening and moral imagination.

You might be wondering what happened next, whether either side was convinced by the other. We never fully agreed as a group as to whether Malala was an angel or an agent. Yet most of the fellows admitted later that during that uncomfortable conversation, something within them individually, and in the group as a whole, shifted. At the very least, the larger group came to understand the hurt of Pashtuns in a more personal way. And at the end of our time together, one of the more privileged members of the cohort spoke about the shame he felt for remaining silent in the past when friends had insulted Pashtuns.

That unresolved conversation also elevated how we saw ourselves as a group. At the essence of the Malala exchange was the interplay of human dignity and identity; a yearning to be recognized and acknowledged; an unspoken promise: if you do not attempt to reduce me to a single identity, I will try to see you as a more integrated person as well. While we may not have fully resolved whether Malala was a hero, this was the resolution we needed: a commitment to acknowledge one another not just within the confines of the room but in the open spaces of the world.

The conversation about Malala prepared me for a surprising interaction I had in Dubai a few weeks later. I had been invited to speak to twenty professional women at a steel-and-glass restaurant atop one of the city’s imposing skyscrapers. The scene could not have felt more different from our simple retreat in the agricultural fields of southern Pakistan. The middle-aged women were dressed traditionally in abayas (long, flowing black robes) and hijabs (head scarves), and obviously were very wealthy, exuding the confidence that comes from operating at the highest levels of political and professional achievement.

I spoke about my work and my hope to contribute to a new kind of philanthropy in the region. When I finished, the elder stateswoman of the group thanked me, then posed an unexpected question: ‘What do you think about Malala?’ she asked. She clasped her hands and placed them gently on the table in front of her.

This time I was prepared. I started from a place of identity, acknowledging that while she was just a young woman, Malala had come to symbolize a tension between the West and the Muslim world, at least for some. I acknowledged that young women and men have been killed by the Taliban and by U.S. drones, and that with such violence, our children and the poor are the ones who lose most.

And then I shared my own belief that regardless of the circumstances that made Malala a teenage celebrity, she was using her privilege as a platform to stand for young people across the world, and doing so with respect for her religion, her parents, and her country. She may have been born a Pashtun girl from Swat, but now she belongs to all of us, and the world is better for it. I ended with another acknowledgment of my hosts: ‘I love this region and recognize the unholy partnership between fair-weather friends in both Pakistan and the United States. Both sides have dirty hands. It is our children who bear the brunt of violence and despair. It must be to us as women, as citizens, as mothers and sisters and aunts, to stand for building a peace that goes beyond politics, so that all children can grow to become what they deserve to be.’

The elder woman smiled and said, ‘Yes.’ And then she was quiet for another moment. I wasn’t sure what was coming next.

Finally, she said, ‘Thank you. Now we can talk.’”

—Jacqueline Novogratz, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World (2020)