Equal Opportunity
Equal opportunity processes are struggles by members of the subordinated groups, and their allies, to gain political and economic rights, social treatment, and economic opportunities equal to those of the dominating group. Equal opportunity processes challenge every hierarchical polarization process, and are a key force in breaking down the injustices, imbalances, and lack of freedom of the Hierarchical Polarization Paradigm.
The United States itself was established as part of an equal opportunity process. With their famous, liberatory claim that “all (white) men are created equal,” the Founding Fathers not only declared political independence from their British colonizers, but also formally overturned the aristocrat/commoner hierarchical polarization. With historical hindsight, the “all men are created equal” statement can be understood as an assertion of equal opportunity for white men. This assertion forcibly rejected one pillar of the then-current Hierarchical Polarization Paradigm – aristocratic political and economic domination -- while accepting all of the others.
White women and people of color, of course, were excluded from this declaration of equality, and from the economic competition based on it. They were segregated into subordinate non-capitalist forms of labor like slavery, and/or into lower paid work and unpaid reproductive work. However, white women, and Black men and women, participated in their own equal opportunity processes over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of these equal opportunity movements has made major strides in eliminating the particular discrimination it is targeting. All continue their fights today, because discrimination and segregation persist.