Meanings to an end.

“Whoever controls the language, controls the culture.”

That quote is attributed to a former pastor and consultant named Dennis Peacocke. Whether Dennis knows it or not, it's a variation on a famous quote from Saul Alinksy, who wrote in Rules For Radicals that “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Both of them, of course, owe an intellectual debt to Orwell.

In any event, we know that language and the meaning of words set the terms for discourse online, in the media, and around the dinner table. The meanings we agree upon create the paths we are obligated to follow, so to speak, as we find our way through modern life. 

Think for example, how relatively benign the term “climate change” is compared to what is actually taking place: global heating. “Extraordinary rendition” is both an impressive and indescribable way of describing torture. I am personally hopeful that asking for an “immunization credential” before boarding a plane or a roller coaster may be less inflammatory than demanding a vaccine passport. 

Meaning is political and as such, opposed viewpoints are continually engaged in a war to define and redefine what we’re trying to say and why we’re trying to say it. Enemies of progress have become faster and more adept at repurposing words themselves -- not the subtle rebranding of estate tax to “death tax” but literally reversing their meanings such that language becomes drained of reason, coherence, purpose. 

Without language, little is left to bind a community -- even a community rife with conflict -- together.

“Equity” is one such term currently undergoing an extreme makeover. Defined by Merriam-Webster as “justice according to natural law or right”, equity is now being deliberately misunderstood and maliciously mischaracterized as an ideology unto itself, synonymous with redistributive government, government overreach, and, most bizarrely, racism itself. 

The reasons, while sad, are clear. This is not an attack on the word; it is an attack on the concept itself. A society that is summoning the courage to reckon with a past that is built on prejudice and subjugation risks unsettling those who have benefited from these structures. 

Systemic racism, as this recent blog post from Coeo partners Urban3 points out, is all about outcomes that perpetuate discrimination even when the individual actors are themselves by no means racist. We can’t fix them through individual actions or preferences. Problems with systems demand fixes to systems, and those can only through policy and politics.

Of course, before that, a city, country, or race of people must decide that these are problems worth fixing. The Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce has admirably talked about the material costs of racism, frequently pointing to a 2020 Citibank study that found the U.S. economy wasted $16 trillion since 2000 because of racial discrimination.

It is unknown and perhaps unknowable what those figures look like locally, but what we do know is the disparate educational outcomes between Black and white children. 

Chattanooga 2.0’s “Forward Together” report, published in February 2021, illustrated some vivid and galling disparities between the outcomes of white students and students of color. Pre-kindergarten readiness, third grade reading levels, ACT scores and college readiness, and college graduation rates all show that white students are not only starting out with sufficient advantages, they are making continual gains that students of color can not realistically hope to catch. 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Hamilton County is approximately 20% Black and 5% Hispanic. Allowing minority children to languish means that a full quarter of our population will not receive the education they deserve, nor achieve the full measure of employability or productivity that our region needs to be competitive.

None of us would live in a house if a full quarter of the foundation was sinking into the ground -- we would make repairs, immediately and at practically any cost, because logically we know that the problem gets worse, not better. 

This is what equity means in real terms: applying help where it is needed. Fixing our foundations so that everyone can rise. When that happens, extractive practices and the reactionary voices who defend them may be threatened, and there is no question that can create uncomfortable dialogues in real time. Long-term, however, the larger gains -- economic and moral -- to our world more than make up for it. 

We think that means everything.