Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Focuses on ‘Racial Equity’

President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, the so-called “American Jobs Plan,” spends a great deal of space promising to address “racial equity.”

As Breitbart News has explained, the term “equity” is not the same as “equality.” Equity is prepared to sacrifice equality before the law to benefit individuals claiming membership in groups deemed to suffer from historic disadvantages.

Under President Donald Trump, black unemployment and poverty rates reached record lows, and the gap between black and white unemployment was the smallest ever, thanks to economic growth, Opportunity Zones, and immigration enforcement.

Trump achieved those landmarks without policies aimed at taxing the wealth of some Americans to redistribute it to others along racial lines. However, Biden ran for president on a promise to “rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country.”

Biden’s plan mentions racial “equity,” “inequity,” “injustice,” or “inequality” no fewer than nine times (original emphasis):

1. Like great projects of the past, the President’s plan will unify and mobilize the country to meet the great challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the ambitions of an autocratic China. It will invest in Americans and deliver the jobs and opportunities they deserve. But unlike past major investments, the plan prioritizes addressing long-standing and persistent racial injustice.
2. The President’s plan will ensure that these investments produce good-quality jobs with strong labor standards, prevailing wages, and a free and fair choice to join a union and bargain collectively [sic]. These investments will advance racial equity by providing better jobs and better transportation options to underserved communities.
3. President Biden’s … infrastructure investments will mitigate socio-economic disparities, advance racial equity, and promote affordable access to opportunity.
4. The President’s plan includes $20 billion for a new program that will reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.
5. Eliminate racial and gender inequities in research and development and science, technology, engineering, and math. Discrimination leads to less innovation: one study found that innovation in the United States will quadruple if women, people of color, and children from low-income families invented at the rate of groups who are not held back by discrimination and structural barriers.
6. In order to ensure workers have ready access to the skills they will need to succeed, and to improve racial and gender equity, President Biden is calling on Congress to invest $100 billion in proven workforce development programs targeted at underserved groups and getting our students on paths to careers before they graduate from high school.
7. All of us deserve to enjoy America’s promise in full — and our nation’s leaders have a responsibility to overcome racial, gender, and other inequalities to make it happen. To that end, the President is calling on Congress to create new, good-quality union jobs for American workers by leveraging their grit and ingenuity to address the climate crisis and build a sustainable infrastructure.
8. President Biden is calling on Congress to update the social contract that provides workers with a fair shot to get ahead, overcome racial and other inequalities that have been barriers for too many Americans, expand the middle class, and strengthen communities. He is calling on Congress to ensure all workers have a free and fair choice to join a union by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, and guarantee union and bargaining rights for public service workers.
9. President Biden is calling on Congress to provide the federal government with the tools it needs to ensure employers are providing workers with good jobs – including jobs with fair and equal pay, safe and healthy workplaces, and workplaces free from racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination and harassment. In addition to a $10 billion investment in enforcement as part of the plan’s workforce proposals, the President is calling for increased penalties when employers violate workplace safety and health rules.

The PRO Act, mentioned directly or indirectly several times in the excerpts above, would actually erode worker choice by limiting “right-to-work” laws and introducing “card check,” which denies workers a secret ballot in union elections.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.