Solidarity Across Difference as Justice Practice

Sor Juana engaged in correspondence and intellectual exchange with people across different social positions: clerics, nobles, intellectuals, women of various classes. Her work demonstrates that fairness can be advanced through solidarity—the practice of standing together across differences to challenge injustice. She understood that women's intellectual liberation mattered not just to elite women like herself but to all women denied education. She recognized that colonial injustice affected entire populations, not just individuals. Solidarity requires developing the capacity to recognize how injustice to others is also a threat to justice itself. Every civilization that has achieved meaningful fairness has required such solidarity: workers across different industries organizing together, people of different races standing against racism, different religious communities defending religious freedom for all. This is not natural; it requires deliberate practice and relationship-building across difference. Sor Juana's intellectual work modeled this—engaging respectfully with thinkers different from herself, learning from diverse traditions, building arguments that could resonate beyond her immediate community. Fair systems cultivate these practices of solidarity, recognizing that justice is indivisible and that all of us have stakes in each other's freedom.