Kamala Harris Should Have to Answer for Equity

By Rich Lowry

Monday, October 14, 2024

 

Many of Kamala Harris’s vulnerabilities are being litigated prior to the election. One that isn’t, though, is her advocacy of “equity.”

 

Susceptible to any left-wing fashion, Harris eagerly adopted the concept of equity — or equal outcomes over equality of opportunity — when it became all the rage a few years ago.

 

In 2020, Harris narrated a video that she posted on Twitter with the line, “There’s a big difference between equality and equity.”

 

She explained in the video, “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

 

In a July 2021 speech marking the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, she declared, “This is a fight that is a civil-rights fight, a human-rights fight. This is about equity, and whether or not we are truly committed to the principles of equity in every way that we as government and as a society can enforce those important principles.”

 

The way Harris has talked about equity can be a little confusing. She has tended to define equality as getting the same amount, presumably in government benefits. And then she’d say, since everyone wasn’t starting from the same place, “some folks might need more” — what she called “equitable distribution.”

 

This wasn’t just a 2020 thing, like some of her other left-wing enthusiasms.

 

She was still talking about it in 2023. In May of that year, she gave remarks at a White House event swearing in commissioners for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics.

 

“Equity is everyone deserves to have — right? — and be treated equal. But equity understands that not everybody starts out on the same base.”

 

“So,” she continued, “if you’re giving everybody an equal amount but they’re starting out on different bases, are they really going to have the opportunity to compete and achieve?

 

“That’s why we purposefully, as an administration — the President, myself, the Secretary, and — and everyone in our administration — are so dedicated to a specific principle, which is that of equity.”

 

She was telling the truth. The Biden administration has shot DEI throughout the federal bureaucracy.

 

An executive order right out of the gate “on advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government” demanded that departments and agencies conduct DEI assessments. “Our country faces,” it explained, “converging economic, health, and climate crises that have exposed and exacerbated inequities, while a historic movement for justice has highlighted the unbearable human costs of systemic racism.”

 

DEI champion Susan Rice, the head of Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, boasted, “Never have we had a president who . . . on his first day and in his first week, has made racial justice and equity the centerpiece of his presidency.”

 

This first executive order was followed up with a second two years later, “Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government.”

 

During Covid, the administration created a Health Equity Task Force, and the CHIPS Act has equity requirements.

 

The beat hasn’t relented. In April of this year, the State Department appointed a new chief diversity and inclusion officer to “advance our deep commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in the Department.”

 

It’s no mystery whom the administration wants to favor — and disfavor. Rice has cited people “including rural communities, communities of color, Tribal communities, LGBTQI+ individuals, people with disabilities, women and girls, first-generation Americans, and communities impacted by persistent poverty.”

 

Left out, of course, is any explicit mention of white males in any circumstance (even if they live in poor communities, for example), since in the who/whom of DEI, they are emphatically the whom.

 

The whole notion of equity is deeply un-American. As Vox noted in one of its explainers, “The embrace of equity is a challenge to colorblind liberalism and to claims that the U.S. is a meritocracy.” Advancing certain preferred groups — and implicitly or explicitly disadvantaging groups deemed undeserving — is a violation of our principles and profoundly unfair to the individuals who are on the short end of the stick. (It’s true that this was our practice throughout much of our history, but that doesn’t justify adopting a new system of discrimination on opposite grounds.)

 

That Harris is extensively on the record promoting this pernicious nonsense should be a major line of attack against her. She could either defend her advocacy, doubling down on de facto racial discrimination, or disavow it. If the latter, her usual attempt to portray herself as consistent wouldn’t work — she says that her values haven’t changed, but equity is a value.

 

Harris has had immunity on this issue, though, since Republicans are generally frightened to bring up anything that opens them up to being called racist, even if they are on the right side. Meanwhile, even though equity is a familiar notion to anyone who follows our public debates somewhat closely, a lot of people have no idea what it means, and equity and equality can be easily confused.

 

It behooves Republicans to find a language to talk about this issue that they are comfortable with, the same way they have with trans insanity: The GOP used to want to dodge on trans issues but now is wielding them as a powerful political weapon.

 

On DEI, Trump is pledged to extricate it from the federal bureaucracy, and to enforce civil-rights laws fairly.

 

That’s all to the good, but if Harris wins, she’ll be free to further entrench a radical regime, distorting our government and civil society — without serious challenge during the election campaign.