Political theorist Danielle Allen is on a journey to revitalize the commitment to equality, saying it too often takes a backseat to freedom in United States’ democracy.

Allen, who spoke at Memorial Union Tuesday as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series, is a professor at Harvard University. She is known for her work on democratic theory and political thought and wrote a book “Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.”

The concept of equality is in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence but is rarely emphasized, Allen said. Freedom is the key term with many political candidates today, while equality falls back, yet both are pillars of democracy, she said. 

Allen said she’s on a journey to revitalize the commitment to equality. It will take a lot of work to fully rejuvenate people’s understanding of one of the two pillars of democracy, she said.

“Our intellectual muscles for talking about equality have atrophied over the last few decades,” Allen said.

Allen said she pursued this revitalization with the students she taught for night school in Chicago while also working as a professor at the University of Chicago. This was a night class of low-income adults, and none of her students had read the Declaration of Independence, she said.

When she later asked her students at University of Chicago if they had read the Declaration all the way through, they also said no, Allen said.

The night school students did not think the text “belonged” to them because it was written by old, dead and white slaveholders, she said.

As Allen took them through the text and focused on the core of the Declaration of Independence, they realized the way they view their lives and the way the writers of the Declaration viewed the world were parallel to one another.

“All the students were there to change their lives, they were trying to regain control,” she said, “The Declaration is just this, a story of people trying to change their lives.”