Responsible Equity is What We Need
Responsible Equity is What We Need
The "whole-of-government" approach to solving perceived inequities must include mechanisms for preventing ideological hardness from guiding public policy
Last week, the President signed an Executive Order, which announced the reorganization of the Federal government's departments with the mission of ensuring equity across the nation in many industries and public services that fall under its jurisdiction. Whatever the public's opinion about this order, most will agree that this vision will likely impact the lives and prospects of Americans from all walks of life.
The excerpt below explains the broad reach of this order.
Sec. 2. Establishing Equity-Focused Leadership Across the Federal Government. (a) Establishment of Agency Equity Teams. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Secretary of Transportation, the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Administrator of the Small Business Administration, the Commissioner of Social Security, the Administrator of General Services, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Director of the National Science Foundation, and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (agency heads) shall, within 30 days of the date of this order, ensure that they have in place an Agency Equity Team within their respective agencies to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives and ensure that their respective agencies are delivering equitable outcomes for the American people.
For the general populace, the word “equity” is often taken to mean “equality”, but that there are some key differences. While equality is about creating equality of opportunity for all people, equity is about ensuring equality of outcomes whenever disparities are detected by giving a boost to groups whose outcomes in any given category of experience, policy, or rights are less beneficial to that group than to other groups. Put another way, the general approach to equity is to “even the odds” by allocating more resources to the groups that are found to be negatively impacted by the disparate outcomes.
The picture below is perhaps the most familiar and widely circulated image depicting the basic approach known as equity. On the left panel, we can see that everybody gets the same resources, though arguably the equal distribution of resources does not appear to provide equal opportunity given the challenges faced by some. On the right panel, we can see that in order for equality of opportunity to have a fighting chance, some supports must be re-allocated from other places. That is, the person with the least access to an opportunity must be given additional supports to “even the playing field”—in this case a crate being taken away from the tall person and given to the smallest person.
Of course, equity is much more complex than that, and there is a wide range of choices we can make in any initiative that involves a commitment to equity. And it’s important—and let me add an exclamation point here! —that we begin to have an open and honest public debate about the highest standards of both analysis and human behavior that we should expect from the powerful Agency Equity Teams that this Executive Order has established for all major departments of the Federal Government. These teams will ultimately be influencing the operationalization of public policies on the scale of the entire nation, as they will be directing Federal-level departments that impact the personal, professional, social, economic, and medical needs of more than 330 million Americans.
With such a strong level of authority and a highly centralized structure with potentially far-reaching consequences (either good or bad), we can only hope that maturity, restraint, and charity will be the reigning passions of these Agency Equity Teams. But, as history has shown, when we give unchecked power to those who are charged with the responsibility to decide who gets helped and who doesn’t, we open the way for abuse and mistreatment at best and tyranny and large-scale dehumanization at worse.
I don’t know where this is all leading. But I do know that we have to insist that the Agency Equity Teams established in all of these Federal departments are guided by the Constitution and the responsibility to provide public service for all people and not solely guided by the zealous commitment to fulfilling the tenets of a rigid ideology. If we do not insist upon this, people who have an axe to grind and who wish to use an ideology to justify the abuses they wish to carry out in the name of their grievances could seize the levers of power without accountability. This could surely set our country on a path that we do not want to go down.
Below is a link to an analysis of the implications involved in the nationalization of equity as laid out in the President’s Executive Order. It is a transcript of a podcast put out by conservative advocate Christopher R. Rufo and is published on his Substack page. Though I remain committed to progressive causes (LGBTQ+ rights, investing in Black and brown communities, protecting reproductive rights, etc.), I also believe that we can gain insights from those who choose to call themselves conservatives. Rufo’s analysis of the establishment of Agency Equity Teams in all major Federal departments and programs is an important one that we should heed, even while we may strongly disagree with some of his other work.
[NOTE: If you click on the link, I recommend reading the transcript before watching the video; Rufo is new at podcasting and has a habit of “yell-talking” which I think distracts from the crisp logic and ethics of his message.]
It’s unfortunate that Rufo frequently references himself as speaking on behalf of conservatives because it gives the impression that concerns about this Executive Order and the ideological framework that governs this Executive Order is shared only by conservatives.
It isn’t.
Many of us who lean “left” (who lean towards protecting human rights and equality as primary commitments more than protecting liberty) agree with right of center people on this. Liberty is important, too, and is a foundation of the United States Constitution and, indeed, all social movements throughout history that sought to advance the cause of human dignity through resistance against authoritarianism and oppression. We are all rightly concerned about the shrink-wrap ideological hardness that has crept into the missions of our organizations, workplaces, schools, social movements—even some of our families—and now the Federal government, into whose hands this Executive Order has placed unprecedented power.
While I do not agree with every campaign Rufo has been up to in recent years—for example, his participation in the suppression of freedom of speech and expression of faculty members who hold different political views at the New College of Florida—he is right about the darker aspects of this well-meaning Executive Order.
No matter how tempting, we can’t turn to authoritarianism to move the needle in the direction of any vision of making the world a better place. If we allow the installment of governmental mechanisms that enable the arbitrary abuse of authority on the scale of what the Executive Order calls “whole-of-government”, we are forging a dangerous path that could potentially create a perpetual cycle of social and physical violence as the “long and slow march through our institutions” begins to clash with those who experience that march as a boot to their necks.
In the atmosphere of ideological totalism and religious-like fervor in which these mechanisms have been built, we could easily hurt innocent people in our aggressive push for a pure moral vision, depriving them of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In this kind of atmosphere, the harms that come to disfavored groups in the service of a utopian vision we believe in would likely feel perfectly justified in the minds of the less mature but ideologically pure people we hire to pull the levers of those mechanisms.
And in the atmosphere of unrest that is sure to follow under such repressive conditions, we condemn the nation to a dark, dark future.
Responsible equity is what we need.