Death of equality in society
As the child of a baby boomer, I attended grade school post-civil Rights Era in a sleepy farming community in the California San Juaquin Valley. My high school was well integrated with Whites, Blacks and Hispanics; in fact, I am Hispanic. Our class president was Black, and he was well respected by students and teachers alike. The time I served in the Marines was another diverse and inclusive experience; my fellow male and female Jarheads came from every walk of life and every part of our country. My Marine Corps experience was the epitome of inclusivity; we knew not racism; however, we knew what a woman was.
For decades in our nation the conversation was about equality, that everyone in America would be offered an equal opportunity to achieve the American Dream. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 paved the way for racial equality. Today, however, we no longer debate the efficacy of equality, or how to level the playing field to provide equal opportunity for all. Rather, we currently find ourselves facing a harmful ideology that is infiltrating every institution of American culture, from school boards and legislatures, media and sports, the private sector and even the judiciary. Equity, not equality, has become the determinative factor used to measure a person’s standing in the world.
Take for example the cases taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court this calendar session. Two prominent universities, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, both face lawsuits from the Students for Free and Fair Admission (SFFA), based on both schools’ discriminatory admission practices. The schools allegedly turned down worthy Asian students the right to be admitted, while other students significantly less deserving were awarded admission, a stark change in course to longstanding admission policies and practices.
These universities have employed what they refer to as “racial-balancing admission policies.” Both schools have also eliminated the long-accepted pre-requisite ACT and SAT admission exams. Essentially, equity has become the admission policy of the day. The SCOTUS has heard oral arguments and is expected to rule on these cases later this year.
This week we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the adoption of Title IX. This federal law established a genderbased protection for women from discrimination in education. Title IX was modeled after Title VI of the Civil Rights Act that established the precedent for Title IX’S subsequent enactment. Is the irony lost on anyone considering the current push to make it legal and socially acceptable, to allow men to participate in women’s sports and further permit them to roam freely in the women’s locker rooms? Consider also that the University of Pennsylvania
allowed a person who swam on the men’s swimming team for three years, putting up mediocre swim times, to suddenly change course and elect to swim on the women’s team, racking up record times and winning medals. Lia Thomas, formerly William Thomas, was also nominated by Upenn as their 2022 NCAA Woman Of The Year. So much for protecting women from discrimination.
Will we stand by and watch this seep its way into medicine? Will future brain and heart surgeons be those people who achieved the highest MCAT scores, or will they be handpicked to attend medical school because of their racial origin or gender fluidity? Respectfully, I suggest that we all agree that the emperor has no clothes. It is time to return to protecting women’s rights and rewarding excellence and achievement, versus the proliferation of a rapidly expanding virtue signal for the smallest of minorities, because they have some immutable characteristic that has been deemed more worthy due to its underrepresentation.
I beseech you all to come to your senses and call this out for what it is — radical ideologies that have no place in American culture, and that if left unchecked, may end up destroying all that has made us the greatest nation in the world.
By George Tristan