President Joseph Biden signed his second executive order to promote fairness within government institutions on February 16, 2023. It mandated, among other things, the appointment of equity officers and the execution of action plans with the ostensible goal of facilitating “underserved populations'” access to federal resources.
There has been a lot of debate on the specifics of the new order, but that is not the subject of this essay. Instead, the aim of this paper is to introduce readers to the theory of equity. I do not intend, however, to come across as a doomsayer who believes all is lost. There are, after all, signs of improvement.
It should be highlighted right away that equity is a concept that isn’t exclusive to government. Because the executive branch is one of the most potent organizations in the US, I am exclusively emphasizing the Biden administration. Schools are another institution that consecrate equity. And although equity is usually referenced through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), I will only focus on equity because it is the ultimate objective that the other letters are meant to serve.
Let’s start by taking a look at the Biden administration’s definition of equity. “The constant and systematic treatment of all individuals in a fair, just, and impartial manner, including individuals who belong to populations that frequently have been denied such treatment,” is how it is described in section 10 of the constitution.
That doesn’t seem all that horrible, does it? So why use the word “just” there, one must ponder. So, what does it mean for an office bureaucrat to carry out their duties in a just manner when, for example, reviewing a student loan application? Federal agencies should undoubtedly be fair and impartial in how they carry out their obligations. Furthermore, why is analysis focused on communal affiliations? One would assume that the main criterion for allocating relief in catastrophe situations, like the train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, is individual need. Sadly, no.
The words don’t mean what the ordinary person thinks they mean, despite the mood being neutral. Rather, equity officers have a unique understanding of concepts like fair and right. You see, equity is informed by neo-Marxist thoughts, such as critical race theory (CRT) among others. These ideas aim to connect the dots between actual injustices and societal structures. In other words, they contend that oppression is not only common, but also directly results from the design of society. As a result, addressing inequalities requires transforming society as a whole, which is why Biden called for an all-encompassing government response.
In his writings, Karl Marx articulated structurally determined oppression by linking it to the division of labor under capitalism. Today, Marx’s division of labor has been updated and repackaged as systemic racism, which makes an appearance in the first sentence of the new executive order. In this context, systemic racism is posited as the ordinary state of affairs that structures and determines all social relations. Additionally, Marx’s concept of the proletariat has been replaced by “people of color,” or “marginalized communities.” Indeed, as the name suggests, many strains of neo-Marxism lazily recycle legacy code and give it new names.
In short, the relevant point is that words like fairness or justice take on unique meanings in the Marxist worldview. To see how these words change meaning, it will be helpful to use a case study.
In June 2021, a federal judge halted the Biden administration’s policy of issuing aid to farmers based on race. The judge ruled that the policy was likely a violation of the plaintiff’s equal protection rights. However, Biden’s agricultural secretary, Tom Vilsack, defended the policy: “We know for a fact that socially disadvantaged producers were discriminated against by the United States . . . We have reimbursed people in the past for those acts of discrimination, but we’ve never absolutely dealt with the cumulative effect.” (italics added)
What Vilsack is saying is that violating equal protection today is equitable if it corrects past injustices. Notice also that past injustices include insufficient restitution. And of course, sufficiency is subjective. Moreover, given the “cumulative effect” of injustice, equitable correction means going beyond parity and creating a deliberate imbalance in favor of marginalized identity groups, hence the overt racism. That is, justice cannot be realized until the oppressed have been uplifted and the oppressor has seen the world from the standpoint of the oppressed, a task that requires coercion.
Relatedly, this belief in asymmetric redistribution is what Ruth Bader Ginsburg was referring to when she called for an all-female supreme court. It also helps explain why California’s proposed reparations plan is so gratuitous, despite the fact that California was never a slave state.
CRT celebrity Ibram Kendi puts the matter more bluntly: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
This ugly conclusion flows from the belief that there is no such thing as a neutral application of law or policy. There are only racist or antiracist ways of running society. There are no gray areas. As a result, this radically changes the meaning of terms like fairness and justice.
To you or me, fairness and justice gain meaning when we adopt the rule of law to settle our conflicts where we face one another as dignified equals. But in CRT, the rule of law is racist because it has a hidden purpose of granting a special type of property called whiteness (capital under Marx) to white people. To solve this perceived problem, rule by discretion must be implemented where self-anointed mandarins like Kendi are empowered to reorder society. Consequently, concepts like justice are no longer impartial processes, but are instead an engineered state of affairs crafted by our enlightened betters.
To summarize, the ideology behind equity seeks to weaken the rule of law in favor of arbitrary discretion where you don’t get what you need. Instead, you get what is deserved, according to the haruspicy of a mystic council. Historically, the high priests have deemed the bourgeois to be deserving of privation and retribution.
Equity is better understood as a perpetual process of modifying societal “shares” between identity groups such that power is rebalanced to achieve justice. This process requires a system of top-down political economy where authority is centralized within a council of experts that don’t have skin in the game; the Russian word is soviet. Equity, therefore, can never be a positive-sum game because the centralized authority only reallocates existing shares, not create new ones. Thus, we must conclude that equity only equalizes downward. This description also holds outside the government context and explains discrimination against minorities like Asian-American students.
Although Biden’s order is a far cry from a Soviet-style central committee, the key takeaway is that equity constitutes a threat to the rule of law, especially the fourteenth amendment. We will have to see how the judiciary handles this challenge. However, the problem in the interim is that equity is moving ahead at full speed and lawsuits take time to bear fruit. In other words, the span of time between harm now and future restitution is sufficiently large enough for many people to be needlessly injured in the name of a pestilent ideology.
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