True Equality?

Can true equality ever be achieved, or is it an ideal that we can only strive toward?

I think it’s important to ask this question because the concept of equality is deeply tied to ideas of fairness and justice. Throughout our country’s history, we have struggled with the idea of treating everyone equally by the law, and inequalities based on race, economic status, location, or other factors have an indirect effect on our criminal justice system today are still some of the most-emphasized problems people believe is prohibiting a fair system. At its core, equality challenges us to question the foundations of our beliefs about what is just and whether any system can truly be designed to give everyone the same starting point. It’s a question that forces us to confront our biases, our laws, and the very structure of society.

Look back at political equality when our country was founded. Slavery still plagued the nation, and each slave only counted as ⅗ of a person for determining legislative representation by state. Some groups of people in this country were literally viewed as worth less than a person, and that racism manifested in every law pertaining to slavery. Then the nation decided that went against its belief that all men are created equal and abolished it. All was not well. 

Racial injustice still persisted as segregation became the norm. The Civil Rights movement succeeded in dismantling the legal structures that discriminated against black Americans, most notably through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and created significant progress for equality in America. 

It’s now hard to find a law that seems blatantly discriminatory by race. Does that mean there is perfect racial equality? No. Disparities in wealth, education, and by extension, criminal justice, continue to disproportionately affect black Americans, suggesting that the roots of inequality run deeper than legislation. 

Even with legal protections, structural issues like systemic racism, economic inequality, and implicit bias persist. This gap between legal equality and lived experience might suggest a difficulty, or impossibility, of achieving true equality in practice. 

The persistence of inequality has one obvious source: human error. Original sin. We are inherently flawed. We can try to live justly, but on an individual and societal level, will always fall short of perfection. 

Though the ideal of complete inequality is beyond our reach, the effort to eliminate all injustice is still a necessary perspective. Striving toward that ideal is what it means to be a Catholic. None of us will ever live exactly how God wants us to, but we try our absolute best to (or try our best to try our best to, if you know the difference I am trying to get at). It’s the reason I always bring up something like the inherent dignity of the person or idea of solidarity. When we envision a society where we all strive for these ideals, it not only gives individuals a healthy mindset to approach daily life, but might help us identify the way in which we can best approximate true equality--even if we can never truly get there.