You Cannot Control People Into Belonging

A few years ago, a supervisor called me into her office as she was preparing to leave the school where we worked together. She looked at me and said, “Justin, I owe you an apology.”

I was bewildered. I had no idea what she was talking about. Then she explained: “I hired you for a job that does not exist yet.”

On paper, the organization said it wanted restorative practices. It said it wanted to center student voice, build a more holistic environment, and create a place where young people could learn, grow, make mistakes, repair relationships, and mature. Those commitments were part of what drew me there. Before joining the organization, I had even consulted with them around some of this work. I believed we were trying to build something different.

But after two years inside the organization, I kept running into the same wall. The language was changing faster than the underlying logic. We could talk about restoration while still organizing discipline around control. We could celebrate student voice while remaining deeply uncomfortable when students used that voice to challenge adults. We could introduce restorative practices while preserving an adult-versus-student mentality. We could change the vocabulary without changing who held power.

My supervisor, on her way out, finally named what I had been experiencing: the organization was not actually ready to become what it said it wanted to become.

About six or seven months later, I decided to leave too. When I gave the building leader my two-week notice, his response was even more revealing: “I can’t say that I’m surprised. I know you’re trying to be all ‘restorative,’ and that’s just not who I am. I wish you the best.”

That sentence hit me hard, but it also clarified something I had struggled to name. The problem was not that we needed another circle protocol. It was not that people needed a better script for restorative conversations. It was not even primarily a training problem.

It was a problem of commitment.

The organization wanted some of the outcomes associated with restorative culture without surrendering the assumptions that made those outcomes difficult to achieve. It wanted belonging while maintaining control. It wanted voice without necessarily sharing power. It wanted restoration without allowing the institution itself to be implicated in the rupture.

And I have come to believe that this contradiction sits underneath a lot of organizational culture work.

You cannot control people into belonging.

Schools, nonprofits, workplaces, and other institutions routinely say that everyone belongs. We conduct belonging surveys. We create student-voice initiatives. We train people in emotional intelligence. We hold listening sessions and restorative circles. We put words like inclusion, safety, community, and authenticity into strategic plans.

But then someone questions a policy. Someone expresses anger in a way leadership finds uncomfortable. A student refuses to participate in a prescribed restorative process. A Black employee names racial inequity. A staff member says that the institution itself contributed to the rupture. Suddenly, the limits of “belonging” become visible.

Voice is celebrated until somebody says something the institution does not want to hear.

That is why I think we have softened belonging into a feeling when it also has to be understood as a practice and a condition we create together. We ask whether people feel welcomed without asking whether they possess meaningful influence over the conditions shaping their lives. We measure comfort without examining power, protection, cultural legitimacy, or the consequences of dissent.

Belonging is not simply being invited into the room. It is knowing you do not have to shrink, perform gratitude, surrender your dignity, or become less culturally whole in order to remain there.

This tension is especially important in restorative justice. Marcucci and colleagues describe school-based restorative justice as rooted in a “radically egalitarian view of humans and their relationships,” while warning that restorative justice can become entangled with the same carceral logics and forms of social control it is supposed to challenge. Their systematic review of 61 studies found that restorative practices are often implemented alongside racialized systems of discipline rather than replacing their underlying logic. The authors argue that realizing restorative justice’s anti-carceral possibility requires whole-school change, including leadership commitment, staff preparation, and meaningful student voice (Marcucci et al., 2026).

That distinction matters. A circle can look relational and still function as a mechanism of control.

Who decided that a circle was necessary? Can a participant decline without punishment or suspicion? Whose behavior is being examined? Who gets to define what happened? Can the institution be named as a source of the rupture? And when we say “repair,” do we mean repairing a relationship, or restoring compliance?

Those questions move restorative practice beyond technique and toward power. If the only person expected to change after a restorative process is the person with less institutional authority, we should at least be willing to ask whether restoration is actually what occurred.

The same problem appears when institutions turn to emotional intelligence as a solution for culture. Emotional intelligence can help people recognize, understand, and regulate emotions. Those capacities matter. But emotional skill does not automatically produce equity, and it cannot compensate for a commitment to hierarchy.

Gómez Yepes and colleagues studied 629 prospective secondary teachers and examined emotional intelligence, prosocial behavior, social dominance orientation, and intercultural sensitivity. Their findings are useful because they place emotional capacities alongside a person’s orientation toward hierarchy. Intercultural sensitivity was not simply a matter of being emotionally skilled or prosocial. Social dominance mattered too (Gómez Yepes et al., 2026).

That helps explain why emotional intelligence cannot be separated from power. People do not enter emotional interactions with equal freedom. A Black employee’s anger may not be interpreted the same way as a White colleague’s anger. A student’s resistance and an administrator’s frustration do not carry the same institutional consequences. The person with less power may be expected to regulate themselves in the presence of conditions they had little power to create.

In that environment, emotional intelligence can quietly become emotional compliance: learn to communicate your pain in a way that does not disturb the people with enough power to address its source.

That is not belonging.

A better standard asks harder questions. Can people remain culturally whole here? Can they disagree without fearing retaliation? Do they have meaningful influence over decisions that affect them? Can they name institutional harm, not only interpersonal harm? Is accountability applied fairly across levels of power? Can people participate in repair without coercion? And perhaps most importantly: when people tell the truth about the organization, does the organization ever change because they spoke?

Those questions point toward what I mean when I talk about ReMembering.

ReMembering begins with the recognition that healthy culture cannot be built simply by teaching individuals to behave better inside unhealthy systems. We have to remember the humanity, dignity, history, knowledge, and agency that systems of hierarchy teach us to forget. We have to dream beyond the structures we inherited instead of merely making those structures more polite. We have to practice accountability that does not depend on humiliation or disposability. And we have to keep repairing forward, which means repair cannot simply return people to the conditions that produced the rupture in the first place.

Remembering. Dreaming.
Accountability. Repairing forward.

These are not decorative values. They are tests of what an organization is actually committed to when belonging becomes inconvenient.

Because belonging without shared power is conditional inclusion.

Marginalized people, young people, and anyone living beneath the weight of an institution may not always have the academic language to describe that distinction. They may never say “carceral logic,” “social dominance orientation,” or “conditional inclusion.” But they can feel the difference. They know when their voice is welcomed only as long as it is agreeable. They know when a restorative conversation is really an order dressed in relational language. They know when emotional regulation means “make your pain easier for us to tolerate.” They know when belonging requires obedience.

And that lived contradiction is toxic to culture.

So maybe the question is not whether people feel welcomed into the culture we have created.

Maybe the better question is whether they have enough daily safety, dignity, and power to help recreate that culture when necessary.

When someone says no here, what happens? Who is allowed to name a rupture, including the institution’s role in creating it? What changed the last time somebody told the truth?

Those answers will tell us far more about belonging than another slogan ever could.