On Tuesday, six days into the Biden administration, it became clear why Susan Rice, hitherto a foreign policy specialist, was named director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rice, unconfirmable for a Cabinet post after her unembarrassed Sunday show lies about Benghazi, ventured into the White House press room to preview President Biden’s “equity” initiative.
With one possible exception, the specific policies announced were less important than the word “equity,” invoked 19 times by Rice and nine by Biden. Ending federal private prison contracts, “strengthening” relations with Indian tribes, and combating “xenophobia” against Asians and Pacific Islanders are small potatoes as federal policies.
Not so, perhaps, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing initiative, started under Obama, repealed under Trump, and now due for a spirited revival. The idea is for the feds to reverse local zoning laws and plant low-income housing in suburbs deemed insufficiently diverse.
Actually, racial discrimination in housing has been reduced since the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act, to the point that in metropolitan areas from Washington to Atlanta to Los Angeles, most blacks now live in suburbs, not in the central cities to which they were tightly confined in postwar America.
But for Rice and Biden, “equity” requires not equality of opportunity, but equality of results. That’s one of the fundamental tenets of the critical race theory training that Trump’s administration banned and Biden’s reinstated on Day One.
A lower-than-population percentage of blacks in any desirable category, explains critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi, must be the result of “systemic racism,” a term Rice used twice and Biden five times on Tuesday. If you don’t agree, you’re guilty of “white fragility” and must be a “white supremacist.”
As Andrew Sullivan trenchantly observes, “to achieve ‘equity,’ you first have to take away equality for individuals who were born in the wrong identity group. Equity means treating individuals unequally so that groups are equal.”
This is exactly contrary to the central thrust of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It could easily be judged, in particular cases, to violate the 14th Amendment. Individuals discriminated against might have standing to go to court.
And there will surely be many such individuals. Rice made clear that the policies mentioned Tuesday are just a start. “Every agency,” she said, with no suggestion of exceptions, “will place equity at the core of their public engagement, their policy design, and program delivery to ensure that government resources are reaching Americans of color and all marginalized communities — rural, urban, disabled, LGBTQ+, religious minorities, and so many others.”
That’s a lot of preferred categories, but one suspects that, as in Orwell’s Animal Farm, some preferred groups will be more preferred than others. What we’re being promised is racial quotas and preferences in every conceivable program, in every possible corner of public life.
It may be objected that the U.S. is already well on its way to such a state of affairs. Racial quotas and preferences are firmly, almost fanatically ensconced in higher education, at least in admissions to programs if not in numbers of graduates. Corporate America’s Human Resources departments, Kendi’s most eager clients, revel in imposing racial quotas and enforcing “equity” orthodoxy.
Even so, something still sticks in the craw of most people about treating some people differently from others on account of race or ethnic identity. “You don’t get to unite the country by dividing it along these deep and inflammatory issues of identity,” as Sullivan writes.
Proof of this came from the unlikely precincts of California on Nov. 3. Democratic politicians, under the influence of critical race theory, asked voters to overturn the 1996 Proposition 209 referendum, which barred state government, including universities, from discriminating on the basis of race. Some $20 million, with corporate elites happily kicking in, was spent to pass this Proposition 16, versus only $1 million to uphold Proposition 209. Yet, Prop 16 flopped, rejected by California voters by a 14-point margin.
That’s an even wider margin than the 12-point one by which Prop 209 originally won in 1996, even though California has become far more Democratic since then. Bill Clinton carried the state by 13 points, Joe Biden by 29.
That suggests that the Biden and the corporate elite project to create a United States of Racial Quotas and Preferences is in conflict with a strong underlying current of opinion that favors equal rights under the law.
