On actually treating people equally

I submitted the following letter to the editor of my local paper in response to a column they published about the Supreme Court rejecting affirmative action in universities. They chose not to publish the letter.

Owen Robinson’s recent column “A long stride on the path of racial equality” celebrates the Supreme Court rejecting affirmative action for university admissions. He argues that everyone should be treated equally. I agree.

Let’s start with getting rid of private schools, which allow wealthy parents to buy more opportunity for their kids. That’s not treating people equally. We also need to address the $23 billion funding gap between predominately white and predominately black public schools. If we care about equality, then we should fund public schools the same, no matter what district they’re in.

To take it a step further, we should have free higher education throughout this country. Then everyone has an equal opportunity to go to college or a trade school, regardless of their family’s wealth.

And if we want to treat everyone equally once they are out in the working world, we must address the racial and gender pay gaps. Black people make 76 cents to a white person’s dollar, and women make 82 cents to a man’s dollar. If we treated everyone equally, those numbers would be one dollar to one dollar.

Robinson says poverty affects all races. He is right. Which is why we should eliminate means testing for welfare programs. In fact, we should implement a universal basic income that gives everyone in this country the money they need to survive, no strings attached. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

Actually treating people equally would mean living in a radically different society than we do today. A kinder, more just society where we realize we are all fellow humans each with our own struggles. A society where we come together to help ease each other’s burdens, not add to them.