Keep your eye on the word “equity,” for it is going to be an important part of your life in the next four years. Not interested? That doesn’t matter; equity has an interest in you.
Still not concerned? If you are affected by the taxes, laws, and regulations passed and implemented by the legislative and executive branches of government, or by the court decisions handed down by the judicial one, then you will be affected.
Or if you are affected by the everyday interpretations of any laws and regulations made by the unelected and un-enumerated branch of government, the permanent bureaucracy (where most power now resides), then you will be affected by “equity.”
If you read the news or are written about by a pompous fourth estate that now sees itself as the stenographers of Big Government and technocratic administration, then you will be affected by ubiquitous “equity.” So, yes, all 330 million Americans are likely to see “equity” enter their lives.
Even if I have your attention now, you may be tempted to say, OK, fine, but isn’t equity just the same as equality, just more modern-sounding? No. Do not confuse the two. They are not even cousins; they are opposites, or better yet, sworn enemies.
Equality is the standard of our old Constitution, the one framed in 1787 and amended since then, most memorably in the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction Amendments. It holds that government should see all people as having been created equal, and equally deserving of the law’s protection.
It is a standard we have not always upheld, but when we have officially deviated from it—as in with slavery or legal segregation—we have paid an awful price. Indeed, at those moments we fixed these great injustices, it was because men like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King came along and demanded enforcement of equality.
Equity is the buzzword of the new constitution trying to take the place of the old one. It holds that government must treat Americans differently according to what category the government has put us in. So equity literally holds that government must treat people un-equally.
Don’t believe me? You don’t want to trust a conservative like me to define a concept of the woke left? Completely understandable. So let’s instead listen to how Vice President Kamala Harris has described the difference between the two, as she did in a tweet on Nov. 1:
There’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equality suggests, ‘everyone should get the same amount.’ The problem with that, not everybody’s starting out from the same place. So if we’re all getting the same amount, but you started out back there and I started out over here, we could get the same amount, but you’re still going to be that far back behind me. It’s about giving people the resources and the support they need, so that everyone can be on equal footing, and then compete on equal footing. Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.
This is not Harris typing out a tweet in haste, mind you. Let’s not forget that she dismissed the Constitution as “that book that you carry” when confronting the now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh during their contentious exchange at his hearing on Sept. 7, 2018. Equity therefore explicitly demands that people violate the Constitution that Harris delights in disparaging — by, for example, calling for discrimination.
Again, don’t listen to me. Listen instead to what Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi wrote in his best-seller, “How to be an Anti-Racist”: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Harris is now our vice president, and she seems to have put a stamp on her purported boss, President Joe Biden. One of his first acts in office was to sign an “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities.” It mentioned the word “equity” 21 times. And the word “equality”? Not even once.
What happened on campus did not stay on campus, in other words. It invaded our streets in 2020, and it now sits in the White House.
Do not allow yourself to become complacent and believe that these are merely semantical differences. No, these are core differences. “Equity” is heading your way, whether you know it or not.
