Equity: A Marxist Word Game
The left uses the fear of being labeled a bigot, particularly a racist, to prevent people from questioning or challenging their agenda. They achieve this by training people to self-censor on social issues, especially those related to race, using fear. The ultimate goal is to present every anti-human leftist mission as a benevolent and necessary intervention against racism, making it psychologically difficult for those conditioned by fear to criticize or challenge destructive ideas. The price to pay otherwise could include social ostracization and the loss of employment. The left has constructed a system to punish those accused of wrongthink, and the accusation of “structural racism” is a way to maliciously label the majority of Americans as racist.
A case in point is the Marxist equity agenda, which replaces the American commitment of equal opportunity for all with the malignant “equal outcomes” of CRT. When you know the specifics, it is obvious that equality and equity are very different, even though the terms sound similar and are conveniently tossed around interchangeably by leftists. Leftists know Americans are committed to equality; it’s in our DNA. Their conflation of the two terms is deliberate—not only to confuse, but to cloak the fraudulent concept of equity from scrutiny and complaints.
Equality is a goal we should all strive to achieve. It requires that each of us be treated fairly and justly as an individual, regardless of the demographic categories into which we fall. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s fought for equality and won long-overdue victories, outlawing segregation and other ugly vestiges of racism.
The women’s movement won victories, giving women the right to vote in 1920, and later opened up careers and colleges to them. This was the beginning of an effort to expand how women viewed themselves in and out of the home. Women, like men, should be able to build lives that best suit them. Some prefer the traditional role of stay-at-home mom and homemaker, others focus on their careers, and most blend the two roles. Ultimately, the American Dream is different for everyone, but all Americans should have the same access and opportunities to pursue their uniquely personal aspirations. Outcomes, though, are up to the individual, not the collective.
The gay rights equality movement led to the legalization of consenting homosexual relations, protected gay people from discrimination on the job and elsewhere, and ultimately brought about legalized same-sex marriage. The drive for equality also succeeded in getting colleges, along with the federal and state governments, to provide more financial aid for students so that bright young people could get a higher education even if their families couldn’t afford to foot the bill. Teaching students today about the benefits of these actions to promote equality is a good thing and should be encouraged.
Equity, on the other hand, isn’t a dream; it’s a cancerous nightmare. It requires remedying past discrimination by discriminating against someone else now. Yet students are being indoctrinated in schools around the country at every age level to embrace “equity” and even our federal government is pouring money into its promotion and use.4
Don’t be fooled by the new language—it’s part of all the old and failed leftist theories that have destroyed lives and countries for centuries. We have seen this scourge of centralized planning and complete social control (requiring the annihilation of the individual) implemented by every failed communist, fascist, and other totalitarian nation. And now American leftists are arguing for it to be implemented here as they actively seed the academies, our government, and culture with this repugnant notion.
The War on Merit
No one willingly acquiesces to psychological imprisonment and severe personal limitations applied by a government. Even leftists have to couch their schemes in rhetoric appealing to fairness and freedom. The notion of the left’s equity scheme is not only unnatural at its core, but there’s only one way to truly achieve it—by artificially culling the field of high achievers who illustrate how different human beings can be.
Most of us are average people and are more than happy with our lives and accomplishments. In America, being middle class provides the best quality of life in human history. Among the many things history has shown is that not all people are the same, and our republican government and the values that inform our lifestyle of freedom expect that and are especially geared for a nation that expects and embraces the power of the individual. Some people are high achievers in their chosen fields, gaining fame for their work and lives, while others enjoy their achievements with less acclaim.
One high school in Virginia illustrates just how vile and destructive people can become when pursuing the nefarious goal of equity. In December 2022, former Wall Street Journal reporter and parent advocate Asra Nomani reported that for years, two administrators at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia (where her son was a former student), deliberately withheld notifications of National Merit Awards won by students. Why? All in the name of equity, of course.
She writes in City Journal: “For years, two administrators . . . have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of ‘equal outcomes for every student, without exception,” Nomani reported.5
Moreover, “School administrators, for instance, have implemented an ‘equitable grading policy’6 that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of ‘NTI’ for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom. An intrepid Thomas Jefferson parent, Shawna Yashar, a lawyer, uncovered the withholding of National Merit awards,” the article alleges, after she learned her son had been one of the 1,200 students whose award had been hidden from him and his family.7
Yashar’s son was tapped by the National Merit organization as a commended student, recognizing his position in the top 3 percent of students nationwide. Overall, these awards and the attendant recognition open the door to millions of dollars in college and corporate scholarships. But the honored students and their parents never knew about the award because, Nomani alleges in her exposé, school administrators decided their mission to promote the rancid goal of equity was more important.
One of the administrators involved in the shocking deception admitted it was, in fact, intentional, according to City Journal. The reasoning he claims is a perfect example of the gaslighting the left relies on in an effort to disguise the social and educational carnage they’re implementing.
“In a call with [high school parent] Yashar, [the TJ director of student services] admitted that the decision to withhold the information from parents and inform the students in a low-key way was intentional. ‘We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,’ he told her, claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to ‘hurt’ the feelings of students who didn’t get the award,” Nomani reported in City Journal.8
As the community became aware of the story, outraged parents of TJ students wrote a letter to state and county education leaders demanding that the two school officials allegedly responsible be fired.9 The local ABC affiliate 7News also reported that Virginia lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears responded via social media, stating, “This is reprehensible. I have reached out to the Governor and Attorney General and asked for an investigation. Our children’s education is not a zero-sum game. We cannot punish success in order to have ‘equal outcomes at all costs.’”10
As the firestorm intensified, Fairfax Public Schools released a statement that reads in part, “As part of our ongoing review into this matter, Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) current understanding is that the delay in notifying National Merit Scholarship commended students was a one-time human error in the fall of 2022 only. Once the issue regarding the fall 2022 notifications came to light, counselors sent emails and made follow-up calls to each college where these students had applied and informed them of the National Merit Scholarship Commendations. To suggest a deliberate intent to withhold this information would be inaccurate and contrary to the values of FCPS.”11
At first, this revelation was about one high school, but as the state’s attorney general announced an investigation into the matter, it was revealed that more than a dozen high schools withheld merit awards in the noxious name of “equity.” We have two options here—either a leprechaun magically compelled more than a dozen high schools to take the same obscene action against gifted and hardworking students, or it’s a deliberate agenda item for progressives that they discussed, planned, and implemented.
Make no mistake, the Marxist war on merit is nationwide. We have been alerted to the destructive leftist agenda in our schools mostly by accident during the last two years. Fox News reported on Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s response to the revelation of how widespread the merit award scandal really is: “Despite school systems blaming the delay in notifying students as an administrative oversight, Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said the ‘golden ticket’ was withheld from students ‘for the purpose of not wanting to make people feel bad who didn’t achieve it. All of a sudden, we see it spreading around to the rest of Fairfax County,’ Youngkin told WJLA. ‘They have a maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs.”12
Nomani was even more blunt: “Withholding the National Merit awards from children is immoral, unethical and downright cruel, if not illegal. It’s emblematic of a war on merit that has become a war on kids.”13
People are different, and the results of all of our endeavors will be different. No school can pledge the woke maxim “equal outcomes for every student, without exception” without committing first to the artificial manipulation of outcomes and the leveling-down it requires.
Some note that this is a “bizarre turn” for the woke mob. But not really. It is what the left has always done. Leftists exploit and weaponize the natural human desire for fairness and opportunity to create a system that crushes the potential of the gifted throughout society. It could be because they don’t know any better, but it has happened so many times in history that this excuse is hard to swallow. The left requires citizens with a perpetual sense of victimhood tightly controlled by a small cadre of Masters of the Universe. This can only be achieved when the people believe the best is behind them, and their survival relies on the kindness of government strangers.
The left’s agenda has always had three steps: envy, chaos, and control. I used to be on the left, and I understand the attraction to its arguments.
That attraction only lasts as long as one is naive and inexperienced. When the truth of the matter becomes apparent, the left is exposed as exploiters of well-meaning people, maintaining power by quashing the individual, implementing censorship, and criminalizing dissent.
With all we know, if anyone asks you to accept and embrace “equity,” the short answer should be no. The long answer should be: hell no.
The Woke Race to the Bottom
In the meantime, the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, published in October 2022, showed a big drop in reading and math scores among nearly 450,000 fourth and eighth graders tested around the US.
Among fourth graders, only 36 percent were proficient in math, and only 33 percent were proficient in reading. As if that weren’t alarming enough, scores were even worse among eighth graders, with a mere 26 percent proficient in math and just 31 percent proficient in reading.14 The drop in scores can’t be blamed entirely on school closures during the pandemic because test scores of reading ability also dropped from 2017 to 2019 (before the pandemic began), while math scores were relatively flat during that same period.15
An international test last administered in 2018 measuring student achievement in 78 countries also showed disappointing results for American students. The Program for International Student Assessment—administered to 600,000 fifteen-year-olds to assess their performance in math, science, and reading—ranked the US in 25th place when scores in all three areas were combined together. China had the highest ranking. A breakdown of student scores in the three areas tested showed American students ranked 13th in reading, 18th in science, and a dismal 37th in math.16, 17 Clearly, US students could be doing better. If they were subjected to less leftist indoctrination and were afforded more time on genuine education in school, it seems obvious their performance would improve.
It’s not as if we aren’t spending enough. America spends more per student than any other major developed nation, and its teachers are well ahead of international averages as well. However, in the last two decades, the number of administrators in America’s public schools has nearly doubled.18
Schools are preparing students for failure and, ultimately, seeding envy that can come from seeing others succeed. As an example, in 2021 Oregon suspended their “essential skills” requirement for high school graduation. Through 2029, students “don’t need to prove mastery of reading, writing, or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color.”19 And exactly how is it helping young people by allowing them to enter society if they are functionally illiterate? This is the ultimate abandonment of children by our system, and yet guarantees more victims for leftist organizers.
As discussed earlier, fostering envy among the people the left uses is at the core of its mission of fear and compliance. Riots, looting, arson, vandalism, and even assault, rape, and murder are acceptable tools to accomplish this mission. When hope is taken away and replaced with envy (and ultimately hate), human beings lose as Marxism and totalitarian governments thrive.
What are graduate, medical, and law schools to do as grade schools,20 high schools, and colleges turn out poorly educated students due to, in part, the focus on social justice and woke indoctrination?
They ignore that applicants have no idea how to adequately read, write, or comprehend the basic complexities of daily life. But hey, at least they know their pronouns, when they’ll need a “safe space,” and the finer points of how to cancel people who dare to not conform.
For medical students, the victim pool of this Marxist scheme encompasses not just their future patients subjected to “social justice” health care, but the students themselves, who presumably started their academic careers wanting to be healers. Instead, many will emerge from medical schools indoctrinated as social justice warriors dressed in white coats.
The lowering of academic standards to promote racial and ethnic diversity, combined with the growing amounts of class and homework time devoted to woke indoctrination in schools and colleges, is producing a generation of students less qualified to perform jobs in the real world once they leave the shelter of their far-left schools.
In 2005, fifteen years before the COVID-19 lockdown and school closures, alarm bells were already ringing about the decline of literacy among the college educated. “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy,” developed by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics, found “that the average literacy of college educated Americans declined significantly from 1992 to 2003. But it also reveals that just 25 percent of college graduates—and only 31 percent of those with at least some graduate studies—scored high enough on the tests to be deemed ‘proficient’ from a literacy standpoint, which the government defines as ‘using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential,” reported Inside Higher Education.21
Just a few months later, in 2006, another national survey, this time by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found equally alarming results22: “Twenty percent of U.S. college students completing four-year degrees—and 30 percent of students earning two-year degrees—have only basic quantitative literacy skills, meaning they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies.” Moreover, they found “more than 75 percent of students at two-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.”23
