Social Equity, Civil Rights, and Economic Rights in America

Defining Social Equity: Beyond Equality

Social equity is a concept that can be difficult to grasp, not only because it means different things to different people, but also because people frequently confuse equity with equality. While equality is an understandable social goal, it is important to realize that equality tends to be relative. For example, giving someone equal legal rights to a person from a different social, cultural, or financial background may produce very different outcomes, so that formal equality may actually reinforce the basic inequities that drive discrimination. That is why the concept of social equity goes beyond equality and "implies fair access to livelihood, education, and resources; full participation in the political and cultural life of the community; and self-determination in meeting fundamental needs" (Ecotrust, 2014). To achieve those goals, it is clear that social equity necessarily has two faces: civil rights and economic rights.

Civil Rights Without Economic Rights: The African American Experience

To understand the importance of either of those two necessary components to social equity, one need only examine a scenario in which traditionally disadvantaged people have access to only one aspect of social equity. To do so, one need only envision the United States in the early 1960s. At that time, African Americans faced serious civil rights hurdles that were coupled with tremendous relative financial disadvantage. The solution the country determined was appropriate was to put an end to legalized discrimination. Race could no longer be a factor in decisions affecting the level of participation that African Americans could have in society as a whole. This had an immediate impact on seemingly minor daily behaviors, such as the end of legalized segregation in public accommodations. It also opened up opportunities for many African Americans by making them eligible for housing in better neighborhoods, attendance at better schools, and access to higher-paying jobs.

However, it has been more than fifty years since the passage of the landmark civil rights legislation meant to bring about equality in the United States, and tremendous racial disparities continue to exist. These civil rights changes were not accompanied by a simultaneous change in economic rights. African Americans still held only a small portion of the nation's wealth, and that amount was highly disproportionate to their share of the population. The practical result was that African Americans may have had equal civil rights but often lacked the financial means to access those rights. For example, they may have had the legal ability to buy homes in better neighborhoods with better school districts, but not the financial means to do so. Their children may have been eligible for — and may even have attended — expensive colleges and universities, but the lack of family funds to pay for those educations may have meant a crippling debt burden that prevented even highly educated students from ascending above the middle class.

Access to desegregated schools may have been meaningless for a generation of students whose parents had not enjoyed the same educational opportunities and who could not afford tutors and other advantages available to middle-class families. The impact of financial disparity is perhaps most apparent in the criminal justice system: while most estimates suggest that Black and white Americans commit crimes at approximately the same rates, Black Americans are far more likely to be indigent and require public defenders, far more likely to be convicted, and far more likely to face harsher sentences — an outcome many attribute to the inability to afford high-priced legal counsel. The modern United States, which still has de facto segregation in many places despite decades of laws guaranteeing civil rights, is a compelling example of why economic rights must be a component of social equity.

Economic Access Without Civil Rights: The Case of Women

It is equally instructive to imagine a world in which a minority group may have had some economic rights but not the civil rights to give them meaningful power. In fact, American history provides an example of that scenario as well. Although women have never achieved full economic equity with men in the United States, an examination of historical community property laws and other economic statutes reveals that some women did enjoy substantial access to financial resources, which translated into a degree of localized power. However, women still do not enjoy the same constitutional civil rights protections that racial minorities are guaranteed. Women have had the legal right to vote in the United States for less than a century. Domestic violence has only been a crime for roughly thirty years, and less than a decade ago some states still permitted a marital exemption as a defense to a rape charge.

The practical impact of these legal limitations is that, while married women may enjoy a degree of economic parity with married men of the same social class, prevailing laws and social norms mean that the vast majority of unmarried women face significant financial difficulties when compared not only to men but also to married women. As a result, women lack social equity with men — an imbalance that is often obscured because women frequently share family units with men and society tends to measure wealth at the household level.

References

Ecotrust. (2014). Social equity. Retrieved September 8, 2014, from Reliable Prosperity website: http://www.reliableprosperity.net/social_equity.html

Hansan, J. (2011). Origins of the state-federal public welfare programs (1932–1935). Retrieved September 8, 2014, from The Social Welfare History Project website: