Equality vs Equity
We've been hearing more about "equity" lately, but what does it mean?
There’s been a big push in corporate America and the educational system lately about something called DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. You have probably heard of this. Diversity and inclusion are fairly standard woke buzzwords in workplaces and schools, but equity is new. At first glance it might seem like it’s “equality,” but it isn’t—it’s equity. What’s the difference? And why wouldn’t they just say equality? Why use this other weird business type word?
Well, equality is a dangerous word for a capitalist society, so the liberal business class who dominates everything wants to get it out of our heads—they prefer that we use the word equity instead. What is equity? It’s easy to see why they prefer it. Equity is about "helping" people who do not start out equally—you might have seen this graphic. This is how they explain it:
They love this graphic. They think it explains so much. And in a way, it does—but it reveals how evil liberals are, not how enlightened and progressive they are. By valuing equity over equality, they are admitting that nothing will ever change—inequality is a fact of life forever. But why do people exist in this unequal state? They do not care to identify the reasons why, nor to change it—that would be too radical. Instead, the idea is that the best that can be hoped for is equity—identifying people who are disadvantaged, and giving them a boost. Why are people starting from such unequal positions? Who cares, not important—going down that path might lead to actual change, which is exactly what they don’t want. Focusing on equity ensures that the larger structures of inequality stay intact, and allows liberal elites to hand pick which disadvantaged person gets a boost up.
There’s lots of obvious reasons why they prefer equity—it helps support the idea of “merit.” That those who really deserve to get help and succeed, will get it.
This might seem nice, but it’s not. It’s how liberals control people today—figuring out how to get their hooks in you from the start, and calling it "helping" you. Equity is how they extend their control over you from the very beginning, and make sure that you never develop any capacities for thinking outside of their preferred value system.
They give you a boost—those little boxes to stand on—if they think you are worth it, and if they trust that you will always think and act with their neoliberal corporate-friendly values. The price of the little box to stand on is that—they aren’t giving you a box to stand on for free!
It’s all part of the larger social vision of liberal capitalism—that well-meaning corporate types with lots of money can decide how to patch up the social leaks that capitalism creates. Equity is perfect because it is a business word, and by applying it to social problems it gets the masses to associate society with business logic—which promotes the idea that business can save society. It also sounds enough like equality that they hope people will think that it is in fact the same thing—that people will stop thinking or talking about equality and instead just think in terms of equity.
Notice how much extra work all of this is! To get people to learn this new term and abandon a concept like equality—or even more fundamentally, of justice—which we all already have a deep intuitive idea of. The liberal business class that rules society will do absolutely anything to distance us all from the universal ideas of justice (and truth and beauty and love) that come from God and which can only lead us into a future that anyone would actually want to live in. Instead of justice, truth, love, or beauty, we get equity. It’s beyond disgusting, beyond absurd.