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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm your host, Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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, like it's the same word. And it's not the same word and the same concept.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So how would you differentiate between equity and equality? Bernie was stumped.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, equality, we talk about, uh, 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Coming up on today, explain the rise and reign of equity and how the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action could reign on equity's parade.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, Today Explained. It's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Because equity is basically a major theme that is at the heart of an increasing amount of our politics today.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Marxist equity. This is something new.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's a concept that ordinary people are talking about and arguing about, too, in their own organizations and institutions.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: People urged the state legislature and Governor Newsom to create a California Health Equity and Justice Fund to help marginalized communities.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Governor Newsom needs to step up on the issue of racial equity and racial justice.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And I 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What does equity mean?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But in this context, what people mean when they say equity is something akin to justice for marginalized or disadvantaged groups.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it's being used, as it was in the Bill Maher-Bernie Sanders clip, mainly by the left as an alternative to equality.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: These days, we hear a lot of people using the word equity. But what does it really mean?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's not quite the same as equality, which means everybody gets treated the same.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Equity is about fairness. It means that everybody gets what they need based on their own situation because we're not all the same.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There's not like a universal clear definition.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Equality, everyone is given an equal opportunity, but there are still people who will struggle.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Here, with equity, everyone benefits.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it's confusing because like they do still want more equality and think we need more equality of outcomes.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So I don't think the challenge to equality is really the right way to frame what they're talking about.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What they are trying to express is a dissatisfaction in the way that race, gender, and identity disparities have been kind of handled by the liberal and societal establishment until recently.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The best way to illustrate this is there is this cartoon that became really popular online a few years ago.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And there two pictures of them On one side on the left is labeled equality.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And the adult can see the game, and the big kid is tall enough to see the game.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The little kid, even with the box, he can't see over the fence.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So then you have contrasted on the right equity, where the adult doesn't need a box, so he doesn't get one.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The big kid gets one box and he can see over the fence.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And the little kid gets two boxes, so he can see over the fence.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Equity, the word, has been around for quite some time.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: When does this word start to have a lot of significance in, say, democratic politics?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think it started to bubble up in the activist world in Barack Obama's second term.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We see it kind of contemporaneous with the rise of Black Lives Matter.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Equality was not a part of our Constitution.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The Three-Fifths Compromise is an excellent example of the lack of equality in our Constitution and in our system.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Equity is what we need as a result of that inherent lack of equality in the beginning.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it's sort of alongside what conservatives disparage as wokeness and the academic concepts like critical race theory, intersectionality.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Gender equity, sexual orientation, all those things become really important in understanding the real intersectionality of systemic bias.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It sort of rose throughout Obama's second term.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And this is when kind of equity becomes part of the triad of diversity, equity and inclusion.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: During the Trump administration, this transformation, which some have called the Great Awokening, continues to spread on the left.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This really identity conscious way of thinking, this more ambitious politics, trying to achieve more equal outcomes.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In and around the year 2020 with the big George Floyd racial justice protests is when a lot of this takes place.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: At JPMorgan Chase, a key goal is to help break down systemic barriers that have created profound disparities.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's why we committed $30 billion towards racial equity.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And so throughout large parts of society, there's more of a commitment to this agenda.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then Joe Biden famously wins the 2020 presidential election.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Allegedly.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Come on.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: How does he take on equity in his administration?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: By this point, the Democratic Party as an institution is now committed explicitly to equity.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So when Biden takes office on his very first day, he issues an executive order, which is all about equity, basically.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I believe this nation and this government need to change their whole approach to the issue of racial equality.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's a whole of government agenda calling on every agency to come up with a plan for achieving equity.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's why I'm rescinded the previous administration's harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training and abolished the offensive counterfactual 1776 commission.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Some Biden advisors have also mentioned women and girls and first-generation Americans.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So there's all that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: How does this actually look in terms of policy?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A pretty uncontroversial, well, these days at least, accommodation for people who might have trouble with English.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You know, a concern with whether enough federal contracts or grants are going to businesses owned by minorities.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And none of these policies are controversial in any way, shape, or form.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Nope, everyone agrees, and nobody has any problem with any of this, and we're all in this together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: J.K. Rowling, people are mad. More on that in a minute on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is the difference between equity and equality in your view?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Oh, the difference is a truly sneaky, terrible thing.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Equity. Equity is this wormy word.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is back, and we have to be back because we left you with a bit of a facetious joke.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We said there was no pushback to Biden administration policies around equity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But of course, this is America in 2023, and that could not be the case.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Andrew, tell us about pushback, presumably from Republicans.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Conservatives express discomfort with these conversations.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They think that Democrats are now pledging to prioritize race and gender in all things and that they would prefer not to do that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: My qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male grad students are no longer eligible upon graduation for university research positions.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This is partly because of diversity, inclusivity and equity mandates.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: My preferred acronym, D.I.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They have a variety of different objections to the basic thinking around equity.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Then there's the populist conservative critique that like, oh, progressives only care about women and people of color.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They don't care about rural white men who are having trouble getting jobs in the modern economy or something like that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's kind of like the Tucker Carlson critique.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Equity is the opposite.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Equity is what allowed Kamala Harris, the privileged child of two PhDs, to stay privileged.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How does this actually play out in terms of policy?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: One of the biggest ones they seized on was happened back in 2021.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Biden and congressional Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan, their COVID aid bill.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They included a fund to bail out struggling restaurants that restaurant owners could apply for some of this grant money.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Federal government's helping businesses keep their doors open through its $28.6 billion restaurant revitalization fund.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It closed for new applicants Monday.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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 are majority owned by women, veterans or members of socially disadvantaged groups.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Which in government speak means mostly non-white people.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And so Democrats intended that this would just be like a brief window of exclusivity, but the money started running out really quickly.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And as a result, some white male non-veteran business owners sued and they were backed by a Trump-allied legal group.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that this is racial and gender discrimination.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And some judges actually agreed with them.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then the Biden administration agreed to back down and change the policy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What about moderates? What about the left? Are they a unified front on equity?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, as this change has sort of rippled throughout institutions on the center and the left, there have been people who have qualms, who have been expressing these qualms sometimes quietly and sometimes more loudly.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Because generally, Democrats have full control over cities.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This is entirely a conversation among Democrats about what the policies of these cities should be.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And so there have been various issues in which equity has come up in which activists have been quite full pushing for what they argue is equity.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And not everyone is on board in their agenda, and it can be a little bit controversial.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A California high school is removing honors English classes in the name of racial equity.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Clover City High School reportedly losing the classes because there weren't enough Black and Latino students enrolled in the class.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So, you know, the stated rationale for all this is to shape schools to help the children who need it most.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But the critics of this, including many Asian parents, they see this as kind of the lowering of standards, the devaluing of academic achievement.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Taking away the test will marginalize opportunities for thousands of students, mostly low-income and mostly immigrant.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They're worried that their own kids might now no longer be challenged as much as they should in school.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: If advanced math is deprioritized, they'd be less prepared for technical fields of study in college.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Then there's like 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They could switch to private schools.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then this would only deepen inequality by sorting those students out of the public school system.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so we can see equity policies from the Biden administration, from local state governments, and probably hits and misses across the board.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what's the alternative? Is it just returning to some aspirational equality?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, some people on the left have a different way of thinking about this.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: These are the class-focused leftists.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They argued 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Professor Adolf Reed, he's a political scientist.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He's spoken about this often.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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 health care, not to homogenize them, that is, under a monolithic and abstract racial classification.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so generally speaking, Republicans think equity is a waste of time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Democrats have bought into big equity, but there There are those on the left who say we could focus on class instead.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let me ask you about the Supreme Court, Andrew.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They sort of entered the chat a few weeks ago when they ruled against affirmative action in college admissions.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Could that have an impact on equity policies?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think it could absolutely have a very significant impact.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The ruling itself was only about college admissions policies explicitly.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it actually had a specific footnote saying it wouldn't even apply to the military academies.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They're like, we're not deciding that at this point.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Equity had a great run, not even a decade.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The forces of equity will have to sort of regroup and reconsider.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Andrew Prokop's big thinky piece on equity is called The Equity Wars and you can find it at Vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan and edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Patrick Boyd.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram and this is Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
