By: Noah Rothman – nationalreview.com – January 14, 2025

In the case of the L.A. fires, ‘equity’ would require consigning even more homes to the blaze and spreading around the torment more broadly.

Occasionally, proponents of the concept of “equity” forget that they are supposed to emphasize the benefits of the discrimination they advocate on behalf of America’s allegedly marginalized minorities. Instead of highlighting their fraught but well-intentioned program of positive discrimination, they sometimes let the mask slip and indulge the bitter avarice that drives their ideological crusade. The San Francisco Chronicle did just that in a recent story on the private, for-profit firefighting teams who helped save some Los Angeles properties from going up in flames — “raising questions about equity” in the process.

“Critics contend that when wealthy individuals hire their own firefighters, they compete with public teams for precious resources such as water, and could potentially interfere with those teams’ efforts by, for example, blocking or crowding narrow access points,” the Chronicle reports. That is a reasonable objection, although there have been few reports of such conflicts since the fires erupted last week. Rather, what has been reported is that residents suffered unduly from a shortage of LAFD personnel, which private firefighters would help mitigate.

It’s all a red herring anyway; a smoke screen that distracts from equity advocates’ true objection to this phenomenon, which is their revulsion toward suffering that is not visited equally — perhaps even disproportionately — on those who they believe deserve to suffer.

The Chronicle provided an example of this invidious impulse. “The rich suffer zero consequences of anything, even cataclysmic natural disasters,” read one illustrative comment, posted on X. Indeed, the dispatch could have sprawled with examples of social media users reveling in the torment they hope those of means experience after watching their homes and possessions disintegrate in an inferno.

This covetous instinct may be ugly, but it is a trait native to our imperfect species. We shouldn’t celebrate it or festoon it with the trappings of virtue. And yet, that is precisely what the concept of “equity” does.

The salutary social effect of putting obstacles in the way of those who the Left believes have benefited unduly from nebulous historical forces is what equity activists celebrate when they are discussing the tenets of their faith with like minds. “Equality suggests, ‘Oh, everyone should get the same amount,’” said the narrator in a video shared by Kamala Harris that explained the concept of “equity.” By contrast, their philosophy ensures that “we all end up at the same place.” In the above case, equity would prescribe consigning even more homes to the blaze and spreading around the torment more broadly.

This poisonous idea has been applied by its advocates to so many aspects of society. During the pandemic, public health experts toyed with the notion of “grounding” vaccination access “in inequity,” which meant providing potentially lifesaving medical care first to American minorities, civil servants, and those without access to housing. Certainly, white people would have to suffer, even if their demographic traits put them at greater risk. “Older populations are whiter,” University of Pennsylvania ethicist Harald Schmidt mused in an interview with the New York Times. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.” Whatever social stigma might have accompanied these ghoulish fantasies was long gone by the time he allowed himself to ponder them aloud.

The same could be said for education reform. The elimination of standardized testing requirements and specialized schools for gifted students was marketed by its proponents as a way to give Hispanic and black Americans access to more opportunities. But what really jazzed progressive education reformers wasn’t the help they’d provide to the few but, rather, the prospects they’d deny to the many. A contemptuous New York Times reporting series noxiously titled “Nice White Parents” identifies the titular subjects as the source of the problem that won’t be remedied until they are brought low. Their failure to endorse “critical grammar” and their attachment to “oppressive mathematical practices” had disadvantaged minorities, so it was time for them to experience similar misfortune.

The concept has been used to justify the unconstitutional distribution of taxpayer funds to those “who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias,” a “restorative” policy that proved more enlivening to its supporters not by what it bestowed on American minorities and women than by what it deprived the majority. It led former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot to refuse to take questions from white reporters, which she (rightly) presumed would be deemed noble by social justice activists in the press corps. And whatever discomfort these gestures produced in their intended targets wasn’t regarded as collateral damage; it was the whole point of the enterprise. “We need to let them cry,” Zack Linley wrote of “white people” in the pages of the Washington Post. “And we need to learn how to just sit our intellectual selves back and enjoy it.”

There’s nothing “intellectual” about any of this. The desire to see an out-group suffer is about as atavistic as reptilian instincts get. That’s also “equity’s” sole value proposition. Because the benefits it purports to provide to the deserving never seem to materialize, the discomfort endured by those who are shut out of the process will have to do.

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Source: ‘Equity’ in Misery | National Review