The Hollowing: What We Lose When We Exclude

Editor’s Note: The Inner Cost of Inaction

In our exploration of “Intentional Interventions” several weeks ago, we examined how transformation requires more than navigating unjust systems. It depends on whether we choose to see people fully, even amid pressure to “streamline.” We looked at the power of small nudges and bold systemic changes that created more equitable outcomes.

But what happens when that energy fades? When institutions stall and begin to retreat, dismantling structures of inclusion one policy at a time? What does it profit an institution to gain efficiency but forfeit its soul?

This week, we slow down and turn inward. “The Hollowing” explores the moral and spiritual consequences that unfold when exclusion becomes normalized within institutions, particularly in spaces meant to form our collective values and shape our understanding of justice. Drawing on insights from James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others who understood the deep connections between social structures and inner lives, this essay examines how the act of excluding others doesn’t just harm those left out. It gradually erodes something essential in those doing the excluding, creating whitewashed exteriors that mask inner decay.

While our previous essays have focused on quantifiable impacts—who benefits, who loses access, how metrics shift. Today we consider what can’t be measured: the quiet diminishment that occurs when we prioritize efficiency over humanity, when we no longer fully see the people affected by our policies and choices.

This reflection connects our journey from student agency within systems (Week 6) through intentional interventions (Week 7) to our recent examination of who truly benefits from equity policies (Week 8). It suggests that in times of regression, the most radical act may not be sweeping reform but bearing witness. Refusing to look away. Preserving what humanity we can.

As we continue exploring educational systems and their broader societal impacts, this pause for moral reflection offers an opportunity to consider not just what our institutions do to others but also what they do to us when we participate in erasure. What are we implicitly teaching when exclusion becomes institutionalized and internalized?

Let’s begin.

— Dr. G

There’s a chill spreading through our institutions today. Not from policies alone but from something more insidious: the gradual hollowing in those dismantling inclusion initiatives. I first noticed it in their demeanor—the stiff smile that doesn’t reach the eyes, the practiced tone of neutrality masking disengagement, the overzealous recitation of talking points. Not hatred, which burns hot and announces itself, but something more calculated—a performance of conviction without substance.

In hearings and boardrooms, campus meetings and press conferences, the body language betrays what policy statements won’t: a leaning away, an averted gaze, a too-smooth delivery of words that sever connection. It’s not infection but erosion. Sometimes slow and passive, sometimes eagerly embraced, but always carving something essential away.

This pattern isn’t new. In archives, we find memos from the 1940s resisting military integration, using language nearly identical to today’s resistance to inclusion: concerns about “efficiency,” “standards,” “operational readiness.” The faces in old photographs show the same hollowing in those who enforced segregation. This isn’t coincidence. It’s a cycle repeating itself. We inherit more than policies. We inherit patterns, scripts written long before we arrived on stage. Unless we recognize them, we’re doomed to perform the same play.

The language gives it away: “streamlining,” “efficiency,” “merit.” Clean words. Bloodless words. Words that create distance between policy and people. What happens to a person when they erase others for long enough? If hate is a social disease that infects institutions, hollowing is its chronic condition—the quiet rot that follows when exclusion becomes ordinary, even professional.

With each signature authorizing erasure, each justification for exclusion, something is lost—not just to those excluded but also to those doing the excluding. The excluders’ reflections show strangers. Their spaces grow colder. Their voices begin to echo as if speaking from increasingly empty chambers. As Toni Morrison might say, this isn’t just “disremembering.” It’s active erasure that requires continuous maintenance.

The witnesses see it happening. The administrative assistant notices her supervisor’s gaze sliding past certain colleagues as if they’ve become transparent. The veteran recognizes the hollow place behind the eyes of the official who denies his benefits. The small-town doctor observes the healthcare executive’s voice flatten when discussing “unprofitable patients.” The farm owner and the workers who sustain his fields are both caught in systems that pit their survival against each other.

The child asks why the person on television seems to have “no light inside.” It’s the same emptiness Ruby Bridges might have recognized in the faces of those who lined her path to school—not just anger, but something missing behind it. “They lost something important inside them,” she might observe today, watching history repeat itself, “something more valuable than what they thought they were protecting.” Jackie Robinson, seeing his military service story now erased from the institutions that once celebrated him, might add: “The most dangerous opponent isn’t the one who hates openly, but the one who has convinced himself his exclusion is reasonable, his erasure merely efficient.”

These aren’t metaphors—not entirely. They’re the visible manifestations of what King understood when he described racism as “a disease that infects the soul, a poison that distorts personality.” The excluder becomes diminished by the very act of excluding. Baldwin meant this when he wrote of “the sickness of the American soul”—a condition that affects not just the marginalized but perhaps even more profoundly, those who do the marginalizing.

But recognition, when it happens, can open the door to transformation. We’ve witnessed it, though all too rarely in today’s climate: A department head quietly questions a directive before signing. An administrator begins using a colleague’s correct name after months of carelessness. Small committees find ways to preserve community connections despite pressure to standardize everything. These moments aren’t systematic change but are acts of resistance—subtle, stubborn refusals to participate fully in erasure.

These small acts of restoration don’t reverse policy decisions or rebuild dismantled programs. But they do preserve something essential: the acknowledgment of specific needs, the refusal to stop seeing people fully, the insistence that humanity matters more than abstract efficiency. The healing is incomplete, often temporary. Yet with each act of fully seeing another, something vital is preserved—both in those seen and those who choose to see. (Shoutout to my bredren Lance Eaton.)

We are never just ourselves. We are also those who came before us, making similar choices, facing similar temptations, carrying similar capacities for both harm and healing. The hollowing doesn’t begin with us, nor does it end with us. But as Flannery O’Connor might suggest, sometimes the veil gets thin, and we glimpse what’s really happening beneath the surface of things.

In those moments, we have a choice: continue the erasure or begin the restoration. Fill the hollow places, slowly, imperfectly, but with intention. In ourselves and in the world we help to shape. Whether through the products or programs we design, the policies we implement, the technologies we deploy, or the standards we uphold for determining who belongs. Suppose hollowing is indeed the chronic condition of institutional hate. In that case, each act of seeing, of recognizing, of restoring becomes both treatment and prevention—a small but vital resistance to the spreading sickness of exclusion.

A question for reflection: Have you ever witnessed the “hollowing” effect in your workplace or community? What small acts of restoration have you seen make a difference?

Let me know. Many thanks for reading.

Dr. G