Trying to Be a Guardian of Equity?

Equity is one of those values that is easy to get behind. Everyone generally agrees with equity as an abstract concept, but it becomes a bit more difficult when trying to make equity a reality.

One of the difficult things about equity is that it is not equality. Equality is about sameness. Everyone gets the same. Equity is about people getting what they need to be successful, which means some will get more than others. Most people have seen the illustration of three people trying to watch a game from behind a fence with all three standing on boxes. The tallest person has the best vantage point, while the shortest still cannot see over the fence. But, when the tallest person has no box and the shortest has two boxes, everyone can see the game.

Another illustration of equity that I like even better is the 400 meter race. Like most people, I am an intermittent fan of track and field. I watch it mostly during the Olympics, and am only marginally aware of it in the years in between. But even with that minimal awareness, I know that the 400 m race is different from the 100. You see, in both races, runners must stay in their lane, but in the 100 there is no curve. The 400, being one complete lap around the track, includes two sweeping curves. The laws of geometry being what they are, one complete lap around the inside lane of the track is significantly shorter than one complete lap around the outside of the track. To compensate for this, runners in the outside lanes start ahead of the runners in the inside lanes. This is known as a staggered start and it is equity.

Despite many people being only passing fans of track and field, I have never once heard someone complain about the staggered start in the 400. Everyone seems to understand that the runner in lane 8 is deserving of the staggered placement due to the increased distance in that lane.

Despite so many people having a reasonable understanding of why a staggered start is necessary in the 400, many have a terrible time understanding why equity measures are necessary in other aspects of life. Sometimes these are people who are starting in the proverbial inside lane, but those folks quite often know they are privileged. Instead, I find that people who are starting in lanes 2–5 have the hardest time with equity measures.

These are people who have a relative degree of privilege. They are not in the inside lane, therefore they can point to someone else having greater advantages over them, but they have a hard time acknowledging their advantages over others. The notion that they can have both privilege and disadvantage, in a relative sense, at the same time, is not something they can easily entertain.

This problem is further compounded by an unwillingness, or inability, to see how staggered their start is, sometimes. Oftentimes, people in these lanes can see their own difficulties, but are unable to see the advantages that they received and pointing these advantages out to them can be met with bombast and anger.

I see this as a central problem of people who are guardians of equity. In too many instances, equity is seen as a binary option — you are in the inside lane or the outside lane. Many people in lane 3 do not see themselves in the inside lane and feel equity movements will leave them out. Instead, equity movements need to find a way to help people reconcile both their advantages and their disadvantages. There are many lanes in this metaphor, not just two. Very few people are in lane 1.

Guardians of equity need to help people understand that while someone in lane 4 might need to help them get equity, the people in lane 8 need a great deal more. Generally, those in lane 8 have been marginalized to a much greater degree, for a much longer time, and with far worse consequences. Equity movements should rightfully prioritize the needs of the most marginalized populations.

The really difficult thing about equity comes in the notion that, at the end of the day, those with more advantages will need to give up some of that power to those who have been shorted. This gets really difficult when people who espouse equity as a value and hold positions that have an inherent obligation to be a guardian of equity, like a public educator, or elected official, have had greater privilege. Oftentimes, these people are defensive about their privilege, in part because they did not do anything overt to gain the privilege — it was simply something that they had by nature of their environment, their skin color, their gender… things outside of their control.

Being a guardian of equity is not just about talking about equity, or tweeting quotes by Martin Luther King every February. Being a Guardian of Equity means both advocating for assistance for those that are marginalized by the system, and simultaneously using your own privilege to make it happen.