Soudeh Oladi
Equity has become a buzzword in different circles, so it’s likely you’ve heard of it. But to better understand this term, we need to consider concepts that may be less familiar: neoliberalism, deficit thinking, and meritocracy. For example, one narrative we continue to hear is that if we work hard enough, we will climb the social ladder. If we fail to “make it,” it is because we lack the resilience and drive to succeed. This is an example of the concept of meritocracy. Some say that a multicultural country like Canada is built on meritocracy. In other words, that talent and effort are all that is needed for success. But is this really true? Others warn that concepts like meritocracy act as 21st-century opium of the masses and are a delusion (Littler, 2017). These concepts fail to consider the institutional and systemic barriers many people face due to racism and discrimination. Instead, they blame the individual for their situation. If we understand equity as who gets what, when, and how (Frick, Parsons, & Frick, 2019), we will better understand how during a pandemic, for instance, some groups have more access to resources, supports, networks, and opportunities than others. All these themes will be looked at in depth in this module on equity.
You may have seen the terms equity and equality used interchangeably. But they have different meanings. Equality can be understood in terms of “sameness,” while equity can be understood in terms of “justice” and “fairness.” Equality is when all people, regardless of circumstance or characteristics, are treated in exactly the same way.
Equity recognizes that treating everyone the same can still be unfair. It focuses on the needs of society’s most under-resourced, oppressed, and disadvantaged people. It is important for us to remember that ideology and discourse determine how we view equity.
Here are four ways that we can create a more equitable society (Rezai-Rashti, Segeren, & Martino, 2017):
Watch this TED talk by Rodney Robinson entitled “What Is Equity and Why Do Our Children Deserve It?” (Source: TEDx Talks, 2020)
Watch this video on “Deconstructing White Privilege with Dr. Robin DiAngelo.” (Source: General Commission on Religion and Race of The UMC, 2017)
One area where a focus on equity is particularly important is education. In schools, students who fall behind are often blamed for their failures. Their poor performance in school is linked to personal problems or deficiencies, or those of their family, or social or racial group. This is called deficit thinking.
Deficit thinking mainly impacts students from marginalized communities. It focuses on what students “lack” and aims to “fix” them, while ignoring or minimizing the structural and systemic issues that affect their lives and learning experiences. It looks for simple answers to complex issues like racism, sexism, and classism.
Deficit thinking strengthens stereotypes, discourages students, leads to low expectations of students, and has a negative impact on students’ overall education (Baroutsis & Woods, 2018).
There are different ways deficit thinking can be challenged. For example, in the Toronto District School Board, Black students have higher suspension rates than white students. To address this, Michelle Bailey proposes using restorative justice instead of suspensions for minor breaches of school rules and codes of conduct (Rankin, Rushowy, & Brown, 2013; James & Turner, 2017). Restorative justice is an Indigenous-based healing and peacemaking process. While the Western justice system tries to reduce crime through punishment, restorative justice tries to bring together victims, offenders, and the community in order to get to the bottom of a problem and restore balance and harmony (Mirsky, 2004).
How would you react if you heard someone express these opinions?
Listen to the following excerpt from Life in Schools by Peter McLaren (Source: McLaren, 2015).
Then consider the critical-thinking questions.
It would drive anyone a little crazy. At least half the class wandered around the room at any given time, despite my attempt to keep them working quietly at their desks. The constant movement was threatening.
Relief happily appeared with Hartford, the gym teacher, who took my kids twice a week for half-hour sessions.
Usually I ended up chatting with a small group of kids who had forgotten their gym equipment and remained behind. It was the same group every week, a coincidence, I’m sure. I looked forward to my half-hour talks with these kids, nick-naming them “the rap pack.” I dreamed of what it would be like to have a class with only six or seven students. There were kids in the group whom I could barely tolerate in a normal classroom with thirty-five students. But individually or in the small group, they were easy to talk to, sensitive, and communicative.
When the rest of the class returned from the gym, pleasant young people reverted to their former selves: distant, rowdy, agitated.
Read this article to learn more about the differences between equity and equality. (Source: Adhikari, 2017)
Use this framework adopted from the book Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (2014) when analyzing a case study based on equity. (Source: Gorski & Pothini, 2017)
Watch this video showing college students racing to win $100 while acknowledging various forms of disadvantage and inequities. (Source: Peter D., 2018)
It is important to remember that ideology can affect how we view equity. Neoliberalism is a dominant ideology in Western society. Some see it as the magic bullet that can resolve all of our problems. In this sub-topic, we’ll discuss the limits to that point of view. But first, what is neoliberalism?
[Neoliberalism is] a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. (Harvey, 2007, p. 2)
In simple terms, neoliberalism is when the rules of the market are applied to every aspect of our lives. Neoliberal logic states that individuals are solely responsible for their own well-being (Brown, 2003). Instead of valuing care and compassion, neoliberalism values competitiveness (Brown, 2015).
What’s wrong with this? Well, let’s consider the example of education. Under neoliberalism, the focus of education has shifted from teaching students how to be caring democratic citizens to assessing and ranking them through tests. Students are held solely responsible for how well they do in this system. No consideration is given to the different opportunities and resources students have (tutors, private schools, extracurricular activities). Everyone is judged by the same standards. This system has success stories, but it doesn’t give everyone the same opportunity to succeed. Even as it celebrates the individual’s ability to “make it,” it masks structural inequalities in our society. Brochures for colleges and universities are filled with images of racialized minorities, but these are the people who are most often put at a disadvantage in this system. Upon closer inspection, one can see examples of “ tokenism.”
Neoliberal logic has been compared to the classical Greek myth about Sisyphus.
In this myth, Sisyphus, the king of Corinth, is punished by the gods for his sins and condemned to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain for all eternity. Each time he reaches the top, it rolls back down to the bottom again.
This myth is used as a metaphor for tasks that seem pointless and unending (Fisher-Ari, Kavanagh, & Martin, 2017). Under neoliberalism, people are pushed to endlessly struggle for success, but there is no end point where success is achieved according to the logic of the system.
This makes the process, like the task given to Sisyphus, inherently fruitless and unattainable. Professor Lauren Berlant (2010) calls this kind of unending search for success “cruel optimism,” and critical educator Paulo Freire (1997) believes it is based on “false hope.”
Watch this video in which five people use slam poetry to explain how being racialized impacted their learning experience. (Source: Poekert, 2010)
Watch this video where Alex Gendler retells the myth of Sisyphus. (Source: TED-Ed, 2018)
Now listen to the poem “Red Canoe” by Chet Singh. (Source: Singh, n.d.)
When speaking about equity, the issue of race cannot be sidelined. Race for the Greeks and Romans, for instance, was a matter of power relations and not skin colour (McCoskey, 2012). However, by the 15th century in the Western world, the concept of race became directly linked with skin colour and used as a way to label certain people inferior. By the 19th century, racial groups were seen as unique biological types in the West. Some went so far as to argue that different races experienced evolution and became human at different times. But the mapping of the human genome proved without doubt that race has no biological basis.
At the turn of the 20th century, African-American sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois rightfully projected that the issue of race and colour blindness would be a central problem for American society (Du Bois, 2008).
When did the word “race” first appear in European vocabulary?
The word “race” was introduced into the European lexicon in the 16th century just as the Europeans were colonizing the Indigenous peoples of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas
A study published in 2019 entitled How Segregated Is Toronto? Inequality, Polarization, and Segregation Trends and Processes (Hulchanski, 2019), by the Ryerson Centre for Immigration and Settlement, offers statistics about economic disparities in Toronto along race lines.
For centuries, Western liberalism has practiced “ collective historical amnesia” (Mills, 2014) and refused to acknowledge the role of white supremacy in reproducing inequalities. Through the refusal to see colour and by prioritizing factors such as economics over race, Western liberal democracies have come to deny their role in keeping racism alive (McKenzie & Scheurich, 2004). It has become clear that pretending race does not exist cannot lead to the end of racism.
Collective historical amnesia is also reflected in how the lived experiences of Indigenous Peoples in Canada continue to be brushed aside. Let’s look at one recent example.
In September 2014, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) opened in Winnipeg and immediately faced controversy regarding the use of the term “genocide” in an exhibit on Canada’s treatment of Indigenous Peoples (Whitt & Clarke, 2019). At first, the museum decided to label the exhibit featuring human rights violations against Indigenous Peoples as “Settler Colonial Genocide.” But just before opening, the museum’s steering committee suddenly changed its mind and made this statement:
We’re not declaring it as genocide. We’re not declaring it as not genocide. Visitors will be encouraged to come to their own conclusions. (Whitt & Clarke, 2019, p. 8)
Critics accused CMHR of “sanitizing the true history of Canada’s shameful treatment of First Nations” (Edmiston, 2013).
Consider these questions:
A wise person once said that if fish were anthropologists, the last thing they would discover would be the water. We are not too different from the fish, swimming in a sea of inequity and injustice (Banks & Banks, 2019). Colonization has acted as the sea of inequity and injustice for centuries and created hierarchies around gender, race, sex, ability, and class that can be difficult to see, let alone resist. The hidden injury of oppression and colonization can lead to the “spiritual collapse of a nation” (Mohaw, 2004). When the spirit of a nation collapses through colonization, individuals tend to develop hate, racist attitudes, and hidden biases towards their own race or themselves. This has come to be known as internalized colonization.
To learn more about colonization and internalized colonization, we need to turn to Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a psychiatrist and a postcolonial philosopher who wrote about the impact of colonization on the oppressed. Fanon was 36 years old when he died from leukemia in 1961. Fanon’s (1965) four-phase colonial model can help us understand internalized colonization.
The first phase is forced entry of a foreign power into a territory. Why? Mostly to exploit natural resources and the people living in that territory through slavery or cheap labour. The second phase is when colonizers impose their culture. To do that, the colonizer labels the culture of colonized people as inferior, breaks it down, and recreates it based on their own supposedly superior values. This is the start of the third phase where the colonized are portrayed as uncivilized and wild, and the colonizer now takes on the role of the saviour who can monitor, tame, and civilize them. The message of the third phase is that domination and even oppression are necessary in order for the colonized to become civilized. In the fourth and final phase, we have a society where political, social, and economic institutions are set up in a way that benefits the colonizer and helps maintain their superiority while keeping the colonized “in check.”
Fanon believed that internalized colonization is the major psychological effect of colonialism. When colonized people are treated as inferiors for a long time, they often experience self-doubt and identity confusion. Year after year, decade after decade, and century after century, many of those who were colonized internalize the message of inferiority and negative stereotypes.
The Jamaican-British sociologist and cultural critic Stuart Hall wrote about how his mother’s attitude towards dark-skinned men had a devastating impact on his family:
I’ve written about my sister’s life before and I don’t find it easy to elaborate further on a painful experience. Pat, five years my senior, began a relationship with a black student from another Caribbean island studying medicine at the University College of the West Indies. He was from a highly respectable black background which later far out-distanced my family in public achievement and social position. But my parents, or my mother, objected to his colour and to his origins. And my mother simply put a stop to it. A few months later Pat had a serious mental breakdown from which, in truth, over the many intervening years she has made only a tentative recovery. (Hall, 2017, p. 53)
Did you know that the global skin-lightening industry is expected to double from 2017 to 2027 to be worth $8.9 billion (Khan, 2018)? A World Health Organization (WHO) study found that around 40% of Chinese women and half of the population in Malaysia, Korea, and the Philippines use skin-lightening products. These numbers are much higher in Nigeria (77%) and India (61%) (WHO, 2013).
In 2020, a petition was signed by thousands of people requesting that the skin-whitening cream Fair & Lovely be held accountable for selling the image that women with dark skin colours can gain self-worth and be less insecure if they have lighter skin.
Read two statements from the petition, then consider the following questions below.
Questions:
Listen to this podcast that explores the impact of colonization among Indigenous Peoples in Canada (Source: Oleman, 2020). Teachings in the Air is an Indigenous health and wellness podcast hosted by Elder Gerry Oleman.
Throughout this module, we have looked at the difference between equity and equality. We explored concepts such as neoliberalism and deficit thinking in relation to equity. The issue of race was analyzed from a historical and social perspective. Examples were provided about how colonization impacted different populations, and we also discussed internalized colonization from the lens offered by Frantz Fanon.
collective historical amnesia
Collective historical amnesia happens when members of a society conveniently forget their active role in exploitation and oppression of different groups of people.
colonization
Occurs when a new group of people migrates into a territory and then takes over and begins to control the Indigenous group. The settlers impose their own cultural values, religions, and laws, seizing land and controlling access to resources and trade.
colour blindness
The belief that racial categories should not be considered when examining everyday social relations (Richeson & Nussbaum, 2004).
deficit thinking
[in education] When students who fall behind are blamed for their failures. These students’ poor performance in school is linked to personal problems or deficiencies, or those of their family, or social or racial group.
Equality
Can be understood in terms of “sameness.” Equality is when all people, regardless of circumstance or characteristics, are treated in exactly the same way.
equity
Can be understood in terms of “justice” and “fairness.” Equity recognizes that treating everyone the same can still be unfair. Equity focuses on the needs of society’s most under-resourced, oppressed, and disadvantaged people.
ideology
A defined set of beliefs and ideas shared by a group of people. Ideologies provide members of a group with an understanding and an explanation of their world.
internalized colonization
What happens when the colonized come to believe the message of inferiority and negative stereotypes that have been imposed by the colonizer. According to Frantz Fanon, internalized colonization is the major psychological effect of colonialism.
meritocracy
A social order where people are ranked and rewarded based on their abilities with no consideration of contextual factors that may affect their performance (DeSario, 2003, p. 485).
neoliberalism
“A theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market, and free trade” (Harvey, 2007, p. 2).
restorative justice
An Indigenous-based healing and peacemaking process that tries to bring together victims, offenders, and the community in order to get to the bottom of a problem and restore balance and harmony for everyone involved and impacted.
tokenism
The “practice of including one or a small number of members of a minority group to create the appearance of representation, inclusion, and non-discrimination, without ever giving these members access to power” (Anzovino & Boutilier, 2015).
white privilege
Taken-for-granted power and a system of benefits, advantages, and opportunities experienced by white persons simply because of the colour of their skin.
white supremacy
The social ideology used to justify colonization. Positions white people as superior to non-white people.
One of the first steps to becoming a more equitable society is seeing and understanding how our current society is inequitable. For example, Indigenous Peoples in Canada, as well as those in other settler colonies like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States, have spoken out about how the nations we live in tried to “dismantl[e] and eras[e] Indigenous society and culture, and replac[e] it through religious, political, and economic conversion” (DeMuth, 2012, p. 102).
The reality is that Indigenous peoples suffered in untold number of ways at the hands of the settler colonizers around the world. The stolen generation narratives are stories about the removal of “mixed descent” children from Aboriginal families and communities in Australia (Attwood & Magowan, 2001). One of the many young girls taken from their families was Margaret Tucker. Margaret was 13 years old when she was forcibly removed from her mother on a New South Wales Aboriginal reserve.
This happened in 1917 under the Aborigines Protection Board Act. This is how Margaret remembers the day she was taken from her mother:
The people at Cummeroogunga [a nearby reserve] lived in constant fear of their children being sent away from them by the Board, and being placed in homes. Wholesale kidnapping (it was nothing less) occurred on the Mission only a few years ago [1919]. The Manager sent the aboriginal men away on a rabbiting expedition. No sooner had they left the station than carloads of police (who had been waiting) dashed in and seized all the children they could get their hands on. These children were bundled into the cars and taken away for the Board to dispose of. Many of them never saw their parents again. (Attwood & Magowan, 2001, p. 184)
Margaret’s mother, Theresa Clements, also gives a painful account of the incident. She would find out years later that after three months in Cootamundra (Aboriginal Girls Home), her daughter would be sent to work as a servant girl for a wealthy family in Sydney.
One day some men came from the [New South Wales] Aborigines’ Protection Board. They said they wanted to take my children away. I said, ‘My children are well cared for’. They were said to be taking all the clever children to educate them. It was the most terrible thing that ever happened to me when they took my two daughters. They rounded up some of the girls from Cummera at the same time . . . I heard that a policeman at Cummeragunja resigned after the incident. He said that if taking children away from crying mothers was a policeman’s job, he didn’t want it. (Attwood & Magowan, 2001, p. 185)
Consider these questions:
Watch this documentary entitled Doctrine of Discovery: Stolen Lands, Strong Hearts, which looks at the history of colonial expansion and its impact on Indigenous populations. (Source: The Anglican Church of Canada, 2019)
Read the Indigenous Ally Toolkit to learn about ways you can be an ally to Indigenous Peoples. (Source: Montreal Urban Aboriginal Community Strategy Network, 2019)
The following resources will help you see how understanding equity can make you a better global citizen.
The Problem with that Equity Vs. Equality Graphic You’re Using (Source: Kuttner, 2016)
What Does It Mean to Be a Citizen of the World?|Hugh Evans (Source: TED, 2016)
Understanding Equity in Global Citizenship: From Social Analysis to Social Action (2021) by Centennial College, Soudeh Oladi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) unless otherwise stated.
Introduction photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.
Adhikari, S. (2017, May 6). Equity vs equality: 20 differences! Public Health Notes. https://www.publichealthnotes.com/equity-vs-equality/
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Baroutsis, A., & Woods, A. (2018). Children resisting deficit: What can children tell us about literate lives? Global Studies of Childhood, 8(4), 325–338.
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James, C. E., & Turner, T. (2017). Towards race equity in education: The schooling of Black students in the Greater Toronto Area.Toronto, Ontario, Canada: York University.
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Social Analysis Example
The Triangle Model of Social Analysis: Individual
The triangle model of social analysis has three dimensions (individual, structure, ideology). We use these dimensions to dissect structures of inequality and oppression in order to gain a deeper understanding of social problems. A social problem may be difficult to recognize, especially if you are not affected by it personally. You may become aware of a social problem by identifying individual behaviours, comments, feelings, and actions that send a particular message about an issue. For instance, if a visible minority is told, “You speak such good English” or “You speak without an accent,” the statement may be packaged as a compliment, but the hidden implications say otherwise. Such statements are invalidating and insulting because they imply that the recipient, who is a racial or ethnic minority, is alien in their own country (DeVos & Banaji, 2005). To better analyze problematic situations, we need to look at examples of people who have dealt with a social problem and decided to do something about it.
In relation to the social problem you are analyzing, you should first ask yourself, what important issue is everyone ignoring? Other critical questions you can ask are: