<rant>
[For those of you unfamiliar with xml, that is an opening tag for a rant because that’s definitely what this is …]
I don’t think this post is going to go too deeply into its subject matter but it has been brewing for a long time and it is time to take a stand.
I think I first came across the Social Justice concept of ‘equity’ sometime in 2017. The coffee-stained artwork above comes from my induction to the board of the International Music Council in that year. I was very excited that one of the first things we talked about were the Sustainable Development Goals: this was an organisation that saw music as part of a greater movement towards a better world.
But, at some time during the two-day induction, the idea of equality was mentioned and someone said, “We tend to talk more about equity these days”. ‘Equity’ in this sense is most often represented by images like the following:
Even now, I find the simplistic nature of the image hard to grasp. I am very familiar with left-wing ideas around equality and they do not equate to that image on the left. My immediate thought, and one that is still with me, is that left-wing ideas had been abandoned, maybe in defeat after the fall of the Soviet Union and that the left had retreated to a less demanding, more wishy-washy version of equality and given it a new word. The 20th-century battle with the right for the meaning and ownership of the word ‘equality’ had been abandoned and, along with it, ideas of economic equality.
I don’t really know if that is the reason the term was abandoned. The union-busting that went on in the 1980s in the US and UK may have had something to do with it too. Unions, focussed on workers rights and liberation, were bastions of left wing thought and strong ideas of what equality meant in terms of redistributive justice, in terms of economic equality. The breaking of the unions may have removed the demand for equality from our societies.
It may be more complicated than that or not but, today, eight years later, in a workshop on EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion), the workshopper described equality as “that’s just treating everyone the same”. This does not equate to how I, a self-identified socialist, think of equality – or ever have thought of equality. The principle of “From each according to their ability and to each according to their need” is one that is fundamental to left-wing ideas of equality but that meaning appears to have been erased from history and the word entirely ceded to the right wing.
I object.
And so, back in 2017, at the induction to IMC, I drew the artwork above to show a simple idea. Equality is complicated. And what does it mean?
The two sides of the equation look very different. I know this is not advanced mathematics by any stretch of the imagination but one side of the equation is far more complicated than the other and yet they are equal. Different but equal.
I use 2 + 2 quite deliberately here, not only because it is simple or easy, but because “2 + 2 = 4” is often presented as a logical certainty, an expression of correctness, an obvious truth. When we see 2 + 2, we don’t have to calculate the answer because we know the answer. “2 + 2 = 4” is of itself a symbol of what is correct and established.
But the other side of the equation is also equal to 4. It is a lot more complicated; it takes a lot more work to resolve it down to a single digit. It contains both real and imaginary numbers. It contains the square root of minus one, which does not fit within the founding axioms of mathematics, rules to which the words, “These truths are held to be self-evident”, might easily be applied. The existence of imaginary numbers were additions to a system that was useful in describing reality up to a point, but only up to a point. There are different and more complicated aspects to reality that the previously normal rules could not describe. Just as there are more complicated aspects to individual people than a simple set of absolute and inflexible rules can describe.
The source of my objection is that the term, ‘equity’, and the concepts that are associated with it are fundamentally rooted in the paradigm of the right. They advocate for small measures to fix some of the less-than-optimal outcomes of a system that is exploitative and creates inequality by default. That would be the capitalist system: the new C-word. Even mentioning that word in groups of people that are supposedly on the left brings discomfort and a feeling of being a heretic.
“Equality is just treating everyone the same.”
No, it’s not.
Equality is complicated. Get over it. Work it out. And challenge the system that creates inequality as a matter of course rather than putting a little sticking-plaster here and there.
I reclaim the word equality for the left. Hopefully, others will join me.
</rant>