Language inversion and the meaning of words

One of our most respected scholars on race relations explains how the Left manipulates the language for political gain.

The Friday Letter / No. 474 / Jan. 7, 2022
Anniversary issue – Est. Jan. 9, 2009

In his Wall Street Journal Weekend piece of last Feb. 13-14, Tunka Varadarajan spoke with author Shelby Steele about race relations in America. Steele explains how the Left has changed the meaning of commonly used words to further its political purposes. Leftists want to disguise their true aims.

Here is an example, though not part of the Steele interview: A recent lawsuit over a local property boundary line dealt with just such an inversion of meaning and is a dramatic demonstration of this tactic at work. A long recognized Federal boundary line was moved by a reinterpretation of the meaning of words. This tactic was rebuffed by the trial judge who said the new boundary was in places 3.5 miles from where a person of common intelligence would consider it to be.

In this example, intelligible talk became non-existent and the matter had to go before a judge. So it is with our current national discourse, except the luxury of sorting out the discrepancies of meaning aren’t resolved judiciously – they they just continue along and the largest megaphone usually holds sway.

Regarding the word “equity,” Steele says, “The sense of the word I grew up with has no relationship at all with the meaning it has taken on today. Most, if not all, of our citizens would agree. Therefore, in this particular instance, to maintain a rational national public discourse, we must confront and examine new meanings at the outset. We would suggest the concept of “a person of common intelligence,” a prevalent standard in case law, be the standard. It could argued that the concept embedded in this phrase is the at the core of the constitutionality of laws regarding human behavior. It should therefore be foundational to our common discourse. Making this demand will broaden the circle of participants and ensure that all are speaking a common language of meanings.

Mr. Steele is 75 and therefore of a proper vintage for he and us to share a common understanding. Most of the country is not. The article is addressing the meaning, and therefore the goals, of Biden's Executive Order on Advancing Racial “Equity,” (not “equality,” the heretofore Civil Rights Movement of MLK’s stated goals.)

“Equality” has long been held to be equality under the law, to have an equal right to participate fully in the civil exchange. In this arena, government acts and brings to bear the remedies at its disposal to ensure the rights of any individual is not abridged. This is also the constitutional limit of governmental powers as set forth in our Founding Documents and the bedrock of the 14th Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law.

Americans are so used to the concept of racial equality as being almost universally accepted that an “Executive Order Advancing Racial Equality” would be met with universal nods of agreement, and the language readily accepted by our citizens of common intelligence. But substitution of the word “equity” is of a disguised meaning and seems almost to suggest a willful sleight of hand and appears to be taking the goal in a different direction. But is it?

Equality means equality of opportunity, that our Constitution guarantees that all all treated equally under the law. Equity means equality of outcome, something our Constitutions definitely does not guarantee.

Accessing the WSJ piece requires a paid subscription. We take the liberty of excerpting up to the 250-word limit under the libel law.

Tunka Varadarajan:

The first time Shelby Steele used the word “equity” in one of his books , White Guilt , published in 2006, he was referring to the value his father had accrued in restoring “three ramshackle homes to neat lower-middle-class acceptability.” This was in 1950s Chicago, a city the author describes as “virulently segregated.” Shelby Steele Sr., a Southern-born black truck driver who’d left school in third grade to work the fields, concealed his homeownership from his white employer. He was afraid he’d be fired for “getting above himself.”

No bank would (lend) the elder Steele money, so he used bricks, discarded lumber, and cast-off roofing shingles to render the properties rentable. “That’s what we used to call equity,” says Mr. Steele, the son. “The sense of the word I grew up with has no relationship at all to the meaning it has taken on today.” . . .

I can almost hear Mr. Steele growl in his study in Monterey, Calif., as I read these words aloud. “This equity is a term that has no meaning,” he says, “but it’s one that gives blacks power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around at any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that somebody’s a bigot.” Its message is that there’s “inequality that needs to be addressed, to be paid off. So if you hear me using the word ‘equity,’ I’m shaking you down.”

Black leaders and white liberals “wanted a new, cleaner, emptier term to organize around. And equity was perfect because it meant absolutely nothing.”

Shelby Steele knows racial discrimination well. While pursuing his doctorate in the 1970s, he had to go to court to rent an apartment.

Steve Combs is not firing on all eight cylinders and is grateful to David Smith for his research and reporting on the Varadarajan interview.