Something like a knee-jerk reaction occurs when I talk about equality with people who have been assuming it means just one thing: being the same.

“Are you saying someone on welfare is the same as a CEO?”

“How can you say that someone in a wheelchair is the same as someone running marathons?”

“Why do women want to be the same as men? Men and women will always be different!”

Without understanding that equal does not mean the same, we are stuck in a rut. We are afraid to have women and people of color in charge, afraid to upset the apple cart of a white male-dominant society. We will continue to elect leaders who arrogantly assume that they are better than the rest of us because they have white privilege, more money, finer houses, or the ear of Jesus.

The question is not, “How can we be equal when we have such differences?” The question is, “How can we (meaning the privileged and entitled) change our behavior, alter the circumstances or otherwise open things up to include the ones who are being left out?”

If you are going to be open to hiring someone in a wheelchair, for example, you might need to install a ramp, widen lavatory doors and make other practical accommodations. You aren’t taking the job away from an able-bodied person. You are opening up access to job opportunities in your company in order to include a group of people who have been excluded.

The food bank is there to feed, to make sure that people who are being left out of the fundamental right to be free from hunger have access to food. It isn’t robbing the privileged of food in order to make sure the poor are fed. It is simply including the poor in the distribution of resources that people need to eat.

Homeless people need homes. Not because if you have a home suddenly you are equal to the rest of us. We are always equals. But having a home allows you safe sleep and a sense of security. We don’t need to rob the CEO’s and entitled whites of their safety and security to make sure someone less fortunate has that, too.

Inequality means being left out. Equality means being included, being brought inside.

An important element to seeking equality for everyone, therefore, is opening up our vast resources and opportunities to people who are being left out. That is the easier part. The more difficult part for most people is reshaping our established ways of seeing and treating others into a more inclusive point of view.

If we are going to include women’s voices in our society, for example, we have to go beyond electing them to office. We have to change our ideas about what role women play in making decisions for our country and its citizens. They aren’t going to talk like men, dress like men, have the same set of beliefs as men, or approach issues like men. The women we elect can’t be used as mere tokens of our intent to be diverse and equal.

Three women recently elected to Congress – Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – are a perfect illustration. They are being mocked, targeted on social media and portrayed as the personification of evil by the white, male establishment. Just today, the President, in his usual childish way, superimposed an image of Ilhan Omar, a Muslim, onto an image of planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11.

These women are equals among all elected representatives. They talk about issues the men haven’t tackled, don’t want to tackle or can’t figure out how to tackle – Palestine, Islamophobia, environmental justice, economic justice, health care, and so on. They illustrate how important it is to include the voices of women and people of color as we work towards a just society.

But the misogynists, white supremacists, racists and bigots among us are unwilling to see these leaders as equals. They will not change their behavior or perceptions in order to respect these women or their ideas. Rather than give credence to these women, the establishment belittles them as not worth our attention. They are saying, “I don’t care that you got elected. It means nothing. I’m not changing my behavior for the likes of you.”

In many ways, men are racing to stay ahead of the game: to keep women’s bodies under male control, to squelch feminine points of view, to keep using lobbyists to write legislation, to keep taking corporate dollars, to hold onto the wealth. It’s all about clinging stubbornly and for dear life to the old, tired ways of doing business.

Equality, then, has to include changing our own behavior to see the other as an equal. Not to see someone who is clearly different as the same as I am, but to see that person as equal in every way to me. The question becomes: How do I need to change, to accommodate this person as an equal? What do I need to do to demonstrate that understanding of equality?

The yardstick of the same can come in handy on other ways. What do I need to do to accommodate that person’s needs instead of assuming his/her needs are the same as my own. What do I need to do to give this person’s ideas the same credence and respect I want others to give my own ideas? How do I ensure that this person has the same freedoms I have?

Once we begin the practice of including rather than excluding people, we then have to learn how to alter our own behavior. You can say you are including someone, you can have the person physically included right in front of you, and still, by your habitual behaviors, leave the person out. True inclusion and equality requires us to change those habits.