Equality… perhaps the most consequential concept throughout all of history. The thing that humans have always been fighting for, but have never fully achieved. When you are young, you think that it’s quite easy. “They fixed all that stuff a long time ago,” you say to yourself as you sit in your third-grade history class, as you are learning about MLK and all his achievements. But as you grow older, you learn about injustice that still occurs based simply on things like people’s pigmentation, hair textures and genitalia. You learn that yesterday’s problems were not fully solved.
When you are young, there are only two forms of discrimination: racism and sexism. As you grow older, you realize there are so many other forms of discrimination, including classism and homophobia, and things start to get more complicated.
Today, there was a baby who was born into a rich family, and at that exact second, there was a baby who was born into a poor family. Both babies can work just as hard in school and have the same drive and motivation, but most likely, the upper-class baby will be more successful. The lower-class baby would have all the disadvantages.
Today’s billionaires epitomize this concept of inherent privilege. Many of the world’s billionaires came from millionaire families; perhaps they weren’t billionaires, but it is a lot easier to turn a million dollars into a billion dollars compared to very little or no money at all.
Legacy admissions exemplify this, through the use of nepotism, rich donors of schools can get their kids to go to a prestigious school even if the person is not qualified.
According to Forbes, there are only five states in which legacy admissions are illegal: Illinois, Maryland, California, Virginia and Colorado. This is outrageous considering affirmative action is illegal in every state in America after the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled against it. Affirmative action isn’t just some “woke” thing that emerged in recent years. According to the National Archives, former President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 back in 1965, which required contractors to implement affirmative action to secure equal opportunities for minorities. This means that when SCOTUS made this illegal in 2023, they showed that they were in favor of not helping women, POCs and those with disabilities, but they are in favor of helping the rich and their children (since legacy admissions is still legal in 45 states). It makes you think, did all these successful people get success because of their own hard work, or because they had all the advantages?
The answer is that nothing is equal and nothing will ever be; it is a fact of life. It’s up to chance if you will be born rich or poor, if you will be with immense privilege and all the opportunities, or if you will have to work hard to survive. So, equality is technically impossible because the only way that we would be equal is if everyone started on an equal playing ground, if everyone had world-renowned tutors or world-renowned wealth to compensate for their stupidity. It is unrealistic to ask for equality, but it isn’t unrealistic to ask for equity, which essentially is what affirmative action is. The conclusion is sad but simple: we do not live in a meritocracy; we live in an inheritocracy.
