Equity, race, affirmation and reaction
Of all the political buzzwords currently trending, “equity” may be the trendiest. But I wonder how many people know what it means. The consensus among my several dictionaries is fairness, evenhandedness, impartiality — in other words, a level playing field. It does not mean racial preferences or “critical race theory” (another unfortunate branding error whose academic odor has been weaponized by the right). The trouble is that when the playing field has been so steeply tilted against people of color, when unwhitewashed history reveals genocide, enslavement, oppression, prejudice and atrocity, any attempt to tilt it level is such a heavy lift that it can result in overcorrection. The progressive impulse can prove reactionary, reacting against injustice with equal and opposite force.
As an older male who can pass for white — though my skin is rather ambiguously brown and I’m Jewish, which in the eyes of some means that I’m not white at all — I’ve enjoyed some of the benefits and delusions of having social conventions tilted in my favor.
As a child of the upper middle class I’ve suffered the unreal expectations of entitlement and have had to unlearn and rethink a lot of bourgeois assumptions about class, privilege, power and success. The current creative uprising of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ and abused Americans of every color, gender and identity is as comprehensible as a law of physics: action begets reaction. The murder of George Floyd and the conviction of his killer may or may not lead to justice or police reform, but it was a watershed, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption in the cultural landscape.
Floyd’s murder was the lynching that broke the tree limb — compounded by the many continuing police slayings of Black people in the months since — an event so hideously blatant in its racial content that no one could ignore or deny it. With the demonstrations of last summer and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement, the cultural playing field didn’t just tilt, it flipped. While plenty of power remains in the hands of old white men, one can see in the arts and media a hurricane renaissance, a storm of affirmation of Black and other “minority” creation. This affirmative reaction has rendered heterosexual older white males irrelevant. We had it coming, and we have no right to complain. Straight white men should just get out of the way as the heavy pendulum of inequitable history turned equity-with-a-vengeance swings back past us.
But I say this as a liberal.
I’ve had my fun and done my thing (including years of radical rebellion) and enjoyed my advantages and played the good hand I was dealt. Now it’s time for those who weren’t so lucky to go for the glory and the power in individual and collective multicultural accomplishment. In the late innings of my own career, I’m delighted to see so many young artists of all kinds and colors hitting the big time in a way I never did. And I’m glad if sobered to know that so much hidden history, however horrible and painful, is coming to light in blinding revelations of injustice (read: inequity).
The hazard in the rush to impose racial consciousness on everyone, starting in early childhood, is not that teaching the history of slavery and racism is wrong — not teaching it is far worse — but that zealotry for “equity,” as for anything else, can be excessive to the point of self-parody. And so, rightwing Republicans (for example) can use the rhetoric of equity against it with the charge of “reverse racism.” Just as most Americans don’t want to defund the police or join a socialist revolution, they don’t want to be subject to a “theory” they don’t understand, one that feels threatening, and so will accept at face value the distortions of its political opponents.
Justice warriors need to think strategically to gain the trust and support they need to win and hold real political power. The fair shake equity promises must include everyone, not just the aggrieved.