What's Wrong with "Racial Equity"?
Recently, President Biden signed several executive orders to address what he calls "racial equity."
Biden may mean well, but I'm not sure what he means by racial equity. Racial equity is a misnomer. As a misnomer, racial equity's target is off. With an off-kilter target, Biden’s executive orders for racial equity are shortsighted and may be counterproductive in the future.
Let's look at how Laura E. Gómez, the faculty director at UCLA's Critical Race Studies Program, talks about race in her latest book, "Inventing Latinos":
We think of race categories as essential and immutable, as reflecting notions of blood, stock, ancestry, and DNA. But they are actually political categories, reflecting the power of one group (Whites) to define other groups as inferior to them, as less than fully human.
The United States is a racial state, which is to say our society is built on racial hierarchy...In a racial state, though racial categories and racism evolve, racial hierarchy persists such that Whites remain the dominant racial group.
I quoted Gómez because one of Biden's executive orders rescinds Trump's ban on critical race theory at federal agencies, and Gómez is a leading critical race theory scholar.
Biden's executive orders on racial equity suggest he doesn't understand race. His orders don't recognize race as a white hierarchy to undo. His orders normalize race and see race as "essential and immutable, as reflecting notions of blood, stock, ancestry, and DNA."
Biden's orders on racial equity seek to amend the white hierarchy rather than upend the white hierarchy. As a white hierarchy, race is inequitable, and it can only ever be inequitable. "Racial equity" tries to perform a function that it can't.
You can't have race and have racial equity unless you're talking about racial equity with whites. Irish Americans and Italian Americans have racial equity as whites. Another example would be Asians having statistical outcomes that give Asians racial equity with whites. That's racial equity in a white racist country. But neither undo the white hierarchy.
Racial equity may rearrange the white hierarchy but it maintains a top, middle, and a bottom. Racial equity is still racist, which means Biden’s executive orders are still racist. I've written elsewhere that "racial" often means racist.
In their book "Racecraft," Barbara and Karen Fields say terms like "racial equality and racial justice" are contradictions:
racial equality and racial justice are not figures of speech; they are public frauds, political acts with political consequences. Just as a half-truth is not a type of truth but a type of lie, so equality and justice, once modified by racial, become euphemisms for their opposites.
You can have a multiracial (multiracist) coalition, but you can't have a multiracial (multiracist) democracy.
You can have racial (racist) injustice, but you can’t have racial (racist) justice.
My point here isn't to be nit-picky or pedantic. But words matter. Language matters. It matters that Caucasian is a racist and inaccurate term. And Caucasian started out as a scientific term.
Did you hear that the Biden administration claims science is back? But science did not make its way to his executive orders on “racial equity” because science knows race is a political grouping for political purposes. If science guided Biden’s executive orders, he’d know there can be no such thing as “racial equity.”
During his campaign, Biden said we're in a battle for America's soul. Right or wrong, I appreciate the reference to battle. Now see what Ta-Nehisi Coates says about racial words:
"racial justice, racial quotas, racial discrimination, etc… this language is ahistorical, and it obscures the current conflict."
This conflict-obscuring language goes beyond the US.
New Zealand has a "race relations commissioner," which by its title can't be anti-hierarchical and antiracist. Properly understood, a "race relations commissioner" can only be about keeping people happy and civil.
But calling it right is not the same as doing it right.
While the US refuses to approve HR40 to form a commission to study reparations and has yet to create a "Department of Antiracism" as Ibram X. Kendi suggests, the UK has a "Race Disparity Unit" in the Cabinet Office and a "Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities."
A "Race Disparity Unit" at the cabinet level and a "Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities" sound accurate and justice orientated. But people who don't believe in racism lead those efforts in the UK. What good is that? That's no good.
Just as people who deny climate change can lead the Environmental Protection Agency, so can people who deny racism lead the Race Disparity Unit and a Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.
We need people to say it right and do it right.
Conflict-hiding language, like racial equity, doesn't help and isn't a step forward. Conflict-blurring terms are how you get executive orders with words like "underserved." Look at what Bree Newsome tweeted about "underserved":
The conflict is with white identity.
Richard Spencer wasn't wrong when he said, "Alt-right is all about identity...And Donald Trump's movement, whether Trump strategist Kellyanne Conway wants to admit it or not, was fundamentally about identity for white people."
White identity got us here; white identity keeps us here, and white identity must go from here. One takeaway I have from Ashley Jardina's "White Identity Politics" is that white identity all by itself, even just as in-group favoritism and solidarity, is consequential and bad for the country.
In "The Machinery of Whiteness," Steve Martinot says:
racism is only symptomatically a problem of discrimination. Addressing the appearance of discrimination does not address the source of its continual reemergence.
Instead, it is an identity problem. As such, it must be addressed through an identity paradigm rather than through experiential data, which points only to where the structures of racialization have required an identity performance.
Notice that Martinot says we must address racism through an identity paradigm rather than through experiential data. But the politicians say, “Not so fast.”
Politicians claim they need more data, and Biden's executive orders are no exception. But if you have whites in a society, if whiteness exists, you have subjugation and racism. That's all the data one needs.
Pierre van den Berghe said, "The existence of races in a given society presupposes the presence of racism, for without racism physical characteristics are devoid of social significance."
White identity negates people who aren't white, and we end that negation by ending white identity. Biden's racial equity doesn't understand that "Whiteness necessitates black subjugation," as Tressie McMillan Cottom says. If the goal is to end subjugation, end whiteness.
In the book "White by Law," Ian Haney López makes it clear:
Whiteness exists as the linchpin for the systems of racial meaning in the United States. Whiteness is the norm around which other races are constructed; its existence depends upon the mythologies and material inequalities that sustain the current racial system.
The maintenance of Whiteness necessitates the conceptual existence of Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other races as tropes of inferiority against which Whiteness can be measured and valued. Its continuation also requires the preservation of the social inequalities that every day testify to White superiority. Racial equality may well be impossible until Whiteness is disarmed.
Unfortunately, Haney López also uses the term racial equality. But he’s right that racial equality is impossible, and he’s right that whiteness is the key to disarm.
His point that whiteness requires the preservation of social inequalities for white superiority and necessitates other races' conceptual existence as tropes of inferiority matches McMillan Cottom's insight that "Whiteness necessitates black subjugation."
Biden’s executive order on racial equity don’t address those realities.
And based on Haney López's point, we could think that ending social inequalities will end whiteness. That may be the case. But won't white identity block the goal? Whiteness will not go willingly.
I'm not sure it's possible to end social inequalities without specifically seeking to end white identity.
That could be why Joel Olson said: "whiteness stands at the path to a more democratic society like a troll at the bridge. The political task, I have argued, is to chase the troll away, not to ignore it or invite it to the multicultural table."
Biden should've attacked the troll directly. Why didn't Biden name or describe his executive orders as antiracist? Why wasn't he specific about white oppression? The world needs counter-white identity measures.
That’s why I wish white politicians would stop trying "to help" Black people and people of color. Instead, they should stop white identity. Politicians should institute holistic reparations and overhaul every racist system - to end white identity. If not, white identity will continue to benefit and dominate because white identity will change rather than die.
Someone reading this may have expected me to suggest something plausible for Biden to do. I know it's inconceivable that Biden would stand up and announce counter-white measures. But it's not my job to offer what's acceptable and plausible.
I share what's necessary. And the next time someone pretends like they don't know why society hasn't changed enough, remember these words. Racial equity will never go far enough.
Racial equity is like providing a "path to citizenship" without questioning citizenship and undocumentedness. Racial equity is like prison reform. It is not abolition. It's not freedom.
And that's what's wrong with racial equity.