Rescuing American History: Essay Reviews (2)

In this blog posting, we continue (from the September 6, 2021 posting) a review of some essays on the topic of American-history education in the U.S.  These essays were recently published in the book “Red, White, and Black,” which includes critiques of the revisionist history published as the “1619 Project” by the New York Times.  The editor of “Red, White, and Black” is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.  Bibliographic data is included in Essay Reviews (1) appearing as the September 6, 2021 blog posting.  (There was a typographical error in that 9/6/21 posting: The correct name is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.)  Today’s blog posting will review two of the essays in “Red, White, and Black.”   

The essay appearing on pages 37 – 42 in Woodson’s book is titled “Slavery Does Not Define the Black American Experience.”  Its author, Wilfred Reilly, is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University.  (A different essay by Reilly was reviewed in the 9/6/21 blog post.)  No one denies, writes Reilly, “that the ‘land of the free’ once used captives from other societies almost as cattle,” in a slaving system that ranged from Latin America to the Muslim states of the Middle East.  A balanced view of history, in Reilly’s opinion, requires the recognition that the primary factor in the building of the U.S. economy was not slavery; indeed, the South was considered to be a feudal backwater conquered by the Union army.  In 1860, the South had 25% of the U.S. population but only 10% of its capital and 10% of its skilled-trades workers.  Moreover, Reilly quotes the economist Thomas Sowell as saying that “the prevalence of slavery in the antebellum South resulted in a mocking and disparaging attitude towards hard work that continues to plague both ‘white trash’ and inner-city black communities today.”

In 1619, Reilly estimates that there were 210 English-speaking settlers on the North American continent.  It is not clear whether the 20 Africans held by the English-speaking settlers were slaves or indentured servants; or whether the 20 Africans (upon learning English) were in addition to, or a subset of, the population of 210.  Riley cites the following statistics: By the time of the first U.S. Census in 1790, there were, in round numbers, about 4 million Americans including 0.8 million people of African descent.  By the 1790’s, 10 states and territories were slave-free.  Civil War deaths numbered about 360,000 for the Union Army and 258,000 for the Confederate Army.  There were about 9 or 10 slaves freed for each Union Army death.  In 1865, slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  

A critically important consideration for Reilly is that some contemporary problems that are commonly attributed to “the legacy of slavery” have only appeared in the last few decades, long after the conclusion of the Civil War.  Chief among those problems is that the black illegitimacy rate is about 75% today; whereas some data from 1925 New York City shows that all but 15% of black households were then headed by two parents.  Empirically, Reilly finds that contemporary factors such as pay-per-child welfare and under-policing of black neighborhoods seem to be responsible for contemporary problems in black communities.  Reilly agrees with the 1619 Project contributors that slavery was horrible.  However, slavery was the world-wide norm until Western societies began to fight it.  Slavery prospered only in the poorest region of the U.S., and more than 600,000 lives were lost during liberation.  While there are contemporary problems in American minority communities, Reilly observes that “ironically, more than a few of them seem to be the result of ‘compassionate’ liberal social welfare policies implemented during just the past few decades.”

The essay appearing on pages 23 – 36 in “Red, White, and Black” is titled “We Cannot Allow ‘1619’ to Dumb Down America in the Name of a Crusade.”  Its author, John McWhorter, is an associate professor of English at Columbia University.  McWhorter finds the 1619 Project to be an exercise in historical misinterpretation.  Being honest about the performance of American Presidents should also include the “Hester Prynne factor”: No matter what the background of a person is - - as revealed by a scarlet letter or by some latter-day equivalent - - that person can be kind and virtuous at the present moment.  It is inappropriate to think of slavery as overwhelming all other factors in a complex world.  Overemphasizing scarlet letters of whatever type calls for the dumbing down of history in the name of a moral crusade.  The gradual abolition of slavery was itself a miracle, facilitated by Jefferson’s signature on some legislation of 1808 banning the foreign slave trade in the United States.  The year 1808 was the earliest date permitted by the Constitution for such legislation.

McWhorter notes that it makes no more sense to think of American history as being comprehensively captured in an orbit about slavery than it would be to think of that history as being exclusively explained by a feminist critique of the fate of colonial white women.  One notes in passing that a historical analysis based on colonial white women would presumably require a “1587 Project” commemorating Virginia Dare, the first white indigenous female in the Roanoke Colony.

The purveyors of the 1619 Project ask us to believe that the existence and ill-treatment of slaves negates all the other characteristics of the colonial and revolutionary-war ruling class.  But McWhorter says that “a smart ten-year-old could see through the willful cluelessness on which this supposedly enlightened conception of social history is based.  Who seriously condemns persons of the past for being unable to see beyond the confines of their own time?”  The 1619 Project’s view of history is familiar from Marxist ideology; and although it makes for bad history, it may be serviceable for use in extracting reparations for favored groups at some time in the future.

McWhorter finds that the 1619 Project also serves as an explanation for disparities between black and white achievement.  In his view, such an explanation is problematic: For example, there were plenty of black students with sky-high IQs in the Chicago of the 1930’s; but by 2020 “we would not find that kind of IQ performance among those very students’ great grandchildren.”  The reader is left to infer the passage from 1930 to 2020 was adversely affected by the 1960’s and its Great Society.  

Regarding the 1619 Project, McWhorter notes two peculiarities that detract from the idea of its being a reliable historical guide: First, “countless human groups have succeeded amidst dismissive attitudes … [but] for some reason, in the late 20th century in the United States … one particular oppressed class, the descendants of African slaves, could only fitfully succeed once the ruling class underwent a profound transformation … down all the way to its basal, pre-cortical impulses.”  Second, for many people, “questioning the 1619 Project elicits irritation, of a kind that suggests personal insult rather than difference of opinion.  This is because the 1619 Project is indeed all about personality, a certain persona that smart black people are encouraged to adopt as a modern version of being a civil rights warrior.”

Social Justice and the Notion of “Race off the Table”

Plato thought that justice in a society implies a harmonious functioning of all the members of that society under a philosopher-king, whereas justice in an individual implies a harmonious functioning of all aspects of the individual’s personality under reason.  Justice implies receiving one’s due, which can refer to distributive sharing of economic rewards, or retributive assignment of punishments.  A zeroth-order definition of social justice is the equality of opportunity for individuals who are working in order to obtain economic benefits and prestige in a meritocratic system.  In stark opposition to that definition is the Marxist credo, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”  In this essay, we will assume the equality-of-opportunity approach to social justice.  Whenever race is held to be irrelevant, as a matter of public policy, to the process of obtaining economic or societal benefits, then we say that “race is off the table” (not a factor that is or should be taken into consideration).  “Race being off the table” is consistent with Martin Luther King’s principle of judging individuals by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

The main problem in social-justice theory considered as equality of opportunity is the accounting for the effects of an individual’s previous family history on his or her opportunity to achieve adequate economic and societal outcomes.  

The philosopher John Rawls sought a way to institute “Justice is Fairness,” which is the title of the first chapter in his book, “A Theory of Justice.”  Rawls wanted social contract theory on a higher level of abstraction that would connect to a theory of rational choice.  One of his basic principles was that inequalities of wealth and authority are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone.  A Rawlsian government is capable of trading off subsidies to the least advantaged and confiscation of wealth from the most advantaged in order to leave society as a whole better off.  Outright confiscation of all property would presumably be harmful to future economic survival, but who knows where a particular legislative body at a particular time will set the ever-changing limit on confiscation of wealth.  Indeed, if it is true - - as a celebrated politician once said while critiquing the entrepreneurial class - - that “You [the entrepreneur] didn’t build that!”; then the way seems to be open for a practically unlimited confiscation of individuals’ wealth, whether annually or at death.  On the other hand, although there may be a role for some level of government transfer payments, there is an alternative to an exclusive emphasis on “subsidies to the least advantaged,” as seen in the life and work of Robert L. Woodson, Sr.

On page A13 of the print edition of the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 16-17, 2021) there is an interview of Robert L. Woodson, Sr. by Jason Willick.  (There was a typographical error in the blog of September 6, 2021: The correct name is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.  The name was cited correctly in the blog of October 1, 2020.)

At 84, Robert L. Woodson, Sr. is preparing to retire from a career of promoting social justice.  After years of social work that included the foundation of the Woodson Center and a participation in the reform of Washington’s Kenilworth-Parkside public housing project, Woodson helped to influence President Reagan to sign a 1988 reform of federal public-housing laws that emphasized tenant management.  At Kenilworth-Parkside, tenant management was successful in ousting oppressive drug dealers and in sending 600 kids to college over the course of 12 to 15 years. 

Woodson grew up in Philadelphia and was distressed by the segregation that he saw when a military assignment sent him to the Deep South.  He earned math and social work degrees before leading protests against segregation in West Chester, Pennsylvania in the 1960’s and founding the Woodson Center in 1981.  The Woodson Center’s objective has been to reinvigorate indigenous civil society in impoverished neighborhoods and to respond to problems of crime, addiction, and family breakdown.  Ultimately, Mr. Woodson wants to “deracialize race” by making it an incidental category in social-improvement projects.

The Woodson Center’s most recent project has been “1776 Unites,” which opposes leftist educational programs and offers an educational curriculum that has been downloaded 21,000 times.  The leading theme of “1776 Unites” is that the nation’s history of racial oppression should be not merely a source of moral accusation, but a celebration of black Americans’ resilience in the face of oppression.  The curriculum stands in “unqualified opposition to any curricula that depict America as irredeemably racist … or fail to provide examples from history of black achievement against the odds.”  Clearly, Woodson’s vision of social justice is one of equality of opportunity for individuals who are encouraged by mentors to overcome problems in family history.  Mentored individuals work to achieve economic benefits and social prestige in a meritocratic system.  Individual achievement occurs without government intervention to create equality of outcome.

Mr. Woodson believes that some progressives’ campaigns to achieve diversity at elite schools via the elimination of standardized tests is a modern-day form of lethal bigotry.  Woodson’s hope is that America can get “race off the table, so we can deal with the moral and spiritual free fall that is consuming all races of people.” 

Structural Racism, Identity Politics, and Re-tribalization

For those interested in the flourishing of the United States in a historically recognizable form, despite adverse criticisms under the headings of “structural racism” and “identity politics”; and despite an implied imperative for a “re-tribalization of society”; a single page from the Opinions section of a recent day’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, September 7, 2021) is of considerable interest. 

William McGurn remarks in his article, The Real Structural Racism, that if ever there were a structure impairing the success of African-American students, then it would be the public schools in major cities of the U.S.  In the most recent results (2019) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress for 27 U.S. urban school districts - - from Boston to Los Angeles - - none of these school districts can say that a majority of its black eighth graders are proficient in either math or reading.  Detroit’s results are worst of all, showing a 4% proficiency in math and a 5% proficiency in reading.  The highest proficiency in math (24%) was achieved in Charlotte, while the highest proficiency in reading (20%) was achieved in Boston.  Meanwhile, the most richly supported public schools spent from $16,543 per student (Seattle) to $28,004 per student (New York City).

There is no mention of cinematography in McGurn’s article, but we note in passing that a recent popular film, Hidden Figures, chronicled a very talented trio of high-achieving black female workers in the highly technical NASA programs (“Space Race”) of the 1960’s.  (The filmmaker took some liberties with historical facts, but those liberties seem not to invalidate the focus of the film.)  This trio of technical workers was doubly blessed, being not only talented but also coming from solid family backgrounds.  Seeing the universal in the particular, as we are wont to do whenever appropriate, there is no good reason not to expect high scores in math and reading among contemporary black eighth graders who live in solid family backgrounds conducive to the completion of homework.

McGurn notes that some progressives, embarrassed by the meager educational results for black eighth graders, have shifted their focus to getting rid of the achievement tests that expose this failure.  Once free of irksome tests for eighth and twelfth graders, it is proposed that future reliance on race-based college admissions can disguise academic deficiencies.  As various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, consider suits stemming from race-based college admissions, McGurn suggests that the key question to consider is: Do school failures at the eighth (and subsequent) grade levels justify rigging college admissions to exclude some high-achieving students in favor of other applicants whose acceptance, due to “social-promotion,” will devalue college degrees?

By “identity politics,” the current reviewer understands any process that privileges or penalizes certain individuals in society on some basis other than objective merit, including the property rights that express the wills of meritorious individuals.  Non-meritocratic factors include ethnicity, race, culture, religion, and language.  Any full-scale program of identity politics includes the destruction of the notion of objective merit, leaving one to wonder whether an identity-politics enthusiast would really prefer that the pilot of his next flight be chosen from an ethnic lottery rather than from a pool of competent and tested individuals.

Discussions of identity politics often employ, confusingly, the problematic terms “tribe” and “tribalism.”  A tribe in the ancient Roman Republic (509 to 27 B.C.) was one of the 35 geographically-determined voting blocs of the Roman plebeians in their Council of the Plebs.  However, the plebs defined themselves in opposition to the patricians.  If “identity politics” is to be read into the ancient Roman world, then this reading would seem to be based upon the struggle between plebs and patricians; and not upon any difficulties between tribes, all of whom were plebeian.  Nevertheless, we will take “tribe” to refer to be any grouping of people according to ethnicity, race, culture, language, or religion.

The entire project of reading “identity politics” back into ancient Roman history is problematic: When the armies of Rome first confronted Germanic tribes in the Cimbrian War (113-101 B.C.), the Romans certainly disdained what they saw as the Germans’ inferior culture, religion, and language.  But the (relatively brown) Romans did not disdain the (relatively white) Germans based on skin color; because, as the classical philologist V. D. Hanson has written in his article, Classical patricide, “Whiteness itself was a concept completely unknown to the Greeks and Romans. No such word exists in the classical vocabularies of the ancient world, the supposed font of endemic Western racism.”

In his article, Identity Politics Goes Global, Walter Russell Mead surveys some political trends of the past century or so that reveal identity politics to be destructive in the sense of reducing a nation’s domestic prosperity and stability, as well as its international influence and security.  

Mead notes that many modern African nations inherited geographical boundaries from colonial times, irrespective of historical tribal boundaries.  The post-World War II presupposition among professional diplomats was that tribalism was primitive, atavistic, and ethically tacky.  Modern diplomacy then assumed that any tribe member assigned to a certain, modern-day nation would automatically be pleased to vote alongside the members of all other tribes within that nation.  Hence, there was a wide-spread expectation that tribalism would wane even while allegiance to the rulers within newly defined national boundaries would flourish.  

In defiance of the expectation for the straightforward development of African nations, some of those new nations broke up due to cultural, religious, and language factors.  The citizens of some failed states saw no good reason to be co-governed by members of cultural, religious, and language groupings other than their own.  In Nigeria, the central government has not been able to suppress Christian-Muslim conflict that has led to tens of thousands of deaths.  In South Africa, Zulus have staged a recent insurrection (or at least a quasi-insurrection) in support of a former national leader.  Similar conflicts have arisen in the regions near Ethiopia and Sudan.  Sudan spun off South Sudan in 2011; South Sudan may further split.  English-speakers and French-speakers are battling each other in Cameroon.  Economic development has not overcome tribal differences in these cases.

Mead sees other historical examples of identity politics as well: In Eastern and Central Europe before World War I, increasing education and self-awareness led to nationalistic aspirations among groups within the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires. The assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist precipitated World War I.  Today, fierce fighting exists within such countries as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon; and this fighting can be viewed as the result of identity politics.

Mead likewise observes that “many Americans wonder whether a common U.S. identity is strong enough to contain the forces that threaten to splinter the country permanently into hostile racial, religious, and ideological camps.”

The current reviewer observes that “civic religion” and economic development in the U.S. helped to create a melting pot of people who agreed to pursue economic interests; to promote abstract notions of international justice; and to ignore traditionally contentious issues in the realms of culture, religion, and language.  Thus, the U.S. is the unique, centuries-long experiment of creating and maintaining a non-tribal society based on merit.  The current effect of identity politics is to reverse the melting-pot process, to drive wedges between ethnic groups, to override evaluations based on merit, to instill doubt about the results of one’s next airplane trip or surgical procedure, and to re-tribalize society under new bureaucratic leadership.

Rescuing American History: Essay Reviews (1)

On the occasion of Labor Day, 2021 and of the recent start of a new school year - - to the extent that a school year is possible in the pandemic era - - this blog post will review the first three essays in a recent book (2021) about American-history education in the U.S.  The book under examination is titled “Red, White, and Black” and subtitled “Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers.”  The editor of this volume is Robert L. Woodson, Jr.; the publisher is Emancipation Books (An Imprint of Post Hill Press); and the ISBN number is 978-1-63758-261-9.  

The Woodson book’s Dedication page recognizes that there are countless millions of patriots seeking to live in peace “at a time when many are trying to pull us apart by stoking grievances and sowing discord.”  The essayists in this volume believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans remain devoted to our founding principles - - or at least would be so devoted if the educational system did its job without recourse to the latest recycled theories of class struggle.  Rising to the current historic occasion, the essayists have done their duty in opposing these theories.  The essayists have elaborated upon Woodson’s “1776 Unites” project.  “1776 Unites” was launched in order to counteract a diametrically opposed project - - as advertised by a certain notorious, de facto Marxist newspaper - - in which the dating of U.S. history is based on the year that the first slaves arrived in North America, in preference to other, notably favorable years, such as the years in which the slaves were emancipated or in which voting rights were established.

The forward to the Woodson book states that “these essays in Red, White, and Black brim with the agency, initiative, and aspiration of ordinary black Americans, telling stories that inspire precisely because they illustrate the success within any American’s reach, if only he or she believes.”

The introduction to the Woodson book mentions a contemporary American historian who maintains that “what America is confronting today, with the dominance of race grievance and identity politics, has had, since its inception, an even more sinister purpose: to maintain the power of the landlord merchant class.”  Here, we might take issue with this historian’s opinion that the class involved with “race grievance and identity politics” is that of “landlords and merchants” - - it is just these classes, after all, that lack political power and that have done poorly in the time of pandemic-induced free rent and cratering businesses.  Instead, the present writer would say that the maintenance of power has occurred in the class of the wealthy, who are accustomed to running government, issuing decrees, and escaping ill-effects of said decrees while ensconced in gated communities.

Essay (1), appearing on pages 3 – 10, is titled “A Positive Vision: The Agenda of ‘1776’.”  The author, Wilfred Reilly, subscribes to the view that a country does not need to be utopian in order to be good: “The U.S. is a flawed but very good country, where it is not terribly hard to succeed, given hard work and personal responsibility.”  Reilly’s theses are that the claim that the contemporary U.S. is “systemically racist” is false; that many primary social problems are completely disconnected from historical racial conflict; that some individuals are not responsible for the sins of others in some group that includes both; and that basic skills training in schools would do more for minorities and working-poor whites than any amount of training in the recitation of grievance theory.  

In support of the first of Reilly’s theses, the present writer would mention that Jackie Robinson faced obvious racism; that such racism is now absent to the extent possible in a non-utopia; and that relabeling absent racism as “systemic racism” is a rhetorical flourish that one would expect in a Marxist diatribe.  There is no doubt that the contemporary U.S. is not “systemically racist.”

In support of the second of Reilly’s theses, that many primary social ills are disconnected from historical racial conflict, one need only cite the problems ensuing from the breakdown of families (i.e., the problems stemming from the increase in illegitimacy) across all racial groups in the contemporary U.S.  In 2010, illegitimacy stood at 28.6% for non-Hispanic whites, 52.5% for Hispanics, and 72.3% for blacks.  (These are Reilly’s cited statistics.)

In support of the third of Reilly’s theses, that some individuals are not responsible for the sins of others in the same group, Reilly offers the observation that “a Caucasian individual whose ancestors were serfs in Sicily or Russia in 1864 [has] nothing to do with the peculiar institution [slavery].”  The notion that someone is condemned today because his or her great-great-grandparents did not fight hard enough against slavery centuries ago is itself morally repugnant.  Reilly notes that poor whites, the so-called deplorables so denigrated during the 2016 Presidential campaign, are the most downtrodden segment of society, because affirmative-action programs are not available to them.

In support of the fourth of Reilly’s theses, that basic skills training in schools would do more for the working poor than any amount of rhetorical training in grievance theory, one need only mention that “calling [for] ‘bourgeois norms,’ as charter schools often do, will do far more to move working-poor Americans toward success than will teaching them … the Swahili word for ‘racism’.”

Essay (2), appearing on pages 11 – 15, is titled “The Moral Meaning of America: Two Parallel Narratives.”  The author, Jason D. Hill, states that Americans are the first non-tribal people in the world.  (The two parallel narratives in the essay title seem to refer to people who are either tribal [non-U.S.] or non-tribal [U.S.].)  “By making foreigners and strangers into Americans, the republic has made them citizens of the world by undermining and de-ratifying the spirit of seriousness grafted onto lineage and blood identity.”  Furthermore, “America encourages human beings not to search for their origins, but, rather, their destiny.”  One notes in passing that the existence of the website, genealogy.com, seems to belie this assertion.  One also wonders why a certain ambiguity in the concept of America is not more widely noted: Does the land of non-tribalism itself require borders and immigration rules for its very existence?

Essay (3), appearing on pages 17 – 22, is titled “Acknowledging Slavery’s Limits in Defining America.”  The author, John Wood, Jr., reminds us that then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama said that “words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage … [or to grant them] their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.”  But to overemphasize the effects of slavery and historical racism is to overlook the success that black Americans have achieved in their culture.  “The relative deterioration [of that success] in the aftermath of the Great Society is arguably the most salient threat facing black America.”  Moreover, overemphasizing the lingering effects of slavery in the U.S. fails to account for the fact that ethnically similar people have succeeded at wildly different rates in the U.S.  (Wood cites a study by Coleman Hughes of the educational and economic outcomes for immigrants from the West Indies and for native-born black Americans.)  Wood concludes that what we choose to emphasize in our history will determine how we relate to our country.

Equity, Equality, and the U.S. Declaration of Independence

Section 1 of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason and adopted by the Fifth Virginia Convention on June 12, 1776, states “that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

The Preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, states that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Jefferson never claimed originality for his Declaration, maintaining instead that it was merely a faithful rendition of the Colonial Zeitgeist and its interpretation of other sources such as Mason and Locke.  

Both Mason and Jefferson referred to all men as being either “by nature equally free and independent” or “created equal … [and] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  However, Mason’s five-fold reference to life, liberty, property, happiness, and safety was boiled down by Jefferson into a three-fold reference to life, liberty, and happiness; consistent with property being subsumed under liberty, and safety under happiness.  After all, Jefferson was an author who took scissors to the Bible in order to pare it down to what he considered its most essential features; and in his Declaration he made up for a truncation of the number of ideas with an enhanced capitalization of words.

For the Founders, being by nature equally free and independent - - or being created equal with inalienable rights - - included being free of arbitrary legislative procedures like taxation without representation or bills of attainder.  Being Englishmen, they insisted on equal status before the law, which is to say, an equality of procedure or opportunity to receive a fair hearing in a stable legal environment. 

In contrast, the legal notion of equity has had a long and checkered career as the antithesis to equality and as a parasite on lawful procedures.  Beginning with the English Court of Chancery in the Middle Ages, there occurred the idea that the King’s Law (or “Conscience”) could trump local courts of law.  This might have been acceptable if it had been limited to technical issues such as in the following cases: Creditors appeal to a bankruptcy court as a court of equity.  A second example pertains to an equal-stock company in which one member did most of the work, incurred an unusual debt, and requested a larger-than-equal pay-out from the enterprise.  

The idea of equity as the King’s Conscience always had the potential to degenerate into an enforcement of “whatever the judge says,” while ignoring the actual law.  Nevertheless, there evolved a dual track system consisting of courts of law, which adjudicated legislative statutes; and of courts of equity, which adjudicated “fairness” - - or whatever the judge thought was fair.  (Later, the judgment might become whatever John Rawls thought was fair.)  Hence, the notion of a court of equity, dating back many centuries, entailed creating a parallel court system, generating complexity and obfuscation, circumventing law (especially property rights), and distributing economic goods in accordance with the preferences of powerful elites.

One notes in passing that the term, equity, has a different meaning in business contexts, viz., the ownership of assets that have labilities attached to them (the securities traded in the stock market).  One is owed some fluctuating amount of cash by virtue of owning such securities, provided that someone wants to make a market in those securities.  Hence, equity markets are somewhat reminiscent of equity courts in awarding some value that is due: Equity values in the stock market are objective in the sense of being the highest bids, whereas equity values determined by a court of equity are essentially subjective.

The meaning of equity most in vogue today is the distribution of economic goods in accordance with the racial preferences of intellectual elites.  Christopher Caldwell, writing in the May 17, 2021 National Review, mentions three female mayors who were recently recognized for administrative acumen by the MIT business school.  These mayors were praised as purveyors of equity, despite presiding over cities with appalling homicide rates and other social pathologies.  Caldwell finds that the perceived paramount importance of equity derives from an assumed absolute (categorical) imperative to eliminate all collective racial inequalities, to abandon equality of opportunity, and to adopt equality of result.  Although Caldwell does not so conclude, it would seem that enforcing collective racial equality over time would require all racial groups to experience alternating eras of subjection and preference that would “average out” in the long run.

In today’s conception of equity as delineated by Caldwell, first, all inequality across identifiable groups is proof of white racism.  Second, equity is race-conscious rather than race-blind.  Third, civil-rights law overrides the U.S. Constitution.  Caldwell does not state the seemingly obvious rejoinder that “the new anti-racism is the old racism.”  Indeed, some white Wisconsin farmers recently won a court case in which they objected to agricultural debt relief being parceled out on a racial basis.  The judge in that case made two points: The obvious solution to old racism is to disallow any new racism, not to embrace even more racism.  Furthermore, “the Biden administration is radically undermining bedrock principles of equality under the law.”  In other words, equity, as construed by the Biden administration in this case, violates equality.

Caldwell maintains that the Biden administration is now radically redefining the American idea of fairness.  Equity and fairness are said to derive from so-called critical race theory, but as we have noted above, this is not true.  Courts of equity have been around since King Henry III in England; but critical race theory has only been around since 1989, when Marxists - - thwarted by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of international socialism - - substituted “race struggle” for “class struggle” and continued their long march through the institutions.  From another perspective, Caldwell notes that contemporary critical race theorists, having found that equity as “race-blindness” is not achieving their desired results, now propose that equity as “race-consciousness” is the sine qua non for the formation of social policy.

Many people may assume, Caldwell writes, that the Civil Rights Act still functions in order to fight discrimination; whereas what passes for civil rights today has moved on to equity ideology, especially among large corporations.  There is much money to be made in giving corporate seminars like “A Ten-Step Plan to Embed Race Equity in Your Organization.”  Any employee dissenters from equity theory are likely to be treated as deviants from a Maoist self-criticism session.  

“The most troubling innovation of equity is its tendency to move in a direction that will, in time, reintroduce segregationist thinking,” as when Illinois U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth announced that she will vote to block the confirmation of all white nominees brought before the Senate.  Caldwell concludes that “perhaps equity is best thought of as diversity or affirmative action taken to its logical conclusion.”