Equality and Equity

 Equality Before the Law

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ….” These inspirational words, written by Thomas Jefferson, are among the basic principles of our society and our laws, but what did they mean when they were written, and why do we now worry not only about equality but also about equity?

When Jefferson wrote these words, he was referring to equality before the law. He lived in a time when all people were not equal before the English law. Members of the English aristocracy had rights and privileges that ordinary people did not have. They were hereditary members of Parliament, and they controlled the country and its laws. They used their privileges to protect their ownership of most of the wealth of the country.  They claimed that this situation was right and just because it was divinely ordained. People said, “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.”

Jefferson declared that this kind of inequality was wrong. It was contrary to the laws of “Nature and Nature’s God.” In America, he said, everyone would be equal before the law.  Unfortunately, this lofty principle was not applied consistently. In Jefferson’s time, black people were not equal, and neither were women or Native Americans. Those inequalities had consequences that have reverberated throughout our history, which has been marked by continual struggles to obtain legal equality.

Equality of Opportunity

The struggle for legal equality has been and continues to be important to us because it is a condition of equality of opportunity, which is an important American value.  We believe that all people should have equal opportunities to prosper in life. Moreover, for us, equality of opportunity justifies the inequality of wealth that is an obvious feature of our society. It is acceptable to us that some people should be rich and others poor if we all have the same opportunity be rich, and we know that equality of opportunity requires at least legal equality.

Equity

Unfortunately, legal equality by itself cannot really guarantee equality of opportunity because people are born into unequal circumstances. Some people are born to wealth, and others are not. Some people face barriers created by both historical and contemporary racial discrimination while others do not.

For example, it has been well-documented that on average, black families in the United States have only about one eighth of the wealth of white families. This means that on average, black children face a harder struggle than white children to obtain professional or technical training. To overcome this handicap, black people end up carrying a heavier burden of student debt than white people do on average, and that burden becomes a drag on their economic prospects throughout their lives. Thus, the race for economic prosperity is not really fair, or as we now say, it is not equitable. That is why we worry today about equity as well as equality.

Equity and Real Equality of Opportunity

If we want our country to be one in which all people really have equality of opportunity, we must address the sources of inequity in our society. As far as we can, we must remove the practical, non-legal barriers that deny equality of opportunity to millions of people. We will never eliminate all of the inequalities of wealth or race but we can make them less important than they are today.

For example, we could make post-secondary education free for all students so that people who have not been born into wealth would not have to take on heavy debts to earn technical or professional certifications.  We could provide affordable child-care so that families who are poor would not need to impoverish themselves still further to provide for their children. We could develop a decent, national health care system so that no one needs to avoid taking her children to the doctor when they are sick.

These kinds of services – education, child care, health care – would not be charity. They would help people to help themselves. They would increase the equity of our society, and they would move us a little closer to real equality of opportunity.