The Inequality of ‘Equity’

By Christopher Caldwell

Thursday, April 29, 2021

 

In mid-April, three of the new generation of black women mayors of big cities met (virtually) at a roundtable sponsored by MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, London Breed of San Francisco, Kim Janey of Boston . . . one might assume that crisis management was the kind of management they had been invited to pronounce on. Lightfoot’s Chicago has become the murder capital of the United States, with 774 killings last year, roughly as many as New York and Los Angeles combined — and up 55 percent from the year before. Breed’s San Francisco, cradle of the Information Age, has in recent years faced a problem out of the Middle Ages: people defecating on sidewalks, 28,000 cases of which came to the attention of the police in 2019. Janey is the newly appointed successor to Marty Walsh, made President Joe Biden’s secretary of labor. 

 

MIT had invited the three women not to interrogate but to applaud them and to find out how the rest of America’s cities might become as “equitable” as theirs. “Equity” is the name for a new understanding of racial equality that is now informing public-policy-making. President Biden issued a burst of executive orders on his first day in office, calling for equity to be placed “front and center” in everything his administration does. His cabinet members, unsurprisingly, allude to equity constantly. 

 

If you wanted to be blunt about it, you might call equity a no-excuses imperative to eliminate all collective racial inequalities. There are many such inequalities in our system, and blacks are on the unenviable side of most of them. They possess the fewest financial assets, fare the worst in school, have the hardest time finding work, live the shortest lives, commit the most violent crime, and spend the most time in jail. Equity’s proponents, most of them progressive Democrats, say their aim is to ensure that all races share equally in economic growth and get a fair shake in the justice system. Republicans say that Democrats are abandoning equality of opportunity for equality of result. 

 

Put that way, “equity” sounds like a new name for something that Americans have been arguing about for two or three generations now. Affirmative action, after all, tips the playing field of opportunity in minorities’ favor. “Diversity” is all about managing results. Feminists’ equal-pay-for-equal-work campaigns might be considered a harbinger of these equity debates.

 

But in two ways the equity movement is radically new. 

 

First is in the categorical simplicity of its diagnosis. It views all inequality across groups as illegitimate on its face — as evidence of white racism, in fact. 

 

Second is in its tools. Equity doesn’t concern itself with more-traditional understandings of inequality — differences, say, between bosses and laborers. It is about equality for blacks, as laid out in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and for the various groups, from immigrants to transgender people, that have come under the act’s protection in the decades since. The power of civil-rights law to punish employers and schools, to investigate those suspected of noncompliance, and even to silence detractors has been steadily strengthened by bureaucratic fiat and litigation. Race-conscious rather than race-blind, open to almost any kind of remedial discrimination, equity has brought us to a crossroads. Either our civil-rights laws are being overstretched to the point where they are growing intolerable to much of the country (though people remain frightened of saying so) or they are in the process of becoming the supreme law of the land, overriding even the Constitution.

 

***

 

Joe Biden, never known for his originality as either a politician or a thinker, is now carrying out a radical redefinition of American ideas of fairness. This is perhaps not as surprising as it looks. In last year’s Democratic primaries, Biden was the compromise candidate of a Democratic establishment that looked on Donald Trump as an existential threat to the nation. Voters, alas, were lukewarm: Biden finished fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, and a distant second in Nevada – with the possibly unelectable socialist Bernie Sanders at or near the top in all three contests.

 

South Carolina, where the Democratic electorate is almost 60 percent black, was the party leaders’ last possible chance to keep Biden in the race. The win he secured there was due wholly to the endorsement and organization of the gentlemanly House Democratic whip James Clyburn, the state’s most experienced politician. That win, in turn, brought heavy party pressure for the withdrawal of rival “moderates” in a position to erode Biden’s vote: Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bloomberg. Other presidents may have empathized more with black America or understood it better, but none has ever owed blacks as much as the congenitally loyal Biden. During the campaign he pledged to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court — something for which Clyburn has said he “longs” — and his first three appellate-court nominees have been black women. 

 

It should be noted in passing that Biden’s electoral debts are numerous. Though victory helps, it has not wholly solved the problem that he lacks a passionate base within his own party. The consequence is that the White House is now staffed by a fractious junta of party interest groups: feminists here, techies there, billionaire philanthropists up there, voting-rights activists down here, held together in variable geometries by Chief of Staff Ron Klain. This arrangement may lead to clashes later on. Right now, it has lent the Biden administration an early dynamism not seen since Lyndon Johnson took office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And at the core of this dynamism is the idea of equity. 

 

Equity is derived from so-called critical race theory, which came to public attention when Donald Trump denounced it as a “malign ideology” last campaign season (after giving it a home in his administration for three and a half years, though that is another story). Critical race theory is a varied set of perspectives on a varied set of issues. But there is one thing that seems to run through all of it: non-neutrality. Starting in the 1990s, critical-race scholars noticed that “color blindness” and the “level playing field” and “objective measurements” were doing little to close the gaps between blacks and others — and came to repudiate those things as frauds. So, for instance, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading theorist, argued in the introduction to the essay collection Critical Race Theory, published in 1995, that “the putatively neutral baseline from which affirmative action is said to represent a deviation is in fact a mechanism for perpetuating the distribution of rights, privileges, and opportunity established under a regime of uncontested white supremacy.” There can be no such thing as color blindness, the reasoning goes, because the institutions, the structures, and the laws are already rigged in favor of white people (and, as immigration has progressed, of other nonblack ethnic groups). 

 

Activist government must intervene explicitly in behalf of blacks. It must practice affirmative action without apology. It must pay reparations for the aftereffects of slavery. It must discriminate. “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity,” wrote the best-selling black-studies professor Ibram X. Kendi in 2019. “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is anti-racist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.” 

 

As equity has advanced, most Americans have sat around scratching their heads. The Civil Rights Act was passed to “fight discrimination,” they assume, and probably most of them assume that is still what it does. But civil rights have moved on. The evolution has been both legal and sociological. After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in mid 2020, it was only a matter of days before equity ideology had been proclaimed the official culture of virtually every large corporation in the country. That is because, in part to strengthen their defenses against proliferating civil-rights lawsuits, corporations have been equipped with large human-resources departments, which mete out company policy, ideological training, and discipline. 

 

The training tends to rely on philosophical statements from well-endowed progressive charities that work closely with civil-rights lawyers. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, for instance, publishes “Embracing Equity: 7 Steps to Advance and Embed Race Equity and Inclusion within Your Organization.” Publications like these are not diffident or wavering. “One of the challenges of communicating effectively about race,” the “Embracing Equity” pamphlet specifies in its Step 1, “is to move people from the narrow and individualized definition of racism to a more comprehensive and systemic awareness.” 

 

What happens if one of these “narrow and individualized” employees opines that racism is not the source of all the country’s divides? Or that his own perspective on the matter is just as valid as a subsidized billionaire’s? HR might suspect he is a racist himself, or apt to be mistaken for one by a liberal judge — a lawsuit waiting to happen. Perhaps that explains why, over the past year, no significant rebuttal to the spreading dogmas of equity has been offered in any walk of American life, not even during the presidential campaign. It went unmentioned that groups might differ for reasons other than racism — that, for instance, the cause of blacks’ more frequent encounters with the police might have something to do with the measurably higher rates at which they, collectively, commit certain crimes.

 

Shortly after Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, the progressive cartoonist Craig Froehle posted a drawing online labeled “Equality to a conservative, equality to a liberal.” It captured the imaginations of those who thought like him, and you are likely to have seen it if you have ever read a diversity brochure or completed an online equity-training module. Froehle’s drawing shows three kids — one tall, one average, one short — trying to watch a baseball game over a wooden fence. Only the tallest of the three can see the game unaided. But they have resources. Each of them has one wooden crate. If each stands on his own crate, now the second-tallest can see over the fence, too. This is “equality to a conservative.” But liberals have an even better idea. If the tallest gives the shortest his box, which he doesn’t need, they can all see over the fence. This is “equality to a liberal” — or as we would call it just nine years later, equity. Today, this parable can be found all over the Internet as a proof of equity’s superiority to equality. 

 

Froehle’s drawing may be a satisfying lesson about why children should share, but as a depiction of how adults reach political compromise, it is misleading. For one thing, most possessions are not useless to those who own them. The goods that political activists seek to redistribute are other people’s homes, their jobs, their children’s educations. Surrendering such things to a political adversary you don’t know and don’t trust is a very different thing from giving a friend a beaten-up crate that you have (for some inexplicable reason) brought to the ballpark. For another, the contexts in which real-world inequity arises are too complicated to simply swap your way out of. If you want a house painter to earn the income of a surgeon, you cannot simply give him the address of the hospital and tell him to show up on Monday. (Nor would the surgeon necessarily prosper as a house painter.) Finally, Froehle’s illustration has nothing to say about how crates (or prosperity) get produced and acquired.

 

The dangers of this equity approach are significant. This year there has been an effort among activists to “break” the patents of those Western pharmaceutical companies that developed the coronavirus vaccines in record time. The effort has been supported by the World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who calls the gap between vaccine distribution in rich and poor countries “grotesque.” Access to vaccines can perhaps be improved. But the director general seems not to understand that the corporate and property arrangements that enabled the rapid development of a vaccine were already up and running before COVID arose. Break those and you break the possibility of developing a vaccine in the first place.

 

***

 

President Biden frequently stresses how overarching his commitment to equity is. It even applies overseas. In his “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons around the World,” promulgated on February 4, the president warned foreign nations that opposition to homophobia and transphobia is now among “our most dearly held values,” noting that same day that equity “has to be the business of the whole of government in all our federal policies and institutions.” 

 

This unwillingness to draw a line between foreign and domestic policy is responsible for what is thus far the most historic moment of the Biden presidency. At a bilateral summit in Anchorage in early March, China rebuked the United States for its institutional racism, after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had sought to lecture China about human rights. Most Americans do not believe that the United States is as suffused with structural racism as activists like to claim. But if the administration insists on validating such allegations domestically, whether to inspire its allies or to control its foes, China will probably concur.

 

Equity is everywhere. The Biden White House even has something called the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity (perhaps to make sure the rain will truly fall on the just and the unjust). But these days the coronavirus pandemic has been the main policy arena for equity. Asked in mid April why the White House had decided not to send extra vaccines to Michigan, which was seeing a surge in cases, Press Secretary Jen Psaki explained: “It’s done with equity in mind. It’s done with the state — the population, the adult population — in mind.” Perhaps Michigan’s youth population is more sympathetic. 

 

COVID testing and vaccination are largely the province of states, and these have, on their own initiative, put in place equity plans that treat whites and nonwhites in very different ways. In Washington, D.C., residents in heavily minority zip codes were allowed to enter the online lottery for vaccinations on all days that they were offered, while residents of whiter neighborhoods were eligible only on selected days. If the White House focus on equity arises partly from atonement, the motivations of City Hall probably differ. Blacks remain the largest ethnic group in Washington, D.C., and Muriel Bowser, another of those dynamic young black women who run major cities, is in charge. It was Mayor Bowser who last June ordered “Black Lives Matter” to be painted on the street near the White House in letters large enough to be read from a satellite. 

 

It is true that, in Washington, D.C., blacks have died of COVID at higher rates than whites. It is also true that, in a pandemic, an unvaccinated subpopulation can offer the virus a dangerous foothold. Time being of the essence in such cases, government might need to resort to rough-and-ready metrics, conceivably even race, to ensure that protections reach vulnerable groups. But protecting health, not establishing or alleging a pattern of racism, must be the starting point. Other states — such as Utah, which has rushed mobile vaccination units to rural areas, or North Carolina, which has, with federal help, subcontracted a large part of its inner-city vaccinations to community organizations — have done better.

 

But Bowser’s technique of using zip codes to create a rough hierarchy of citizens’ rights is nonetheless coming into vogue. Targeting by geography can work to the same effect as targeting by race. It is an old practice that bears a resemblance to “redlining,” the assessment of banks and mortgage brokers that certain neighborhoods were too default- and crime-prone to lend in. In Vermont, the Republican governor, Phil Scott, felt no need to dissemble. When nonwhite vaccine rates fell behind those of whites, he opened up vaccinations to all nonwhites in the state, excluding only whites. When Vermonters accused him of his unfairness, he reached for the contemporary politician’s all-purpose retort. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the legacy of racism in America, and in Vermont, still drives a lot of anger and fear.”

 

The Biden administration has staffed up to ensure that its own role in COVID provision is equitable. Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-response coordinator, often finds the occasion to explain that “we’re putting equity front and center,” and a Yale epidemiologist, Marcella Nunez-Smith, has been taken on as the chairwoman of the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. 

 

Also newly arrived to work on health equity is Catherine E. Lhamon, deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council for Racial Justice and Equity. She is the former ACLU litigator who served in the Obama administration’s Education Department and devised the strategy of sending “Dear Colleague” letters to university administrators. These were implicit threats to strip universities of their federal Title IX funding, in order to pressure them into meting out draconian penalties to students accused of sexual assault, often on flimsy evidence. 

 

Lhamon’s present preoccupation is inequities in the rate of mothers who die during childbirth. It is a serious problem. The United States has a higher rate of maternal death than other Western countries have, and new data from the CDC show that black women are 2.5 times more likely to die from complications of pregnancy than are non-Hispanic whites. There is a curious element to the CDC data, though, that is missing from the White House’s briefings. It shows that whites are not the best-off group in terms of maternal-health outcomes. Asians suffer a maternal-mortality rate roughly equivalent to that of whites, and the Hispanic maternal death rate is lower than that of whites. This opens up the probability that reasons other than racism (individual, systemic, or otherwise) are responsible for the black–white gap. 

 

A similar misunderstanding has accompanied the shocking declines in longevity that white Americans, alone among racial groups, suffered for several consecutive years over the past decade. These declines, documented by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in their work on “deaths of despair,” were reported in such a way as to leave the impression that whites were still in a highly advantageous relation to other groups. They are not. According to the CDC, life expectancy for blacks is 76, for whites 79, for Hispanics 83, and for Asians 87.

 

In a multiracial country where at least a half-dozen head-to-head comparisons are possible, the obsessive focus on black–white comparisons gives a skewed picture of what is going on. It also raises a question of principle: If Phil Scott had discovered that it was whites, not nonwhites, who were getting vaccinated at lower rates, would he have applied the same principles and ordered a halt to nonwhite vaccinations until the numbers came into line? What if a particular minority — say, Asians — were doing especially well? Would he have singled them out? And if not, is it really equity that we are talking about here? Or is it a progressive impulse, for whatever good or bad reason, to take white people down a peg?

 

***

 

These questions have arisen in the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus bill, signed into law when the post-COVID boom was already under way. The COVID pretext for the bill is dwarfed by its Christmas list of unrelated progressive spending. Many items on the list involve equity. In late March, when the bill was safely passed, Lhamon and White House special assistant for gender policy Kalisha Dessources Figures described it as the “largest single federal investment in history for Native programs” and a boon for industries “concentrated among entrepreneurs of color.” Once confirmed as deputy Treasury secretary, Adewale Adeyemo is expected to lead a “racial equity review” of the funds disbursed.

 

One measure of the stimulus has drawn particular attention. A section that would forgive billions of dollars in debt for “socially disadvantaged” farmers was patterned on an “Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act” sponsored by Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, which excluded whites from its beneficiaries. Many of the bill’s backers even crowed that it was a form of racial “reparations.” 

 

Applying government benefits by race: Is that even legal? Maybe in some circumstances, but it is an area that politicians have, until very recently, entered only with extreme caution. In 2011, President Obama wanted to give the presidential imprimatur to a program called “My Brother’s Keeper,” funded by Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, to mentor “young men of color.” But White House communications on the subject were scrupulous about conveying (if only in the fine print) that it was not a government program. In today’s equity programs, the line between government and billionaire philanthropists is disappearing, especially in the environs of Silicon Valley. A city program to give $1,000-a-month cash payments to pregnant black women is one of the equity initiatives that London Breed, the San Francisco mayor, was touting when she spoke at the MIT roundtable in April. Similar programs, using nonprofit money for racially targeted government transfers, are under way in Marin County and Oakland.

 

Surveying the institutions and programs that rest on the concept of equity, one sees that some of them are race-conscious: New York State, since the legalization of marijuana there, has conducted an outreach to “social and economic equity applicants,” making it a priority to turn more nonwhites into (now-legal) drug dealers. Some of them are funny: Rutgers University has a Period Equity Project, a “club that supports menstruators,” as women are increasingly called in this age of gender indeterminacy. They reckon that since the costs of menstruation are unduly borne by those who menstruate, they must be socialized. Some initiatives are heavy-handed: California now requires all corporations to have at least one woman director. But, really, most such programs have their heart in the right place and are consistent with ideas of community harmony as they have developed over the last century: The City of Baltimore probably should have a “director of broadband and digital equity,” to bring Internet services and skills to run-down areas that might otherwise be excluded from the life of the community. Such programs are not of a nature to provoke broad complaint.

 

The most troubling innovation of equity is its tendency to move in a direction that will, in time, reintroduce segregationist thinking. Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth announced in March that she would vote to block the confirmation of all white nominees (except for gays) until the president nominated more Asians. Boston mayor Kim Janey is experimenting with an approach that combines the zip-code hierarchies of Muriel Bowser’s Washington and the race-based benefits of London Breed’s San Francisco, offering free public-transport and bike-share passes to 1,000 residents of minority neighborhoods, including Nubian (formerly Dudley) Square and Jamaica Plain. The Uber Eats app allows diners to order from “black-owned businesses.” 

 

And there is another difference that has to do with public morale. Over six decades of federal civil-rights enforcement, the race-based interventions of the government into the most intimate areas of people’s lives have sometimes been irksome and sometimes counterproductive, but the burden was always made more tolerable by the sense that the project had a goal, an end point. Once the country was integrated, invasions of the citizenry’s privacy would stop. But now race activists are having second thoughts. Equity proceeds in an altogether different spirit, best captured by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s call for whites to pay trillions of dollars in reparations while warning, “We may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans.” They are reparations that won’t repair anything.

 

That civil-rights remedies must be eternal is the view not just of intellectuals but also of many bureaucrats. In a March interview, Nataki Pettigrew, chief equity and inclusion officer of a mostly white school district outside of Indianapolis, described equity as “a life-enhancing piece not just for adults but for students,” adding: “You’re on a journey but you never arrive, you get closer, but you never really get there. It’s continued work, it doesn’t stop, because I think the moment that we stop is the moment that old systems can come back.” There is a presumption here of an inherent malevolence in white people (or at least in white societies) that must be kept under perpetual surveillance. A reasonable non-racist white person might protest that this is not what anyone signed up for.

 

***

 

Equity is the product of an invisible legal revolution. Civil-rights law was designed to function within a set of American institutions as they existed in the early 1960s. But it has generated institutions of its own and captured others. Today, power gets exercised in interactions between regulatory agencies, corporate managers, litigators, and nonprofit foundations – interactions that are not always transparent.

 

In late April, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), close to the Democratic Party and its equity activists, took out a full-page ad in the Financial Times and, in the name of “racial justice leaders,” accused “asset managers” of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” The ad called for “racial equity audits” and demanded that companies stop “backing corporate directors with known histories of anti-Black racist harm.” Companies should also “oppose directors in charge of political spending at corporations that have failed to address their role in funding elected officials implicated in the Capitol Insurrection or those behind or supporting voter suppression efforts.” 

 

This appears to be the ACORN model of activism: In certain cases, minority activists can “hold up” (in both senses of the idiom) corporations, raising objections that can be overcome with compensation. The SEIU activists are adding a new twist: trying to intimidate corporations out of making campaign donations to Republicans, using a legal-sounding threat, as if the polarity of Right-versus-Left were being replaced by legal-versus-illegal. 

 

The assertions are strident, and the vocabulary is esoteric (“harm,” “insurrection”), as if it were translated from a foreign language. In a sense, it is. The language is legalese, and it is designed to build a foundation upon which a company can be held liable under civil-rights law in an American court. This activist tactic has been widely misunderstood. When a campus activist demands a “safe space,” conservatives tend to say, Oh, boo-hoo, precious widdle snowflake! This is foolish. The word “safe” is carefully chosen. It gestures at certain specific kinds of negligence for which a university could pay dearly in a court of law. It is schools’ legal vulnerability, not students’ emotional vulnerability, that such confrontations reveal.

 

By contrast, in a report on equity in the entertainment industry, McKinsey & Company notes that 87 percent of TV executives and 92 percent of film executives are white, lamenting that Hollywood lacks “strong accountability structures (uniformly enforced HR processes and rules, for instance).” In other words, they’re too supple to be sued by activist foundations or investigated by attorneys general.

 

In a funny way, we are returning to a politics that is pre–civil rights, or perhaps even a politics typical of the old big-city Democratic machines before the Progressive era. “You’ve got to use the bully pulpit of the mayor’s office,” Lori Lightfoot said at the MIT roundtable in April as she explained how she runs Chicago. “People now know they can’t come to talk to me about anything related to our city, and particularly not our economy and innovation, without telling me what their plan is for equity and inclusion.” 

 

Lightfoot seems not to understand what Teddy Roosevelt meant when he called the presidency a “bully pulpit.” Like a lot of Northeastern patricians of his day, he used the adjective “bully” to mean great, or perhaps jolly good. The bully pulpit is the opposite of what Lightfoot describes. She means the smoke-filled room. And she seems to assume that Roosevelt is referring to bullying, to giving people who want to do business with the city the third degree. “Tell us what your track record is in supplier diversity,” she explains. “If you are walking the walk, you won’t have trouble telling your story.” 

 

There is no doubt that pressuring people into using black vendors would help some black businessmen, at least the politically connected ones. Kim Janey claims that Boston spends $2.1 billion “to do business” in a year and that less than 1 percent of that goes to black and Latino businesses. But what makes such an ethnic spoils system less suitable to today than it was to the world of a century ago is civil-rights law. The political “arena” in which different ethnic interests used to contend over turf — the Irish lodge against the Italian block committee — is no longer neutral. Today some ethnic groups’ interests are considered legitimate, others’ not. There are no checks and balances in discussions of equity, because whites’ interests can be attacked racially (by “people of color”) but not defended racially.

 

Any institution, no matter how successful, that does not follow the new equity orientation of the civil-rights laws is without a language in which to defend itself. Consider what is happening to some of the nation’s “exam schools” — traditionally places where children of modest means (and often immigrant backgrounds) can get a public education to match the best private school. In Boston, only 205 seats come open in a given year at the hallowed Boston Latin School, the Boston Latin Academy, and the John D. O’Bryant School of Math & Science, and they are traditionally allotted mostly by testing. Because these spots go disproportionately to Asians and (to a lesser extent) whites, the selection process has been opposed by the NAACP and by Ibram X. Kendi himself, who runs an “anti-racism” center at Boston University, as well as by John Henry, the progressive billionaire who owns the Boston Red Sox. 

 

With COVID as a pretext, equity advocates set up a new system to fill the spots based on zip codes and grades, a plan that will result in a 24 percent reduction in Asians, an 18 percent reduction in whites, a 50 percent increase in blacks, and a 14 percent increase in Hispanics. One can wish the new students well, but there is a danger in loosening admission standards. It implies that the educational mission of the school has always been a disguised social mission of exclusion, and that very notion delegitimizes the educational mission. As often as not, equity destroys the goods it means to share.

 

Perhaps equity is best thought of as diversity or affirmative action taken to its logical conclusion. We can expect it to function in ways similar to affirmative action, steadily entrenching itself as those who administer it forget the goals they began with. At that point, a temporary program turns into a permanent one, and a new goal enters: no longer to undo racism but to duck the arduous work that would have to be done if the problem turns out to be more complicated than that.