If there’s one word that’s central to Oakland politics, it’s “equity.” The notion of “equity” runs like a bloodstream throughout all the city’s programs. Virtually every city department has an official equity component. The Department of Transportation boasts that its street-paving plan is based on “equity, street condition, and safety.” The Department of Human Resources Management claims its values are “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” the infamous and controversial DEI that is under such fierce political attack. The Department of Violence Prevention’s Chief, Holly Joshi, says her goals include achieving “gender and racial equity.” The Oakland City Auditor’s Department even has a Race and Equity Team to “take into account race and equity in implementing City policies, programs, laws, budgeting, and funding.”
And then, of course, there’s the biggest equity bureaucracy of all, the Department of Race & Equity itself. It’s self-described goal: “to create a city where…racial disparities have been eliminated and racial equity has been achieved.”
What is “equity,” anyway? The standard dictionary meaning is “the quality of being fair and impartial.” Nobody could be against fairness and impartiality, right? Fairness undergirds American idealism. It’s inherent in the Declaration of Independence’s second paragraph: “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.” Americans are sentimentally and instinctively in favor of fairness. It’s one of the more praiseworthy aspects of our nature.
But something distinctly unfair has perverted Oakland governance over the decades. It has to do with race, and specifically with Oakland’s large Black population. It’s no secret that this population has long been poorer and more caught up in the criminal justice system than other populations. There has arisen as a result a powerful political bloc that sees these discrepancies as evidence of what they call racism. If you’re a part of this politically left movement, it’s obvious to you: so many people cannot be so stymied without there being some sort of conspiracy to keep them down. This paranoid way of thinking has devised a well-thought out system that makes sense in terms of its own internal logic—as many paranoid fantasies do--but unfortunately bears no relationship to reality. There is no organized conspiracy to keep anyone down; we all know that. But reality is so unfair to Black people that, in the minds of these justice warriors, there has to be some explanation for it—and if there’s an explanation, then there can be a solution. And this is where all those equity departments come in.
So the Oakland definition of “equity” now becomes a negative: instead of achieving something “fair and impartial,” it now becomes necessary to dismantle the purportedly “unfair” current system—to tear it out by its roots, by any means necessary. We thus see equity police patrolling the corridors of City Hall like witch hunters in 17th century New England and like Communist hunters in 1950s America, determined to find guilty parties and correct them. As with any partisan witch hunt, sometimes innocent people are harmed, but when your philosophy is “by any means necessary,” a certain amount of collateral damage is tolerable. If fairness can only be achieved by unfair practices, so be it: the end justifies the means.
And we end up with—not fairness, not impartiality, but quotas. If the population of Oakland is 27.8% Black, then at least 27.8% of everything must be Black or Black-related: employees, roads paved, police hired, grants given, contracts awarded, school subjects studied. No sane system in the history of humanity has ever worked under such contrived circumstances. Predictably, Oakland’s system results in the incompetence we’ve seen for decades, which has given us a city on the verge of bankruptcy, led by people whose only qualification is their skin color. A failing, flailing city, where voters keep electing incompetent people who promise—what else?—equity, but deliver instead massive deficits, crime waves, the collapse of entire neighborhoods, and all the rest of the damaging results of woke progressivism.
Oakland is looking to cut expenses. May I suggest that the police and fire departments be completely off limits to budget cutting. Instead, let’s eliminate these wasteful, abusive and often fraudulent “equity” programs, lay off their staffs, and start running our city efficiently and honestly.
Steve Heimoff