Eight Little Letters That Are More Trouble Than They're Worth

Here's my thing: I don’t really like equality.

For my money, equality has gotten America into way more trouble than it’s worth for eight little letters, just over half of which can be considered vowels under the right circumstances. We’ve established doctrines because of it, we’ve made speeches, we’ve sang songs, and we’ve probably engraved it in stone a lot into the nation's public buildings.

Equality isn’t all it's cracked up to be. It’s not the end-all-be-all of social justice. Want proof? How about “Separate, But Equal”? There’s a reason we’re not clamoring to be back into that territory.

Equality is when everyone is on equal footing, something that is unrealistic for this country because in case people haven’t noticed, we’re so not. Yeah, we sort of get it. We understand that there are those worse off, people in need, lost sheep, et cetera. And sometimes (maybe one or two days out of the year) we volunteer our time at soup kitchens or the like to remind ourselves of how not-equal we are.

The problem is while we recognize that not everyone is on the same level, we allow ourselves to cultivate this image that the people who are on the top of the social food chain, the “haves”, somehow got that way by virtue of themselves alone. (I should also probably take this very special time to talk about how much I don’t like the idea of rugged individualism, but one issue at a time…) Don’t get me wrong, some of them did get there independently. We’re nothing if not industrial. Remember the labor movement? How about women’s suffrage? And that’s not just to talk about socially progressive movements. Microsoft and Apple are two über For-Profit companies that completely germinated out of the Protestant work-ethic mainstay. Say what you like about Americans, we are definitely not afraid of the hard work. But that hard work that we’re so proud of in ourselves becomes our undoing when we use it as a justification.

What we should really be striving for isn’t equality, but equity. The difference is that equity is equality but with something nice to say. It places a higher value on what’s right, rather than what’s fair. Inherent in equity is a sense of connection to other people, an acknowledgement that we are all in this together, living together as brothers or perishing together as fools, to paraphrase. It recognizes that those who are underprivileged don’t need the same access to things as everyone else, they need more.

Equality is saying that everyone gets the same sized piece of pie after dinner. Equity says maybe we should skip the pie and take it down to the homeless shelter and give it to people who it would really make their day to have it. After all, we’ve still got cake.

I know, I know. This whole idea flies in the face of American history. I’ve even got what are perhaps the most beautiful words in the pantheon of American voice on the subject inscribed at the top of this page. Who am I to fly in the face of these venerated men who did so much for our fledgling country?

I have a friend who is a high school history and economics teacher in a suburban school district. She told me a couple of years back that for kicks she trained all of her tenth grade history students to automatically chant “dead, fat white guys” whenever someone said the phrase “our Founding Fathers”. Irreverent? Yes, but it makes a point. I don’t think the men who drafted the foundations of our country intended this equality thing to end where it did. They knew there was more to the whole deal, or else why would they have seen to it that the constitution could still be amended after they thought it was done?

Gavin Moony has to my mind the best definition of equity: he calls it “equal access to equal care for equal need.” Do you get it? Equality is Equity Lite. It is pervasive within the concept of equity, but the difference is that equity is what equality becomes once it has evolved. The Founding Fathers, dead, fat white guys that they may be, understood that America had a long way to go. It wasn’t ready for equity yet. It had just won the right to stand on its own under the ideal that no one would ever be able to dictate to it again. The people who won the war couldn’t have taken it if instead of being rewarded for all their hard work they were told, “Sorry, but you’re going to have to share that pitchfork with farmer Ben down the way come harvest time next year, just because it’s the right thing to do.” (Seamlessly segueing into my conversation about communism, also at a later date…)

The point is we are not those people anymore. We can put away the notion of equality where everyone gets the same as everyone else. We can start looking at the reasons why we should be more concerned with everyone getting what they have to have instead of what they ought to have. Equity is a lot like forgiveness. It isn’t given because people deserve it; it’s given because they need it.