The Folly of Equity
“Equity” has replaced “equality” as the latest buzzword in America’s never-ending game of Victimology, which in turn has replaced the board game of Monopoly in popularity.
As Vice President Kamala Harris has said, “Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.” In other words, equity means equal outcomes, not equality under the law or equality of opportunity.
When I first saw a photo of Harris, I thought she looked Italian, given her swarthy complexion, dark hair and prominent nose. But, looks aside, her Jamaican father and East Indian mother were nothing like my Italian parents and grandparents, at least in terms of accomplishments and social standing.
Her dad was a tenured professor at Stanford, and her mom had a PhD in endocrinology and nutrition. My dad was a non-union tile setter, and my mom, a clerk. My dad’s dad was an immigrant coal miner in southern Illinois before moving to St. Louis to work in low-wage jobs. My mom, who was orphaned as an infant, was raised by her immigrant aunt and uncle in a tiny four-flat on a waiter’s pay. They never owned a car.
My ancestors didn’t play Victimology. I never heard them express racial or class resentment towards upper-income White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who dominated the professions and the top levels of government and industry. Nor did they ever complain about the ugly stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination faced by Italians and other Southern Europeans for the first half of the twentieth century. Fortunately, my grandparents made it to America before the Immigration Act of 1924 closed the immigration gates to people like them—people who were seen as inferior and non-white.
I took the example of my forebears with me to my first formal job, where I started working at the age of fifteen as the only non-black on an otherwise all-black staff of porters, janitors, cooks, and waiters at an exclusive country club, where membership was closed to blacks, Jews and Italians. On my first day, my boss, a black man named Jewell, told me to clean the disgustingly filthy employee restroom in the dark, dingy basement of the clubhouse. For extra money on my off-hours, I would wash and wax the big Pontiacs and Buicks of the black waiters, all of whom had learned their trade, manners, and impeccable dress and grooming as waiters on Pullman trains. They were at the top of the employee pecking order, and Henry, the head waiter, was on top of them.
That experience probably led me to being at the leading edge of equal rights, equal opportunity, and affirmative action over my corporate career, culminating in the diversity movement, which was born in 1990 from the landmark Harvard Business Review article by R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr, “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity.” My work in this regard included the conducting of racial sensitivity training to address unconscious biases.
Now, self-righteous Americans who haven’t done a damn thing but virtue signal about race or play Victimology have typecast ethnics like me as white, privileged and racist, thus revealing their profound ignorance of the full racial/ethnic history of their country. At the same time, they espouse the Marxist notion of equal outcomes, which proved to be a fantasy under communism and is total folly in a liberal, capitalist democracy, where citizens continually change places on the socioeconomic ladder, as demonstrated by Kamala Harris and her parents.
The levelers have a lot of work to do. This commentary ends with the list below of 107 selected racial/ethnic groups in the US ranked by their median household income, which ranges from $126,705 for East Indians to $45,903 for Burmese. (Income doesn’t include the considerable amount of transfer payments and tax credits that go to lower-income Americans.)
There are many more unique ethno-cultural groups in the US than those on the list. How do the levelers propose making the rankings more equitable? Do they even track all of these groups and know how many are corporate executives, members of boards of directors, members of Congress, students in the Ivy League, doctors, lawyers, or other professionals? Do diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives include all of these groups or exclude many of them? Which ones are included and excluded?
The levelers won’t answer such questions because they know that the game of Victimology is rigged.
Rank Ethnicity
1 East Indian
2 Taiwanese
3 Australian
4 Filipino
5 South African
6 Basque
7 Indonesian
8 Latvian
9 Macedonian
10 Pakistani
11 Iranian
12 Lebanese
13 Austrian
14 Russian
15 Lithuanian
16 Chinese
17 Japanese
18 Turkish
19 Swiss
20 Slovene
21 Italian
22 Greek
23 Israeli
24 Romanian
25 Ukrainian
26 Serbian
27 Croatian
28 Bulgarian
29 Slovak
30 Swedish
31 Czech
32 Norwegian
33 Scottish
34 Polish
35 Danish
36 Portuguese
37 Belgian
38 English
39 Welsh
40 Hungarian
41 Finnish
42 Armenian
43 Korean
44 Canadian
45 Irish
46 French Canadian
47 Argentine
48 German
49 Chilean
50 Syrian
51 Hmong
52 Scotch-Irish
53 Guamanian
54 Bolivian
55 Vietnamese
56 Albanian
57 Cambodian
58 Spanish
59 French
60 Panamanian
61 Dutch
62 Ghanaian
63 Nigerian
64 Cajun
65 Bangladeshi
66 Guyanese
67 Samoan
68 Egyptian
69 Palestinian
70 Ecuadorian
71 Colombian
72 Peruvian
73 Thai
74 Laotian
75 Polynesian
76 Barbadian
77 Brazilian
78 Nepalese
79 Costa Rican
80 Belizean
81 Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac
82 Nicaraguan
83 Micronesian
84 Native Hawaiian
85 Trinidadian and Tobagonian
86 Jamaican
87 Uruguayan
88 Jordanian
89 West Indian
90 Salvadoran
91 American
92 Haitian
93 Pennsylvania Dutch
94 Cuban
95 Mexican
96 Cape Verdean
97 Venezuelan
98 Ethiopian
99 Puerto Rican
100 Moroccan
101 Appalachian
102 Guatemalan
103 Iraqi
104 Honduran
105 Dominican
106 Afghan
107 Burmese
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
