The Patriot Post® · Biden's Insidious 'Equity' Agenda

Perhaps you missed last Thursday’s news dump from the Biden administration, coming as it did just before the holiday weekend. But its ramifications are far too important to ignore.

Why? Because Team Biden has surreptitiously written its equity agenda into its two signature legislative accomplishments: The American Rescue Plan Act and the unfortunately bipartisan infrastructure bill. This includes the allocation of “billions in race-based preferences for nonwhite restaurant owners, nonwhite farmers, nonwhite small businesses, and nonwhite homeowners.”

Here’s how the White House trumpeted last week’s progress on its equity agenda:

On his first day in office, President Biden signed Executive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. That historic Executive Order directed the whole of the federal government to advance an ambitious equity and racial justice agenda. Today, more than 90 federal agencies, including all Cabinet-level agencies, are releasing the first-ever Equity Action Plans that lay out more than 300 concrete strategies and commitments to address the systemic barriers in our nation’s policies and programs that hold too many underserved communities back from prosperity, dignity, and equality.

Anything to get our minds off of inflation, we suppose.

What’s interesting here is that last word, “equality.” Scan the entirety of Biden’s original day-one executive order, and you won’t see that word. That was purposeful, because the two words — equality and equity — are not synonyms. The former is a fundamentally American word, especially with respect to opportunity. The latter is a fundamentally un-American code word for redistributing wealth, especially to groups favored by the government.

“Equity,” says historian Victor Davis Hanson, “is the code for an elite professional and bureaucratic class to gain more influence, money, and power by forcing all people to be equal no matter of their circumstances or behavior.”

So, when you hear the word “equity,” don’t think “equality.” Instead, think racist and sexist and redistributionist.

Last week, for example, one of those 90 federal agencies, the Department of Education, dutifully wrote in its 19-page plan for achieving equity: “Our nation’s education system must reckon with and address the long-standing disparities that students from underserved communities face in achieving equal education opportunity. … To this end, the department intends to revise its regulations on the selection criteria used to evaluate applications submitted in a grant competition to … to assess the way in which an applicant integrates equity into its proposed project.”

Thus, if you’re vying for a lucrative federal grant toward, say, improving your school’s STEM program, you probably ought not waste your time unless you pepper the application with language about diversity, equity, inclusion, systemic racism, and restorative justice. And while you’re at it, you might want to concede that math is racist.

As for Joe Biden’s fixation with printing money, the department will increase funding to schools and colleges that serve low-income students and “significant numbers of students of color”; simplify their application process for federal student loans to avoid “intimidation”; expand funding for Pell Grants; begin collecting race, ethnicity, and gender data on financial aid application forms; and, oddly, refrain from asking questions about past drug convictions.

Of course, Biden’s equity agenda isn’t just about improving our nation’s institutions of indoctrination education. “The Justice Department is improving language access to its programs to help people with limited English proficiency better report crimes,” Fox News reports. “The Interior Department is providing technical assistance to Native American tribes to help them apply for grants. The Energy Department is helping low-income households access programs to weatherize their homes and save energy.”

So much for the unity Biden was supposed to bring. Indeed, “The entire program,” says Ryan Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, “is set to lower standards, dilute meritocracy, and have the first large-scale government-supported laws that discriminate against people based on their race since before Eisenhower was president.”

As the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s Rick Esenberg and Dan Lennington write, “Make no mistake: These programs distribute tax dollars based on race, even though our Supreme Court has continued to make clear that all racial preferences are highly disfavored and subject to the strictest of scrutiny.”

Precious few concepts are as divisive and un-American as “equity.” Fair-minded people of every color and creed should denounce it at every turn. And resist it.