By Rob Meyne
- Jan. 5, 2022
- 3-min read
A major change was announced by the new Biden Administration nearly a year ago. It represented a significant policy shift, a fundamental change in philosophy, but received relatively little notice. Team Biden, led by Susan Rice, said that, moving forward, the federal policy would be to administer laws and regulations with an intention to pursue racial equity rather than equality.
Equality means that every person is entitled to equal opportunity to pursue the education, employment, and support that allows us to succeed and reach our potential. If everyone gets equal opportunity, then we are only separated by our talent, intelligence, and ambition.
Biden has rejected that philosophy, committing instead to equality of results for groups identified by race, gender, and ethnicity. Equity insists that groups, divided by factors of importance to leftists, matter more than individuals. People are thus entitled to more governmental largesse, if they happen to be black or Hispanic, than they would be if they were white.
If that sounds like an indefensible policy in a free nation, it is. A commitment to equity means that groups should share resources, benefits, status, and wealth equally, regardless of their own talent, effort, or performance.
There could hardly be a more astonishing shift in national policy. Yet it created barely a ripple in the media. Perhaps it is because most people don’t understand the difference between equity and equality of opportunity. Plus, emphasizing equity rather than equality is so contrary to traditional, fundamental American values, it wouldn’t even occur to most people that a president could support it.
To clarify further: equity is the philosophical foundation of communism. Equality of opportunity is the philosophical foundation of a constitutional free republic. It is startling that an American president supports the concepts that drive communism more than those that underpin a free nation.
What does all this mean in practical terms? Among other things, it means governmental assistance, protections, and opportunities are not available to people of all races equally. People of certain races are denied benefits, others are provided them.
Sounds like, well, racism, right? Of course. Any policy that allocates resources – governmental benefits – based on race is, by definition, racist.
But Biden and leftist governors embrace it. Consider what is being done with Covid in New York. Priority is given to blacks and other minority groups for new therapies, tests, and COVID-related medical care. If you are black, you go to the top of the list. If you are white, you go to the back of the line.
Why? Because those favored groups are among those who have been under-served in the past. If a racial group, in the past, received less care, or lower quality care, than people in another, the official policy is to deny care to people of the formerly favored group to supposedly make up for it.
Two wrongs make a right, in their view. Dr. Ibram Kendi, a proponent of Critical Race Theory, has flatly admitted he embraces discrimination (racism) as long as it is hurting white people. He wrote: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” He is opposed to equality and advocates state-sanctioned racism.
That is not just a fringe thought in New York. It is official policy to discriminate based on race. In New York, if you are seriously ill from COVID, and need access to a ventilator or therapy that might save your life, you will die rather than getting care if black citizens need the same things and there isn’t enough of it to go around.
A nation, state, or community that embraces racism, for any reason, does not deserve to be a part of this constitutional republic. Leaders who support such policies should be repudiated and assigned to the ash heap of failed history.