By Eddie Scarry
January 27, 2021 - 12:48 PM
In the span of 13 minutes, President Biden used the word "equity" nine times. Be prepared to hear it a lot more.
It's not just Biden raving about "equity" and how virtually every policy choice he pursues and makes will be with that concept in mind. It's en vogue with every one of his White House advisers. He said Tuesday that he had signed an executive order that will "for the first time, advance equity for all throughout our federal policies and institutions." The goal, he said, was to — what else? — "confront systemic racism and white supremacy."
Biden is simply doing what's required of him by the modern Democratic Party, which is to signal his virtue and acknowledge the permanently, hopelessly racist and bigoted nature of America that liberals insist upon. But there's also the disturbing possibility that he will really dial it up and actually try enacting this stuff on a large scale.
Equity is not the same as "equality," a word we've all been comfortable with and understood for years as a fundamental principle of our founding. Equity is something different, and that's why administration officials are using it so much, as to make it something people expect to hear whenever they talk.
At the televised briefing for reporters on Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki used the word five times. White House adviser Susan Rice was at the same briefing and used it 18 times.
Equality is the notion that no one person is inherently better than another; everyone deserves the same treatment under the law. In contrast, equity means that all racial or other groups' outcomes must be exactly the same, even if that means that individuals must be treated very unequally and even unfairly to get to that outcome.
So, equity means race quotas. It means different standards for different people and even race-based wealth redistribution at every level of society, both in government and in the private sector.
Biden made clear from the beginning that this was his aspiration. He said during his inauguration address that "a cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us" and that "[t]he dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer."
He promised to "deliver racial justice" and soothe "the sting of systemic racism."
The only way to achieve "equity" is for the government to create specific opportunities and entitlement policies for specific races deemed to have been victimized by our past and current society.
That's not equality — that's systemic discrimination. But the Biden administration isn't promising equality. It's promising equity.
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