What is equal? What is the difference between equality and equity? And why is the distinction less useful than we think?
Episode 24 of the Make Saints podcast: “Equal”
When I buy a bag of Skittles, get in the car, and pick up my kids from school, how do I figure out what to do with those Skittles? Everybody in the car expects that they will get some.
So do I count them out and give the exact same to both? Or do I just let them sort it out?
What happens if I give one of them more than the other?
And what happens if one of those kids always gets more?
It is time to talk about what it means when things are equal.
Equality
So here we are. Bag of Skittles. Who knows how many are in a bag. Let’s say forty-five. How do we make this as fair as possible?
The easiest way to look at the scenario is to split it in half. So half of forty-five is…uh oh. Forty-five isn’t even. So twenty-two each with one left over. I guess that’s for me. I usually call that the Dad Tax. Better make it three. Or five. They each get twenty. Nice round number.
Of course, this assumes the whole bag is for the two of them. Maybe it was for me and I was sharing with them. Well, that sense of fairness disappears instantly; and it’s replaced by an entirely different one. Yeah, it would be rude to eat a bunch of candy in front of the kids, but you know, maybe if they got jobs they could get their own candy.
See how easy it was to throw equality out the window when we established my ownership? Suddenly, I’m being nice if I share two or three with each of them and gobble the other 40 myself.
But let’s say it isn’t about that. How do we make it more equal? It’s actually easier to split it three ways because forty-five is divisible by three, so we each get fifteen! Problem solved!
What about the citrus, though?
Everyone is down for the red ones. And we all like orange (though I love orange, so you know I’m getting plenty of those). But only I like lemon. And this bag of forty-five has ten lemons. Do I just get those ten and then we divide the rest? That’s not good.
Is my fifteen composed of ten lemons and a couple of other stuff? That doesn’t seem fair, either. Yeah, lemons are great, but the kids got a ton of strawberry now and I’m feeling left out.
For the last few years, we encountered this problem every Halloween because my daughter had braces and a peanut allergy. So pretty much all the stuff she could eat, she really also couldn’t. So we watched her pile most of her candy on top of her brother’s pile. Which is totally not fair.
Equality vs. Equity
What we usually think of when we think of equality is this vague sense of things being equal. And really, we all know it when we see it.
When we talk about equal rights, we aren’t talking about pretty decent rights for these people and super awesome rights for these other people. That’s not what any of us has in mind.
The problem isn’t our sense of equal exactly. It is in our lengths to actually maintain equality.
For many, they are satisfied by stopping at the door to equality. They say we all have equal opportunity. As long as you and I both have the same shot at a thing, well then we’re equal.
But what happens when you and I are up for the same job and I get that job over you 75% of the time and the only difference between our resumes is my name is Andrew and yours is Tyrone.
That isn’t equal opportunity. No matter how many ways we try to spin it as equal. When random isn’t random: it’s fixed, we’re not talking real opportunity.
This is the difference between equality and equity.
Equity deals with outcomes
The shorthand for equality is that we all get the same opportunity and for equity we all get the same outcomes.
I think this distinction is a bit rigid, but let’s run with it anyway. And run back to the Skittles and other assorted candies.
Imagine the scenario with my daughter who can’t have much of the candy, but nothing stops my son from devouring everything. What do we do with that?
Well, we could give away most of my son’s hoard so they both get the same amount. Or we could get my daughter a bunch of the stuff she actually can have. Of course, none of that feels great either. But often it’s what we have to do. Who hasn’t gotten both kids the same thing because one of them wanted it and it was just easier?
Another name for this, of course, is affirmative action. Which always seems OK with kids and corporations, but some people really like to hate it when it comes to race.
The fact is that we think that striving for equality means that we can pretend that outcomes are just out of our control. Like we can control what happens when we walk up to the house and ring the doorbell, but we don’t control what candy they give us.
We treat equality as 100% subject to fate. Like, We tried. Sorry kid. I guess your brother gets all of the candy.
Except we do control what candy comes into the house and whether other candy comes in. It is a lie to say this is all about fate and the blessed rules of Halloween candy. We make up the stupid rules! My baby wants white chocolate, I’m gettin’ her some white chocolate! That pile is damn pitiful!
But here’s the other thing.
What if one kid always gets more candy?
He doesn’t just get more on Halloween. His teachers give him more candy. His friends give him more candy. Even we give him more candy.
So now if we give them both the same, it doesn’t really feel the same, does it? Shouldn’t she get more this time since he always gets more? And when is that difference paid up?
It is one thing for me to get the job way more often than Tyrone. But Tyrone gets it more than Shaniqua. And we both get paid a dollar for her 56 cents.
As much as we might chafe at having to come up with how to make it all equal, it is just not acceptable to live with such utterly unequal outcomes.
Let’s call this the “It’s just too hard” fallacy.
The #1 argument trotted out against equity is that it is just too hard to ensure equal outcomes. Now, the funniest thing about this argument, which, let’s be honest, isn’t entirely wrong, but that also isn’t the point. The funniest thing is that it is offered as if we actually cared about making things equal.
People most often use this argument when they want me to also believe Tyrone and I have the same opportunities.
The “It’s just too hard” fallacy is the reason the debate between equality vs. equity is inaccurate. Because we aren’t ensuring equal opportunity or outcomes. Most of our regular practice ensures both unequal opportunities and outcomes. Because the stuff is all intertwined.
Eventually
My son will eventually get braces. And for those next two years, we’ll hear the constant refrain about what he can’t eat. And in a real way, we will all feel the cosmic scales balancing.
But without such actions, the constant presence of inequality might swirl into the usual sibling rivalry. Big sister resenting all the candy her little brother got, yadda yadda. But that might turn into turns in the front seat, sports, college, and who gets more help in the dumpster fire economy of late-stage capitalism.
Just one more data point about why Mom and Dad love one of us more.
Uncle Ben lifts the mask
We can save ourselves the trouble of some of that rivalry by not actually engineering the winners and losers in such predictable ways. Because we currently are engineering the winners and losers. We’re just pretending it is accidental.
It is one thing for racism to affect who gets hired. That sucks, sure. But it is another thing to know that it is easier for white dudes with a high school diploma to get a job than black dudes with a college degree. Knowing that and pretending we can’t do anything about it? Well, that’s no accident. Knowing makes that deliberate.
When the mugger kills Uncle Ben and Peter realizes it was the thief he let run past him, does he go, meh, nothing I could do? No! That junk haunts him. Because he knows that he should have done something about it and chose not to.
And this gets to the most upsetting part of inequality.
We pretend it is accidental because we don’t want to own the responsibility for not acting when we should have. And why didn’t we act?
We didn’t know what to do.
That’s it. We feel helpless. Confused. We don’t know how to fix it. So instead of accepting that reality, we concoct multiple layers of excuse to pretend things really are equal.
But as always, the coverup is worse than the crime.
We need both
Most of the time we don’t share a big bag of Skittles. We let the kids pick out what they want. And they never pay attention that one costs $2.19 and the other $1.89. Nor do they check the weight of the bag. They really don’t need things that equal.
And when it comes to sharing, we usually just eat stuff and hope there’s enough. We aren’t ridiculous. And honestly, none of it sticks. Nobody harps on what happened two weeks ago. It’s forgotten.
But systemic inequality isn’t like Family Movie Night treats. It involves generational trauma and community exploitation. It involves generations of wealth creation for whites and debt creation for blacks; redlining and legal means of making things unequal. This is the true face of equal opportunity.
As the saying goes, born on third, he thought he hit a triple.
Solving this requires course correction—which must include, not only the structural impediments, but the generational advantages afforded certain persons.
It means we focus on both opportunities and outcomes.
Protecting Inequality
And we start with acknowledging how equal opportunity is used as a weapon against equity. How a both/and problem is turned into a fight to (ultimately) prevent equal outcomes. Not because everyone sets out to be a racist. But because they want to exclude it from the analysis.
The argument is obviously: if we do equal opportunities right we’ll get equal outcomes. And if we get unequal outcomes it can’t be that the system is messed up. It must mean we’re fundamentally unequal. In other words, if I have more money, I must be better at math. It can’t possibly be anything else.
Excluding half of the equation is what Americans of the last 50 years love to do. We love to pretend freedom is unlimited liberty and just can’t figure out why we can’t all have everything we want all of the time.
We love arguing that protecting the environment just isn’t profitable…while letting companies dump waste in our lakes and rivers for free—so waste only shows up on the state’s balance sheet when we take responsibility for it.
Our vision of equality, right now, is probably best defined by what we pretend isn’t really happening. And when we’re confronted with the truth, we pretend that there isn’t anything we can do about it. Then, when we’re confronted with what we can do about it, we pretend it is actually too hard.
But when we find out someone has done the work for us, it is actually quite easy, and may benefit all of us, then we pretend that isn’t equality. It infringes on someone’s freedom.
Shifting goal posts
So at this point, if you’re looking for a solution, it means you need to go back and listen again. Some solutions to inequality are obvious and are found in this podcast. But this problem isn’t solved by naming the solutions. Because naming solutions is another opportunity to shift the goal posts.
The problem is that people shift the goal posts.
Not for equality, but to preserve inequality. Redlining housing commissions, bankers, poll-watchers, legislators, county commissioners, real estate developers, restaurant owners, school administrators, and pretty much anybody with any power in our communities always shift the goal posts to preserve unequal systems that consolidate power and protect their own children from the supposed threat of equality. That’s how a middling white student could sue the University of Texas for not accepting her averageness.
The action is always to tell the whole story. Claiming all of the responsibility that is ours. Holding one another accountable for the ways we don’t ensure equality.
Because “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” That is equal.