Last month, at her confirmation hearing, U.S. secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development nominee Marcia Fudge was asked to define a term by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. “So just to be clear then, it sounds like racial equity means treating people differently based on their race. Is that correct?” he asked.
Fudge responded no, and added that income, education or historic discrimination would be better criteria for such judgments by the government. But it wasn’t the only time that a conservative has interpreted the word “equity” in politically objectionable terms, and it won’t be the last. Usually understood as distributing resources proportional to need, rather than in matching (or “equal”) amounts, equity features prominently in the lexicon of progressive politics du jour. And in recent books like How to Be an Antiracist and White Fragility, in news coverage of Covid-19’s disparate impacts and vaccine rollout, and in actions and remarks by President Joe Biden since he took office last month, there’s a particular focus on racial equity as a missing-yet-needed condition in American society.
