Before he founded a design firm for justice, before he advised billion-dollar companies, and long before he became a sought-after speaker on equity and power, Xavier Ramey was a kid on the West Side of Chicago who spent most of his free time in the library. Not because anyone made him. Not because it looked good. But because books were where the world made sense to him.
“I was the outcast kid,” he says. “Nerdy, curious, always talking—usually about things no one else cared about yet.”
His father, Paul Ramey, was an organizer in the Henry Horner Projects, someone who knew how to move people without a mic. His mother knew everyone in the neighborhood. From them, Xavier absorbed two enduring truths: that real power lives in relationships, and that silence is a form of complicity. Those ideas would become the emotional architecture of Justice Informed, the company he built in his thirties to help organizations reckon with systemic inequity.
But Ramey's journey to becoming a justice strategist wasn't linear. It moved through grief, betrayal, academia, corporate boardrooms, and the lived complexity of Black manhood in America. It also moved through disappointment—both personal and professional—especially in the performative equity boom of 2020 and its post-2024 rapid retreat.
He remembers one afternoon in middle school, huddled at the back of the Garfield Park branch library, reading about apartheid while kids outside practiced double dutch. He remembers trying to explain redlining to his classmates and getting blank stares. “I had a lot to say,” he recalls, “but not always a place to say it.”
“We don’t pitch,” he says. “We don’t sell. We invite people who already know the world is broken and want to work.”
That ethos, sharp and unapologetic, has made him a vital force in today’s justice movement. Ramey isn’t here to soften the blow. He’s here to identify and name the pain—and help rebuild what comes after.
West Side Foundations
Ramey grew up at the intersection of Chicago’s Garfield Park and Lawndale neighborhoods. It wasn’t an easy upbringing, but it was rich in culture, questions, and community.
"I spent most of my time reading. I devoured books the way a cactus takes in water," he says. “They helped me speed up time. A book is what someone else already figured out.”
He credits his father with giving him his first real framework for leadership—"My father taught me: you can organize a protest, but can you organize a meal?”
That hunger for knowledge became his first form of resistance. In a city often defined by its segregation and struggle, Ramey was already asking: Why is it like this? Who benefits? Who pays?
His second-grade teacher, Ms. Whitfield, taught him the electric slide. It’s a memory that he recalls with warmth. It wasn’t just a dance. It was belonging—a soul-binding tie of unity signifying that everyone could move together.
“That class was one of the few places I felt seen,” he says. “I knew even then: I wasn’t meant to survive this place—I was meant to shape it.”
But school wasn’t always a sanctuary. He remembers being mocked for the way he spoke, for using vocabulary he picked up from books rather than the streets. “I got called 'white' for how I talked. Even in Evanston, which people think of as progressive,” he says.
Still, he held on to his voice—awkward, earnest, and insistent. The same voice that would later command conference rooms and keynote stages. In a generation coming of age with dual fluency in code-switching and consciousness, Ramey was ahead of the curve.
Before Justice Informed
Ramey didn’t begin his career in justice. He started in finance and nonprofits, navigating spaces that rarely centered equity but were constantly invoking it. He learned the language of philanthropy—and the limits of good intentions.
“People wanted transformation without discomfort. That doesn’t exist,” he says. “What they want is safety within the system. But safety is a future state. It isn’t guaranteed now.”
After earning degrees in economics and public policy, Ramey began to chart his own path. He noticed a troubling gap: organizations were obsessed with metrics but allergic to meaning. Diversity reports without relational work. Inclusion campaigns with no actual redistribution of power.
So he founded Justice Informed not as a DEI firm, but as a strategy and design company for equity. “We are a firm that looks at how relationships function inside institutions,” he explains. “And then we ask: What would this look like if it were built for equity from the start?”
He refers to it as an invitation-based model: people aren’t persuaded to care—they’re welcomed into the work only once they do. “My cousins in Chatham aren’t getting a job at Meta just because we updated the website’s stock photos,” he says. “This is about power, not palette swaps.”
The DEI Mirage
Ramey has sharp words for the post-2020 corporate rush into DEI. He calls it “the performative era”—an influx of jobs, initiatives, and funding that often lacked substance.
“We had folks with 14-hour certificates calling themselves experts,” he says. “People jumping into DEI work who didn’t want to do corporate work around white people. It was a house of cards.”
He’s equally critical of the logic behind it.
“There’s no business case for raising your kids. So why does equity need one?” he asks. “That was the whole premise after 2014—this Harvard Business Review white paper saying diversity makes you more money. I call that an arrogantly disrespectful foundation to build humanity on.”
Instead, Ramey advocates for what he calls a justice-informed model. One rooted in accountability, not optics. Relationships, not transactions. Repair, not rebranding.
“Equity is divisive because it demands an answer: Are you in relationship with the people harmed?” he says. “If not, you won’t do the work.”
“Racial change cannot move at the pace of white fragility,” he adds. “Black people’s ambition for equality has already outpaced white America’s imagination.”
Erased and Still Here
In the years after George Floyd’s murder, Ramey’s firm was in high demand. He led equity audits, coached C-suite executives, and helped shape large-scale public and private policy shifts. Then, slowly, the calls stopped. His name vanished from websites. Companies returned to the safe language of inclusion over impact.
“It felt like betrayal. But I had already counted the cost,” he says. “The erasure is never loud. It’s administrative. One week your name is on a slide. The next, it’s not.”
He describes this moment not as a crisis, but a revelation.
“The value proposition of my work isn’t business. It’s ministerial,” he says. “I’m trying to change people’s hearts. Tragedy is a hurricane. What we’re facing—poverty, homicide, racial violence—is not tragedy. It’s a design. And I run a design firm.”
An enemy, he says, is easier than a traitor. “Because a traitor had a relationship with you.”
What They Get Wrong
Some people, he says, assume he wants to burn everything down.
“It’s a failure of imagination,” he says. “Some things need to be pruned. Others need to die. But that’s not destruction—it’s design.”
He uses a fitness metaphor. If you want to get in shape, you change your diet. That’s not violence. That’s discipline.
“Help feels like pain,” he says. “But if your goal is change, you have no right to comfort. Your safety isn’t in the current. It’s in the next.”
This is not about punishment. It’s about integrity. And it demands more than statements or sponsorships—it demands structural courage.
The New Model
Justice Informed today looks different than it did in 2020. Ramey calls it Version 3.0. The firm is leaner, more selective, and more honest about who it works with.
“We don’t convince people. We partner with those who already believe the work matters,” he says. “And that, in itself, rebukes the myth that nobody wants this.”
He speaks in rhythms—part preacher, part strategist, part philosopher. He dissects capitalism, calls out false allies, and still ends the conversation with grace.
Asked if he sees himself as an activist, he shakes his head.
“I don’t like the word,” he says. “Too many people use it without doing the work. I’m a strategist. A speaker. More and more, I think I’m a minister.”
And what is he ministering?
“Hope with teeth,” he says. “Hope that comes with a cost.”
The Future, If We Want It
Ramey doesn’t believe in false hope. But he does believe in people—at least the ones who are ready.
He still travels the country, still speaks to CEOs, still asks the question that launched his entire enterprise:
Are you in a relationship with the people you say you want to help?
If the answer is yes, he’ll help you redesign your institution from the ground up. If the answer is no, he’ll walk away.
Because Xavier Ramey doesn’t chase the work. He builds it—carefully, urgently, and always in relationship.
Because he knows what happens when a generation forgets to read, to listen, to be brave enough to change.
And he refuses to let that be our legacy.