Tag: equity

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part Two—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

The place where I learned the most about diversity, equity and inclusion was not at my liberal summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains—but at a pig farm in northern Kansas. To be fair, if it wasn’t for camp, I never would have pitched a tent under the big sky of the Jensby farm.

A dining hall at a Web-Met Camp
A dining hall at a Wel-Met Camp.

I was there because, as my last chapter noted, Wel-Met, my summer sleep away camp, had a free-range philosophy. Campers planned their own activities, hiked into the woods for sleepovers and—when older—lived in tents rather than bunks. This was a preparation for the next step: Cross-country camping trips. Wel-Met ran six of these each summer and in the 1960s they all stopped at the farm of Clarence and Florence Jensby. The Jensbys welcomed all with open arms—campers and returning counselors alike. (I arrived three times). On the surface, we could not have been more different. Or in today’s lingo, more diverse. Most of us were Jewish New Yorkers. The Jensbys were Christian midwesterners.

It did not matter. With great panache, the Jensbys introduced us to their operation and their pigs who, well, smelled like pigs. This came as a surprise to the city slickers. Mrs. Jensby demonstrated, with schoolteacher-like skills, how to prepare a live chicken for dinner. Trip after trip, year after year, she showed city kids how she would break the chicken’s neck, pluck the feathers, yank out the guts and prepare it for cooking. Some campers were horrified. I saw her humanity. I saw her as a farmer who worked quickly to minimize suffering. Today, when I view pictures of chickens raised in crowded coops, not free-range—or hormone or antibiotic free—I think of how Mrs. Jensby did it better.

I also have a memory of Mrs. Jensby dressed up, wearing her good shoes and leaving the farm—perhaps for church. I wondered how she did this without stepping on any animal droppings. I wondered how she had transformed herself so quickly from farm wife in a blood-stained apron to a “proper” lady. A lifelong lesson: there is more to a person than you see at first. Read more »

Monday, February 21, 2022

The Problem With Equity

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

Equality v Equity

How should society go about the business of redistributing resources? Many people will be acquainted with the image featured at the top of this article. It is supposed to show the superiority of the notion of ‘equity’ – that is, giving people what they need to succeed, thus satisfying the demand for fairness that the equality approach is depicted as failing. Since people don’t start in the same place, due to gender, race, disability and so on, so the argument goes, an equal distribution is unfair: everyone goes up a bit, as in the image on the left, but since the differences haven’t been addressed, the result is unfair. So we need equity rather than equality. This is an example of an argument that looks persuasive at first glance, but which is deeply problematic when we consider it further. To see why, we need to go beyond the thought experiment approach to this issue, to see the social and  political context in which it has become popular.

A first point to make is that no thoughtful advocate of greater equality has been blind to the importance of considering the needs of recipients. If equality is about justice, then it can’t just be mathematical equality. Giving the same amount of food to a malnourished person and a replete one would obviously be unfair. So if the current equity over equality argument is just saying this we could just see it just a difference in the terms one uses. But there is more going on with it than that. Read more »