Race comes first: What to expect when the Equity Warriors come to town
The City of San Jose has engaged a group of consultants to help the city better understand its perceived systemic injustices and develop more "equitable" policies. Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute unearths the surprising and extreme measures these groups champion.
Many Americans probably have never heard of a “chief equity officer,” but it may be the hottest new job in municipal government. The emergence of the position is part of a broader movement to get local governments to look beyond the fundamental American ideals of equal treatment and opportunity and instead demand equity, which generally means the achievement of similar outcomes for all groups. While certain programs pursued under the equity banner—minority contracting set-asides, say—have been around for years, others are newer and more radical.
The equity movement presumes that any unequal results in society reflect structural or institutional racism, even when officials can’t identify any actual discrimination. To redress these purported inequities, the movement demands that every city department’s mission, and every major decision in local government, be looked at from a racial-equity perspective. In practice, this has meant mandatory bias training for municipal and school employees, in order to root out “policies that work better for white people,” in the words of one advocacy group, and laws passed in a number of cities that limit what employers can ask job applicants (about any past criminal history, especially), as well as other measures.
And equity promoters are pushing even more radical ideals, such as having municipalities pay reparations to minorities who’ve done poorly under local policies. Such revolutionary steps are apparently needed because, as a National League of Cities publication puts it, “no individual jurisdiction has achieved success when it comes to equity.” Only equal outcomes for all, however unlikely—or impossible—to achieve, will suffice. None of this bodes well for America’s urban future.
The equity crusade in local government started slowly about 15 years ago, in progressive cities like Seattle. Local activists there argued that minority residents were being left behind or, worse, actively harmed by the city’s economic growth, so politicians created the Race and Social Justice Initiative in response. As part of the effort, Seattle officials adopted a “racial tool kit” for government that required every city budget to go through a racial-equity analysis, measuring its impact on minority communities. City employees were also required to undertake training on “race, power, and implicit bias,” overseen by Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights. Other policies that boosters say have resulted from the initiative: a law banning firms from asking job applicants about criminal convictions; and a rise in the local minimum wage to $15 per hour.
The equity push has changed Seattle’s ongoing priorities. When, to take just one recent case, former mayor Ed Murray wanted to allocate $149 million in 2016 to build a modern police station that would replace an outdated, overcrowded facility, the city council demanded a racial-equity analysis of the project, which was subsequently canceled because of minority-community hostility.
The equity crusade has spread rapidly to other “woke” cities. Portland modeled its Office of Equity and Human Rights on Seattle’s effort. The office trains public employees in racial equity, which involves instructing them in the history of “public policies designed to favor whites over other races.” Portland has also developed an equity “dashboard” that publicly tracks the racial characteristics of the city’s government workforce. Austin created its equity officer position three years ago, after clamoring from community activists. A city task force recommends that Austin set aside a staggering $600 million to buy housing and reserve it for minority residents, consider reparations for minorities “affected by city codes or policies,” and grant housing subsidies to minority teachers to attract them to the public schools. In 2018, Baltimore joined the movement, with local lawmakers passing a measure that requires every city agency to “adopt a racial-equity lens,” notwithstanding the fact that two-thirds of the city’s residents, most of its elected officials, and many of its key bureaucrats are black.
The justification for this all-encompassing focus on race is a postmodern view on discrimination and prejudice that has migrated from universities into the public sphere. Its advocates contend that America’s major institutions remain deeply racist and that white (especially white male) privilege is the main driver of discrimination, even where no discriminatory behavior is evident. A Seattle government report, “Why Lead with Race,” is typical; it deems institutions as bigoted that “work to the benefit of white people,” as well as to “the benefit of men, heterosexuals, non-disabled people and so on.”
Some local equity initiatives take as their founding documents “equity-indicator” reports from organizations such as the City University of New York’s Institute for State and Local Governance, which simply measure group outcomes; any lag by minorities serves as prima facie evidence of bigotry. A report on Oakland, developed with support from the CUNY institute, for example, helped launch an “equity in Oakland” initiative. The report charted differences in outcomes by race in several areas in the city and concluded that higher graduation rates for white students, lower household incomes for blacks, and lower health-care coverage for Latinos show that “race matters” and that “troubling disparities by race” exist in the city.
The basic, but highly dubious, assumption behind these reports, and the equity movement generally, is that no possible behavioral differences among ethnic or racial groups might account for different life outcomes. Yet, as the eminent economist Thomas Sowell argues in his recent book Discrimination and Disparities, attitudes and behaviors that have nothing to do with bias can vary dramatically among cultural and ethnic groups over time and across societies. For example, he points out that the median age of Mexican-Americans is far lower than that of, say, Japanese-Americans; therefore, Mexican-Americans in the workforce tend to be younger and less experienced than Japanese-Americans, which can explain some of the variance in average income between the two groups—a factor that has nothing to do with discrimination.
After Yale University’s Amy Chua published Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011, several researchers sought to test her claim that Asian parents demanded more of their children, a plausible explanation for their academic success. One study found that Asian students on average spent more than twice as much time studying as white peers, who themselves studied 60 percent more on average than black students. Asian-Americans create a particular problem for the equity movement’s views on white privilege: Asians now have higher incomes and better educational outcomes than whites, which seemingly wouldn’t be true if the system were rigged for whites. Faced with such facts, equity advocates proffer absurd reasons for why Asians do so well. In New York City, school personnel undertaking equity-bias training claim that the training supervisors told them that Asians were in “proximity to white privilege” and thus also “benefit from white supremacy.” Meantime, a National Education Association paper on “unconscious bias” says that teachers often stereotype Asian-Americans as “model minority” students, giving them an implicit advantage.
Rather than confront behavioral differences, bias training now labels attitudes and habits associated with America’s “strive and achieve” culture as unconsciously racist. Bias training used for teachers in New York City’s public schools includes a slide on the purported characteristics of “white supremacy culture” from the book Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups. At the top of the list is the quest for “perfectionism,” which gives “undue focus to the shortcomings of someone or their work.” Other characteristics of white supremacy: a “sense of urgency,” “worship of the written word” (because it prioritizes documentation over relating to others), “individualism,” and “objectivity” (because it supposes that nonobjective viewpoints or emotions are bad). The presentation also dismisses the possibility of reverse discrimination, as it “equates individual acts of unfairness against white people with systemic racism which daily targets people of color.” (Of course, affirmative-action programs that disadvantage white and Asian students are, by definition, “systemic.”) As a student counselor in a Boston-area grammar school observed about that institution’s bias training, “What we’re trying to have teachers see here is that white people have benefited their whole lives from white supremacy.”
The equity movement dismisses venerable American ideals of equality. “We’ve got to get beyond talking about equality and talk about equity,” says John Marshall, chief equity officer of the Jefferson County Public School System in Kentucky. He adds: “Equity is providing what is needed to do what is best.”
It’s a way of thinking that postmodernists used in our universities to disarm critics. Now, it’s being employed to spread postmodern theories of race and discrimination throughout local government. If it persists, city hall and public schools may never be the same.
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