The Rooms We Build
March 16, 2026
There is a moment we all know: stepping into a room and feeling, without knowing quite why, that you belong.
And there is another kind of moment most of us know too: entering a room and realizing, just as quickly, that you were not exactly who they had in mind.
Both moments were designed. Someone built them — in the layout of the room, the faces on the wall, the warmth of the greeting. In whether your name is pronounced with care, the books on the shelf reflect your story, or the table was set with you in mind. Belonging is not a feeling that arrives on its own. It is constructed out of a thousand small decisions, and it can be deliberately reconstructed toward greater welcome.
This intentional act of designing for belonging — asking, every time we build something, who we are building it for — may be among the most important and hopeful commitments we can make to one another right now. Conversations about who belongs are shaping our politics, our schools, and our neighborhoods. We see it in debates over immigration and voting rights, in rising incidents of hate, in the polarization that turns neighbors into strangers. Here in Idaho, we have watched legislation advance that would require teachers to report transgender students who came to them in confidence, strip nondiscrimination protections from the most vulnerable, and cut funding for disability services. These are not philosophical debates. They are choices about who counts and who gets to belong.
Such moments can feel unprecedented. But they are not. Time and again, societies have arrived at the same crossroads: whether to narrow the circle of belonging or expand it. Jim Crow drew hard lines around who counted, enforced first by law and then by the violence that law made permissible. From Reconstruction’s end in 1877 through the mid-twentieth century, Black families in the Jim Crow South navigated a world designed to communicate their diminishment at every turn — in the schools their children could attend, the jobs they could hold, the places they could live, the courtrooms where their word did not count. Dehumanization is most effective not when it is dramatic, but when it becomes mundane — when it is stitched so thoroughly into daily life that it stops registering as a choice anyone made.
That same pattern is visible today. As conflict in the Middle East intensifies, we hear open calls to exclude our Muslim neighbors. These are not coded messages, but strident declarations that some people simply are not welcome. During World War II, similar rhetoric preceded the incarceration of Japanese Americans. After September 11th, it fueled a wave of hate crimes against Arab communities. Each time, the narrowing of belonging left real wreckage: families uprooted, trust shattered, civic life diminished for everyone.
But destruction has never been the whole story. In every era, people have organized, marched, litigated, and refused. The system was total, but so was the resistance. And that resistance, it turns out, is also the story of American belonging expanding — haltingly, imperfectly, but unmistakably — toward greater dignity and inclusion.
This type of resistance produced some of the most consequential and least celebrated architects of change in American history. Pauli Murray, legal scholar, civil rights activist, Episcopal priest, began staging sit-ins in the 1940s, nearly two decades before the Greensboro sit-ins made national headlines. Black and gender-nonconforming, Murray navigated a world that had no room for the fullness of who they were. Yet the legal frameworks Murray built gave Ruth Bader Ginsburg the foundation that won Reed v. Reed in 1971 — the first time the Supreme Court struck down a law for discriminating on the basis of sex, laying the intellectual groundwork for decades of equal protection arguments that followed. Murray did not wait for the world to make space. They built the conditions under which belonging becomes possible — legal, intellectual, human — so that others could eventually go through doors that did not yet exist.
We can design for belonging too.
The beautiful and demanding truth about this work is that it does not require a revolution to begin. In our schools, it starts with asking which children can see themselves in the curriculum, what cultural traditions are acknowledged, and whose curiosity is reflected back to them as worthy. In our workplaces, it means noticing who gets interrupted and whose ideas get credited to someone else — and then changing the practice. In our homes, those first schools of belonging, it means the stories we tell around the table and the way we talk about our neighbors. These moments happen quickly, but each is significant. They are the difference between a room that tells some people they belong and a room that tells everyone they do.
What holds most of us back is habit and the discomfort of admitting that spaces we love were built with some people in mind and not others. We are all part of spaces that exclude; we all hold the capacity to redesign them toward greater welcome. Looking clearly — with honesty, with humility, with hope — is where the work begins.
Murray never lived in a world that welcomed all of who they were. But the rooms they helped build made it possible for others to be more fully seen, to walk through life with greater dignity, greater freedom, greater joy.
This is ultimately the work. Not perfect institutions, but open doors. Not grand gestures, but the steady, faithful practice of asking, every time we gather:
Who is not yet here? What would it take to make room?
Who is here, but feels like they don’t belong? What would it take to welcome and value them?
These questions, asked seriously and often, are how we keep building the rooms we all long to live in.