Equity is different from equality because it gives more to those who have less access. For example, an apple tree is higher on one side than the other, so the person with the higher side gets a bigger ladder to reach the apples. Equality would give both people the same size ladder, which means, obviously, that the one on the higher side would still come short. When I was trying to go to college, I got more aid because my family was poor, and I had siblings heading to college soon after me. Equity makes up for disadvantages.
Many Americans are assisted in this way and many Americans argue against it. They tell the first group to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which is fine – unless you have no boots. Equity helps those without boots to get them; then they can make their way. I can understand opposing equity if it makes lazy people rich, but that isn’t how welfare works. Nobody on welfare is eating Filet Mignon every night and driving a Mercedes. The vast majority of the people our church helps are the working poor who just can’t make ends meet.
The Jewish practice of Jubilee was a structural way for equity to be made real. The problem was that you had to be alive for 49 years for it to happen. Tithing in church is the same idea; that every person, regardless of their finances, gives 10 percent. Everyone can participate in the work of the faith community. To oppose all forms of equity is, to me, a sign that one has a lack of empathy. It is unimaginable to me that someone could look at a homeless person and refuse to help by building affordable housing.
But this is where we are in America; the bitterness in much of the population that seeps into everything we do. The jealousy that someone got free money and you didn’t – the idea that everyone is on their own, regardless of where they started. Equity allowed me and millions of others to attend college; equity feeds billions of people all over the world. To care for the least among us is a central tenet of every major religion, yet too many people who claim to be religious work to deny equity. They talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. Giving a hand up is an act of faithfulness to God. Slapping those hands away is not. Not everyone starts at the same place; equity helps make up the gap.
Prayer – Holy God, teach us Your ways of equity and justice, and take our selfishness away. Amen.