Kamala Harris declares commitment to the social justice cult

Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted a video on Sunday afternoon where she declared her commitment to equity, where Harris herself explains the difference between equality and equity.

"The problem with [equality] is that not everybody's starting from the same place," the video explains. "Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place."

Equality is an idea which Americans hold dear. In the American conception of the term, equality means equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Such values are the cornerstone of a functioning liberal democracy.

Without equality before the law, there is no justice. Those who have more power within a system do not face the same consequences for their actions as they would if they came from a more disadvantaged background. This is why we hold justice to be blind, as justice does not care whether you are rich or poor, black or white, male or female. The goal of a functioning justice system is to separate universal values of right from wrong. Universal wrongs such as murder, theft, and rape do not become more or less justified depending on the person who commits such wrongdoings. When equality before the law is abandoned, you are left without a justice system, only a legal system enforcing injustice.

Without equality of opportunity, there is no American dream. Arbitrary advantages handed to some over others prevents those at the bottom from pursuing their talents. Not only does this prevent those who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder from realizing a dignified living, but it deprives the rest of society of talent which could make society better. Without equality of opportunity, the brilliant mind who could cure cancer may forever be stuck performing menial tasks for those who want to preserve their own social status.

Of course, these ideals are utopian and can never be achieved in full. The brutal fact of human imperfection allows neither of these goals to be reached, but at the very least, societies can strive towards them in order to produce an increasingly better society over time. This is the story of America, a continuous stride towards achieving, but never perfecting, equality of opportunity and equality before the law.

The American vision of equality, however, starkly contrasts with the vision of equity offered by Kamala Harris. Equity is a fundamental attack on the concepts of equality of opportunity and equality before the law, proposing to replace both with an equal outcome. As Senator Harris said in her own words, "equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place."

Brandeis University's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department says that "true equity implies that an individual may need to experience or receive something different (not equal) in order to maintain fairness and access." In essence, the goal of equity is to provide unequal treatment in order to create an equal outcome.

Brandeis uses the example of someone in a wheelchair, a common but realistically false notion of equity in practice. Individuals who have physical disabilities are frequently provided extra resources not to ensure that they achieve an equal outcome, but so that they can have equal opportunity to everyone else. The famous wheelchair-bound scientist Stephen Hawking would not have benefited from disability-friendly architecture to assure that he is just as well off as those who were not, but so that people like him could revolutionize the world in spite of their physical disability.

Hawking went far beyond an equal outcome with his peers. In fact, he went far beyond almost any of his contemporaries. It was the western and enlightened commitment to equal opportunity which helped him achieve greatness. Far from having an equal outcome, his knowledge and research put most of his counterparts in the scientific community to shame, and Hawking will long be remembered as one of the most brilliant minds to ever dawn upon the discipline of physics.

Indeed, while equality of opportunity and before the law have justified some of the greatest and most prosperous societies to ever exist, equity, or equality of outcome, has been used to justify some of the worst of mankind's atrocities. The genocides and mass killings committed under communist regimes were justified under a vision of equity. The natural human tendency to strive for success proved a difficult problem for communist regimes, and many of then, such as the Soviet Union, chose to liquidate members of their society who did not want to be equally as miserable as those who were far less productive than themselves.

Is this to say that Kamala Harris is a secret or not-so-secret communist willing to engage in the most egregious of human atrocities? No, and it is doubtful that anyone really thinks that. Those pushing for equity, however, have caused other injustices in the United States, and are actively pushing for more.

Equity is commonly used to justify affirmative action, whereby certain racial groups which are considered to be historically disadvantaged are provided advantages over those who are considered privileged. At Yale University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, it was found that the university was actively discriminating against Asian and white applicants in their admissions. From the perspective of equity, telling an Asian that they cannot attend university simply for being Asian is acceptable because, being Asian, they already have advantages over other applicants who are black or Hispanic, for example.

In New York City, public school teachers were instructed to actively favour black students in order to achieve equity. “If I had a poor white male student and I had a middle-class black boy, I would actually put my equitable strategies and interventions into that middle class black boy because over the course of his lifetime he will have less access and less opportunities than that poor white boy,” said the woman hired to perform the training session.

At the University of Michigan, it was an equity, diversity, and inclusion department which spearheaded the creation of segregated spaces of learning, separating white people from non-white people. A similar situation was seen recently at a Seattle public library, where an organization known as Racial Equity Consultants created segregated spaces where white people were separated from people of colour.

Today, we see groups committed to equity actively trying to repeal anti-discrimination laws in California. Activists seek to pass Proposition 16, which would repeal a previous successful ballot referendum which prohibited ethnic and sexual discrimination in California.

In a liberal democratic system, we evaluate people based on merit. Individuals "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," in the words of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Equity ignores the content of character entirely, focusing all efforts to achieve an equal outcome between various identity groups.

With the announcement of her commitment to equity, Kamala Harris clearly committed herself to the social justice cult, throwing under the bus everything which makes liberal democracy so successful. The best society is one which allows all people, regardless of background, to equally partake in the creation of a better society. The worst societies are those which try to manufacture a better society through misguided policies favouring some groups over others, squashing the ambitions and brilliance of those who have the most to offer the rest of us.