The past few weeks have offered us an excellent snapshot of what the Left’s idea of “equity” looks like in practice.
The Minneapolis public school district reached an agreement with the local teachers union to fire white teachers first, regardless of their seniority or how long they’ve worked for the district, to protect the jobs of nonwhite educators. A private housing co-op near the University of California, Berkeley banned white visitors and tenants unless other residents in the home grant them permission to be there. And Harvard University is preparing to make the case before the Supreme Court that it has the right and responsibility to deny admission to Asian American applicants simply because they are Asian American.
Meet the new racism, same as the old racism — except with a new outgroup and a set of outward characteristics by which to pass judgment.
The Left defends blatantly discriminatory practices, including the ones mentioned above, as necessary measures to make right the wrongs of the past. Leftists deny the very concept of equality — rather, they judge and assign personal worth based on skin color and nothing more. We’ve been down that road before, and our nation suffered as a result.
The truth is the leftists pushing this toxic racialism aren’t motivated by a desire for equity, diversity, or inclusion but by vitriol, resentment, and sometimes even self-hatred. White liberals, specifically, have adopted a worldview in which nothing they do will ever be enough to make up for the disadvantages others experience. At the same time, this worldview teaches minorities that nothing they accomplish or achieve will ever be enough to make up for the privileges others enjoy.
Everyone is caught in a circular victim complex that offers no real solutions to either the oppressors or the oppressed. As a result, mutual resentment will continue to grow until something finally bursts.
This is what happens when you trade equality of opportunity for equality of outcomes. The latter is impossible to achieve. Even if it weren’t, it’s not something people in a free society should desire. (Just ask a Soviet empire survivor how much they enjoyed living in a society built on forced equity.)
The Left is doing its best to convince the public that “equity” is both possible and just. In so doing, it has embraced the same methods of racial discrimination that our country rightly rejected years ago.
No one wins in an ideology like this one, except for the people who have figured out how to profit from it.
The very best solution to the inequalities we face is freedom — the freedom to pursue the same opportunities as everyone else; the freedom to look another person in the eyes and know your skin color makes you no better or worse than he is. That’s the same freedom today’s racialists want to take away from us — and the same freedom the racists of the past fought so hard to suppress.
Kaylee McGhee White is the deputy editor of Restoring America for the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
