Today, Explained - Why everyone’s mad about equity

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Everyone is fighting about “equity.” If only they could define it. Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Haleema Shah, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A few months ago, Bernie Sanders was on Real Time with Bill Maher, and Bill wanted to talk about the word equity. I think this word equity has come into the language in the last few years, and before that we didn't hear it a lot. And I think a lot of people hear equity and they hear equality. It's the same word. And it's not the same word and the same concept. So how would you differentiate between equity and equality?

Bernie was stumped. Well, equality, we talk about, I don't know what the answer to that is. Despite the confusion, equity has come to occupy a much larger place in progressive politics over the last few years. Coming up on today, I explain the rise and reign of equity and how the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action could rain on equity's parade. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Andrew Prokop, we usually have you on Today Explained to help us understand the political news of the day. But you recently wrote about the word equity. How come? Because equity is basically a major theme that is at the heart of an increasing amount of our politics today. Marxist equity. This is something new. It's one centerpiece of the Biden administration's policy agenda. That's why we talk about equity, because we recognize not everybody starts out on the same

base. It's a concept that ordinary people are talking about and arguing about, too, in their own organizations and institutions. People urged the state legislature and Governor Newsom to create a California Health Equity and Justice Fund to help marginalized communities. Governor Newsom needs to step up on the issue of racial equity and racial justice. And they thought that it would just be interesting to take a closer look on where exactly it came from, what exactly it means, and the discussion that's being had about it. What does equity mean?

So there's a traditional definition of the term before the modern context about social justice politics, where equity, you know, it could just mean like stock shares. But in this context, what people mean when they say equity is something akin to justice for marginalized or disadvantaged groups. And it's being, as it was in the Bill Maher-Bernie Sanders clip, mainly by the left as an alternative to equality. These days, we hear a lot of people using the word equity. But what does it really mean? It's not quite the same as equality, which means everybody gets treated the same.

Equity is about fairness. It means that everybody gets what they need based on their own situation because we're not all the same. Equity is about fairness. It means that everybody gets what they need based on their own situation, because we're not all the same. There has been this concerted push over the past decade to say that U.S. government policies and just our discourse in society in general have been too focused on equal opportunity and not enough on actually changing outcomes. And so it's a little confused because no one came down from on high and said, hey, this is what equity now means in the social justice context. There's not like a universal clear definition.

This is a term that kind of bubbled up in the advocate space, in the activist space, online, and people just started using it as this alternative to what they viewed as the old idea of equality. Equality, everyone is given an equal opportunity, but there are still people who will struggle. Here here with equity. Everyone benefits. And it's confusing because, like, they do still want more equality and think we need more equality of outcomes. So I don't think the challenge to equality is really theatisfaction in the way that race, gender and identity disparities have been kind of handled by the liberal and societal establishment until recently. That there was this idea of colorblind liberalism that, you know, we shouldn't take race into account at all and we should just like evaluate everyone on their merits or just a dissatisfaction with kind of the outcomes,

with the failure of the post-civil rights era to truly achieve equality in outcomes and that you still have the groups that were disadvantaged, especially black Americans, women in certain contexts, that you still see those groups struggling to achieve equal outcomes to white people and men often. The best way to illustrate this is there is this cartoon that became really popular online a few years ago. And it's a cartoon that shows an adult, a big kid, and a little kid looking over a fence to watch a baseball game. And there's two pictures of them.

On one side, on the left, is labeled equality. And there, all three of these people who are of very different heights each get one box to stand on and look over the fence. And the adult can see the game, and the big kid is tall enough to see the game. The little kid, even with the box, he can't see over the fence. So then you have contrasted on the right equity, where the adult doesn't need a box so he doesn't get one the big kid gets one box and he can see over the fence and the little

kid gets two boxes so he could see over the fence so the specific concept which is kind of being outlined here is that we should take into account the fact that people start with varying levels of disadvantage and give them help accordingly if they need it. Equity, the word, has been around for quite some time. When does this word start to have a lot of significance in, say, democratic politics? I think it started to bubble up in the activist world in Barack Obama's second term.

We see it kind of contemporaneous with the rise of Black Lives Matter. Equality was not a part of our Constitution. The Three-Fifths Compromise is an excellent example of the lack of equality in our Constitution and in our system. Equity is what we need as a result of that inherent lack of equality in our constitution and in our system. Equity is what we need as a result of that inherent lack of equality in the beginning. And it's sort of alongside what

conservative disparages wokeness and the academic concepts like critical race theory, intersectionality, gender equity, sexual orientation. All those things become really important in understanding the real intersectionality of systemic bias. It sort of rose throughout Obama's second term. And this is when kind of equity becomes part of the triad of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Every industry these days is using the term DEI to explain why they are appointing diversity officers, carrying out diversity training, and discussing ways to be more inclusive. DEI is implemented to make sure that from the very beginning, all types of people get the chance to be in the room and make the decisions.

During the Trump administration, this transformation, which some have called the Great Awokening, continues to spread on the left. This really identity-conscious way of thinking, this more ambitious politics trying to achieve more equal outcomes. In and around the year 2020, with the big George Floyd racial justice protests, is when a lot of this takes place. You see a lot of these big corporations have gradually over this time period

started to become committed to the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion. At JPMorgan Chase, a key goal is to help break down systemic barriers that have created profound disparities. That's why we committed $30 billion towards racial equity. You see corporations like Starbucks and Amazon conducting racial equity audits, basically reviewing their own corporation's behavior to see if they are helping achieve racial equity or harming it in some way. And so throughout large parts of society, there's more of a commitment to this agenda.

And then Joe Biden famously wins the 2020 presidential election. Allegedly. Come on. How does he take on equity in his administration? By this point, the Democratic Party as an institution is now committed explicitly to equity. So when Biden takes office on his very first day, he issues an executive order, which is all about equity, basically. I believe this nation and this government need to change their whole approach to the issue of racial equality.

It's a whole-of-government agenda calling on every agency to come up with a plan for achieving equity. That's why I'm rescinding the previous administration's harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training and abolish the offensive counterfactual 1776 Commission. The order also names LGBTQ plus persons, members of religious minorities, persons with disabilities,

persons who live in rural areas, people otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality. Some Biden advisors have also mentioned women and girls and first-generation Americans. So there's all that. But I think probably most common in the liberal world is that it's sort of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality that are getting the most focus here. How does this actually look in terms of policy? So it can look in any number of ways because equity is an ideal, but depending on how you actually want to go about trying to achieve that, it could be anything from as simple as, you know, offering forms for government benefits in other languages,

which is like a pretty easy thing to do, a pretty uncontroversial, these days, at least, accommodation for people who might have trouble with English. You know, a concern with whether enough federal contracts or grants are going to businesses owned by minorities. And then, you know, locally, there's all sorts of other policies that play out on the ground in issues when it comes to transportation policy, like whether underserved communities are really being served by the transit decisions of a city.

And none of these policies are controversial in any way, shape, or form. Nope, everyone agrees, and nobody has any problem with any of this, and we're all in this together. JK Rowling, people are mad. More on that in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight

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ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained, cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications.

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Equity is this wormy word. Today Explained is back, and we have to be back because we left you with a bit of a facetious joke. We said there was no pushback to Biden administration policies around equity. But of course, this is America in 2023, and that could not be the case. Andrew, tell us about pushback, presumably from Republicans? Conservatives express discomfort with these conversations. They think that Democrats are now pledging to prioritize race and gender in all things, and that they would prefer not to do that. My qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male grad students

are no longer eligible upon graduation for university research positions. This is partly because of diversity, inclusivity, and equity mandates. My preferred acronym, DIE. They have a variety of different objections to the basic thinking around equity. Some of them say that not all disparities among groups are due to oppression and that some groups might just end up being different for other reasons. Then there's the populist conservative critique that like, oh, progressives only care about women and people of color. They don't care about rural white men who are having trouble getting jobs in the modern economy or something like that. It's kind of like the Tucker Carlson critique. Equality is what allowed Andrew Jackson to rise from a childhood of bitter poverty in the Carolina woods where he was born in 1867 and make it all the way to the White House. Equity is the opposite. Equity is what

allowed Kamala Harris, the privileged child of two PhDs, to stay privileged. And so there's been a search on the right for policies in cities and in the Biden administration that they think have gone too far. One of the biggest ones they seized on happened back in 2021. Biden and congressional Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan, their COVID aid bill. They included a fund to bail out struggling restaurants that restaurant owners could apply for some of this grant money. The federal government's helping businesses keep their doors open through its $28.6 billion restaurant revitalization fund. It closed for new applicants Monday. So in the law, it said that for the first 21 days this fund was open to applications, grants would be allotted only to restaurants who were majority owned by women,

veterans, or members of socially disadvantaged groups, which in government speak means mostly non-white people. And so Democrats intended that this would just be like a brief window of exclusivity, but the money started running out really quickly. And as a result, some white male non-veteran business owners sued, and they were backed by a Trump-allied legal group. And they argued that, hey, what you've created here is a program that bails out restaurant owners as long as they're not white men who haven't served in the military, and that this is racial and gender discrimination. And some judges actually agreed with them.

And then the Biden administration agreed to back down and change the policy. So when an equity policy is as blunt as that, when it starts looking really like a, you know, no white men need apply kind of thing, that is where the conservatives have had the most success in pushing back and have been the most animated in pushing back. When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white people last in line for COVID relief funds. Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. What about moderates? What about the left?

Are they a unified front on equity? times more loudly. And I think in fleshing out these objections, it's helpful to look at how these issues play out in cities, especially around the country, because generally Democrats have full control over cities. This is an entirely a conversation among Democrats about what the policies of these cities should be. And so there have been various issues in which equity has come up and which activists have been quite full-throatedly pushing for what they argue is equity. And not everyone is on board in their agenda, and it can be a little bit controversial. So one of the most heated issues on this is education and especially how equity is being interpreted and put into practice in a lot of places by the educational policy

establishment. There has been a push in some places, notably in California, about discouraging tracking of certain students towards high-level courses because it tended to be white and Asian students who are more likely to be tracked. A California high school is removing honors English classes in the name of racial equity. Culver City High School reportedly losing the classes because there weren't enough black and Latino students enrolled in the class. So, you know, the stated rationale for all this is to shape schools to help the children who need it most. But the critics of this, including many Asian parents, they see this as kind of the lowering of standards,

the devaluing of academic achievement. Taking away the test will marginalize opportunities for thousands of students, mostly low-income and mostly immigrant. They're worried that their own kids might now no longer be challenged as much as they should in school. If advanced math is deprioritized, they'd be less prepared for technical fields of study in college.

Then there's a more practical criticism, which is that if the challenging material is taken out of public schools, well, perhaps those families would just be spurred to seek advanced help elsewhere, supplemental classes. They could switch to private schools and then this would only deepen inequality by sorting those students out of the public school system. Okay, so we can see equity policies from the Biden administration, from local state governments, and probably hits and misses across the board. But what's the alternative? Is it just returning to some aspirational equality? Well, some people on the left have a different way of thinking about this. These are the class-focused leftists. They argue that, you know, more attention needs to be focused on class in this whole discussion, and that too much prioritization is being given to race, gender,

and gender identity. This brand of what I could disparage as class denialism separates race, gender, and other ascriptive identities artificially from the basic dynamics of American capitalism and from inequalities produced through the labor relation and market forces. Professor Adolph Reed, he's a political scientist. He's spoken about this often. The obvious disparity is a cause for concern, but the way forward is precisely through the kinds of social and economic policies that address Black people as workers, students,

parents, taxpayers, people in need of decent jobs, housing, and healthcare, not to homogenize them, that is, under a monolithic and abstract racial classification. This is by no means a universally popular idea, but it is a different way of looking at things. Okay, so generally speaking, Republicans think equity is a waste of time. Democrats have bought into big equity, but there are those on the left who say we could focus on class instead. Let me ask you about the Supreme Court, Andrew. They sort of entered the chat a few weeks ago when they ruled against affirmative action in college admissions. Could that have an impact on equity policies?

I think it could absolutely have a very significant impact. The ruling itself was only about college admissions policies explicitly, and it actually had a specific footnote saying it wouldn't even apply to the military academies. They were like, we're not deciding that at this point. But the logic of the ruling, I think, contains a deep skepticism towards the use

of broad racial classifications in any sort of competitive process or adjudication. So I think it sets the stage for more and more litigation and perhaps for future Supreme Court decisions along this line that will take a very skeptical view towards other equity policies, both in the corporate world and in the governmental world. So equity had a great run, not even a decade. Well, I think equity is here to stay, but we may be in a bit of a backlash cycle kind of enabled by the Supreme Court. The forces of equity will have to sort of regroup and reconsider. I think it will be an interesting question whether the

Democrats and the left shift their strategic focus more towards policies that are aimed at class or at those facing disadvantage, and that policies like that might be more defensible in the court of public opinion as well as in the Supreme Court of the United States. Andrew Prokop, his big thinky piece on equity is called The Equity Wars, and you can find it at Vox.com. Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan and edited by Matthew Collette. We were fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Patrick Boyd.

I'm Sean Ramos for him, and this is Today Explained. Thank you.