The Trouble With Equity
Corporate America and the rich have used anti-racism to distract from broader inequality. Ensuring that every racial group has identical access to society’s limited resources does nothing to change an economy that exploits the many to enrich the few.
A banner reads "End Racism" on the World Bank building in Washington, DC, on March 14, 2023. (Celal Gunes / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
For progressives, the crescendo of corporate interest in social justice, particularly during 2020’s racial reckoning, has amounted only to a cynical co-optation of radical grassroots movements. “Rather than redistribution, redress, or reparations,” one Nation contributor wrote of the corporate response to the reckoning, “corporate America and the political elite alike embraced the language of identity to assure those making radical demands in the streets that political change might just come one chief diversity officer at a time.”
It’s true, on one hand, that business leaders have been far more amenable to measures like diversifying corporate boards and instituting companywide antibias trainings than they have been to some of the more confrontational slogans that arose from the protests — the call to abolish the police, for example. But on the other, 2020’s reckoning also revealed that line between “corporate” anti-racism and “radical” anti-racism is often very fuzzy indeed. There have, for instance, been a number of steadfast calls for reparations from the business sector that don’t look terribly different from what activists themselves have demanded. In 2020, Robert Johnson, the billionaire founder of BET, called for the federal government to pay $14 trillion in reparations to black Americans — the same figure included in several congressional reparations bills, including one introduced by progressive Cori Bush in 2023. The CEO of the private equity firm Vista Equity, which is valued at $96 billion, likewise said in an interview that he believed corporations with historical ties to the slave trade also had an obligation to pay reparations.
In 2022, major corporations also joined forces with progressive activists to throw their weight behind preserving affirmative action in higher education, which was eventually overturned by the conservative-majority Supreme Court. Prior to the ruling, nearly eighty blue chip firms — including Mastercard, JetBlue, Ikea, and Silicon Valley giants Google, Meta, and Apple — had filed a brief with the court expressing their enthusiastic support for Harvard’s right to consider applicants’ racial identities in its admissions process. Elite universities like Harvard were vital talent pipelines to elite corporations, the companies noted, and therefore had to be racially diverse in order for the leading firms to cultivate their own diverse workforces. (“Racial and ethnic diversity enhance business performance,” the brief further argued.) It was a stance that drew praise from a variety of racial justice groups, including the Legal Defense Fund — a civil rights organization founded in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall — which declared in a public statement that it was “proud to stand” with the corporate signatories of the brief.
These instances of ideological alignment between activists and wealthy corporations aren’t only coincidences. Even more insidious than the possibility of corporate America defanging radical anti-racism is the fact that the contemporary ruling class is completely at ease with a vision of justice that overlaps with one held by progressives. Today that vision is most commonly called racial equity. And while for corporate America racial equity generally means diversifying their C-suites or subsidizing black entrepreneurship whereas for grassroots organizations racial equity is more likely to mean ending the disproportionate incarceration and police killings of black people, the two find common ground in an outsize focus on racial disparities.
An Acceptable Model of Redistribution
For proponents of racial equity, the underrepresentation of black (and brown) people at the top of society (say, the Forbes billionaires list) and overrepresentation at the bottom (among the incarcerated or those living in poverty) is a sign of the enduring power of racism in the United States. That’s the argument advanced by Ibram X. Kendi, the country’s foremost writer and speaker on anti-racism.
In his best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist, which appears on countless reading lists and training guides, Kendi explains that racial equity exists “when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing” and offers the following example: In 2014, while only 41 percent of blacks and 45 percent of Latinos owned the homes they lived in, 71 percent of white families owned theirs. “An example of racial equity,” Kendi writes, “would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.” A racially equitable society, in other words, is simply one in which racial disparities have been eliminated.
Yet, as the professors Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr have argued, ensuring that equal percentages of every racial group have identical access to society’s resources (such as, following Kendi’s example, a private ownership-based housing market) has nothing to do with changing an economy that exploits the many for the enrichment of the few. A fixation on racial disparities as a sign of an abstract “systemic” or “structural” racism furthermore obscures the very political economy that generates society’s grotesque inequalities in the first place. “Every time racial disparity is invoked as the lens through which to see American inequality,” Reed and Michaels write, “the overwhelming role played by the increased inequality in the American class system is made invisible.”
What underpins the call for racial equity is the presumption that America’s current lopsided distribution of wealth and resources would be justified so long as these disparities were eliminated — that is, it would be acceptable if the top 1 percent of the population held 90 percent of the nation’s wealth just so long as that 1 percent were (following the demographic makeup of the US population) 13 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic, and so on.
And the business sector has wholeheartedly celebrated the idea of racial equity because this project of eliminating racial disparities from American life ultimately doesn’t much affect either their political dominance or their profit margins. Just ask the Wall Street founders of the financial services company Percapita, who consulted books like How to Be an Antiracist when brainstorming a business model that might help ameliorate long-standing racial disparities in finance and banking while also making them some money. The firm landed on the goal of financial inclusion, or providing financial services to black and Latino people who, as the company noted, were disproportionately underserved. (“What could we build that would be just and equitable? How could we create a sustainable engine of change to remove the barriers so many face in achieving financial stability?” asks the group’s official website.)
Likewise, just a few short years after the racial reckoning, a Bloomberg report found that corporate America had fulfilled its commitment to anti-racism in at least one respect: of the 300,000 workers that companies in the S&P 100 had hired between 2020 and 2021, 94 percent had been people of color. And while most of these hires had been in lower-level positions, the proportion of non-white employees had increased significantly at higher ranking professional and managerial roles too. “Even at the executive level, more than half the added jobs went to workers of color,” Bloomberg noted.
Because racial equity is a framework that demands only that no particular racial group is disproportionately subject to hardship under the broader economic system, it’s also one that political elites have eagerly brandished to avoid confronting the scarcity created by capitalism and instead advocating only for rearranging that scarcity. In 2020, the concept of racial equity was swiftly taken up by legislators and funders hoping to coax new life into neoliberal policy aims, who were, in fact, so partial to the notion that they insisted on swapping it for the idea of equality.
On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris released a short animated video stressing the importance of equity over equality in policymaking. “There’s a big difference between equality and equity,” she said in the video. “Equality suggests, ‘Oh, everyone should get the same amount.’ The problem with that [is] not everyone’s starting out from the same place.” Equity, she went on to explain, was a way of apportioning assistance based on need. This distinction also found a home among liberal nonprofit circles; as one California-based foundation insisted, equity “recognizes that due to racial or social status some communities need more help than others to achieve the same outcomes.”
But despite advocates’ claims that the concept of equity addresses and corrects historical injustices that a traditional notion of equality somehow overlooks, a second look at this supposedly new framework suggests that we already have a perfectly good policy term for the process of determining who deserves assistance and who doesn’t. That term is means-testing, and the practice also happens to be the preferred model of administering social welfare under neoliberalism.
Means-testing entails limiting benefits to a targeted group, traditionally those below a certain income cutoff, and its champions — like those of equity — have claimed that the practice ensures fairness. (In 2016, for instance, Hillary Clinton dismissed Bernie Sanders’s call for tuition-free public college with the quip, “I am not in favor of making college free for Donald Trump’s kids.”) But this conception of fairness tends to undermine the very programs means-testing is theoretically meant to enhance.
For one thing, because means-tested programs must constantly monitor recipients’ eligibility, they reliably generate byzantine and expensive bureaucracies that limit participation even among those who qualify. Legislators who want to shave down the social safety net often make administrative hurdles onerous by design; after all, the more red tape there is choking a program, the more people there are who are discouraged from using it. This also means that such programs are inefficient and politically unpopular: Those who qualify for means-tested benefits often aren’t aware that they do or find themselves ill-equipped to slog through the necessary paperwork. And those who don’t qualify for benefits but believe they’re footing the bill with their taxes can come to harbor resentment for such programs.
In this context, it’s easy to understand why so many elites today have warmed to the concept of equity: it’s a convenient euphemism for the continuation of neoliberal economics with a progressive twist. (Old-fashioned “equality,” on the other hand, sounds rather like the kind of universalism that legislators on both sides of the aisle have worked to sweep off the table for decades.) Racial equity is a perfectly acceptable model of redistribution for our contemporary ruling class because it treats things like decent jobs, education, and health care as limited resources that only need to be divided up proportionally by race, not as public goods to be expanded and improved for all.
What Progress?
The language of equity makes it that much easier to cloak this revamped means-testing in moral righteousness, but at a moment when working-class Americans, regardless of race, face a declining standard of living, it’s a zero-sum approach that amounts only to slicing up a shrinking pie in a slightly different way. As historian Touré Reed has argued, while antidiscrimination policies still serve as a much-needed bulwark against racism in the labor market, they can only truly improve life for the majority of black Americans within a type of economy that has been nonexistent for at least a generation. “If the US economy were still characterized today by an expanding middle class, anti-discrimination measures alone might be a reasonable fix,” Reed has said. “The problem is that the game has changed.”
The game was changed most notably by the onset of deindustrialization and the subsequent evaporation of high-wage blue-collar jobs beginning in the middle of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin had predicted that shifts underway in the economy — namely, the rise of automation and the erosion of manual labor occupations — would render civil rights legislation toothless in the long run if left unaddressed. “We are in the midst of a technological revolution which is altering the fundamental structure of the labor force, destroying unskilled and semi-skilled jobs — jobs in which Negroes are disproportionately concentrated,” Rustin wrote in 1964. Without a significant overhaul of the structure of labor in the United States and a raft of public programs to guarantee full employment, housing, and education, he argued, the civil rights movement itself would soon run up against its limits.
His warning was prescient. As Judith Stein would show in her sweeping account Running Steel, Running America, the collapse of domestic manufacturing over the latter half of the twentieth century would, in effect, undercut the measures against employment discrimination established under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Though Title VII legally prohibited employers from engaging in racial discrimination and thereby helped increase the percentage of blacks working within certain occupations, the simultaneous disappearance of jobs in steel and adjacent industries over the next several decades meant that, in many cases, the total number of black workers in those fields would decline dramatically. Between 1974 and 1988, for instance, representation of black workers in the electrical trades increased from around 5 percent to a little over 8 percent. But, Stein noted, “it would be difficult to call this progress, because the number of black electricians declined from 718 to 431.”
Today the family-sustaining blue-collar manufacturing jobs that helped forge a black middle class during the civil rights era are long gone, replaced by an expansive low-wage service sector and fewer and fewer avenues to long-term economic security for most working people. And while racism and discrimination still shamefully circumscribe the lives of many, the unrelenting downward pressure on the vast majority of Americans of all races suggests that measures intended to ensure that certain racial groups aren’t disproportionately subject to precarity — as opposed to measures seeking to eliminate, or at least ameliorate, that precarity — will continually struggle to win popular support.
To put it another way, calls for racial equity in the current economic pressure cooker — whether from corporations or activist organizations — have amounted to little more than calls to diversify the shrinking ranks of those lucky enough to escape downward mobility. And this project is one that’s completely compatible with the interests of business elites, neoliberal politicians, and wealthy philanthropists. If the protests of 2020 had ignited a wide-scale cultural reckoning over race that captured the nation, the seamless incorporation of that reckoning into the economic order also suggested there was nothing about it that the ruling class found objectionable in the least.