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This is a comment from Michel Bauwens in response to my initial short essay on "responsible equity".

Since I wrote this piece, I have changed the phrase "responsible equity " to "responsible inclusion" out of the recognition that the term "equity" is too controversial for productive conversations in the professional, personal, and public square. While I once thought the word could be rebranded and re-envisioned, but I no longer think it can.

As long as I remain in the education field, I will need to use the term "equity" and add the word "responsible" in front of the term when I use it during dialogues with colleagues, subordinates, and supervisors, and policy makers. But I will not be using it to define perspectives and practices that I believe can make a real life difference for all people, including those who belong to groups deemed marginalized.

The comment below was written on Michel's P2P/Commons Politics and Policy page on Facebook on February 23, 2023. For Michel's Substack writings on theory and practice in Peer to Peer (P2P) movements, navigating the commons, public policy, sustainability, and other related topics, please visit his link: https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/

Dear Steven J. Lawrence,

I believe I disagree with your too positive assessment of Equity, you see that equity implies sending more resources to disadvantaged groups , but that is NOT what they are doing; this was in fact what the old left and the socialists wanted: give more resources so that the 'bourgeois rights' became real, and this is exactly what the woke approach to Equity abandons, and instead, changes by:

1. active discrimination

2. changing the entry requirements and abandoning any merit-based selection

And it does so by mis-identifying where the privilege is located:

(bear in mind I have not read yet your article carefully, I am reacting to a phrase in the beginning of your text)

"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."

https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/responsible-equity-is-what-we-need?

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