Equity or Equality? Why It Matters
For Black and Brown people who live every day in a system predicated on injustice, no explanation is needed. For others, a picture can hit home.
The Civil Rights movement created a new era of legal equality in the United States, but racism and injustice merely shape-shifted into new forms to accommodate the letter of those laws. As Ibram Kendi writes, “Racial disparities persisted after the (Civil Rights) law was passed because discriminatory policies persisted under a patina of colorblindness… America is still hemorrhaging from the racism of police bullets, health disparities and environmental catastrophes. The black unemployment rate has been twice the white unemployment rate for 60 years.”
Equality’s a good thing — until you see how a small child standing on his equally-sized box can’t see the baseball game, while his taller family members can.
Equity: The quality of being fair or impartial. As pictured here, it looks pretty good — but that panel doesn’t show how the ground beneath a good swath of the US population, represented by the child, wasn’t level to begin with. It still isn’t. That is reality.
Liberation: The problem isn’t merely unlevel ground. Let’s tear down the fence of racist attitudes that hide…
