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Equity is when everyone ends up with the same and I think this is impossible. People who have more to contribute to society will and should make more. We shouldn't look at it on the basis of race but we should see it on an overall basis and if equity is even possible. The answer is no because different people provide different labor or different products that are more valuable than others. For example, Jim should not be making the same amount of money as John when Jim flips burgers at Mcdonald's and John is the CEO of a company. This extra money for Jim would likely come out of the pockets of the CEOs and that is completely immoral because Jim's skill has little to no value. - Jason Glassman

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I don't think society could be equitable because the natural flow of our economy is to make the rich richer. I feel like there will always be a huge cap between our social classes because the way our economy is built. - sam

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I feel like an equitable society can't be possible only because of how judgemental the current society is and how many people want to be better than others. I would like to think that anything is possible, however,  I feel we are far from reaching that type of society.

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I think it will take a long time until our society is equitable. This is because there are so many stories and things that have been on the news that clearly shows white privilege. People are not treated the same and you can clearly see it on the news, tiktok, YouTube, etc. lea

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I think an equitable society will be hard to be possible because it is hard to make things equal for all people. There will always be some differences between people.

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An equable society is not better because we would all more or less be the same so there would be no modern inventions. No iphone's, computers, smart cars. Nothing would get done and there would be no leaders. -Olivia

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chris
honestly i don't think we could have an equitable society as pessimistic as it sounds. there'll always be an injustice held somewhere and it derives from a history that can't heal over perfectly because that's not how it works, it heals but it'll scar over and i think that's one of the best ways it could be patched up
not to mention this country drives off of competition so who knows what could happen

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we are more open and equal in today's world but to have a world where everyone is the same i don't want because then it is boring and no one will be able to have their own identity but to have a world where everyone is treated equally and not given more chances because of race or money is what should happen. Right now we are not equitable -yarden

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An equity society could be good but there is some problems with an equity society. If everyone is treated the same, that would be good but would society agree with it? Would society rebel against it? If a certain group has more opportunities than others, some others who may deserve it would not have an opportunity. -Alisha

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This question doesn't specifically talk about race, and if it did I may have been a little closer to the center. However when it comes to the life quality between the rich and this poor, is crazy, and something should be done about it.  A way we can fix this disparity is by taking the rich more, and using the money to help poor people.

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i think it definitely can happen, its in everyones best interest but as it was mentioned before, racism is taught most of the time and it can be hard to un learn. it would be difficult, not saying it wont. HOWEVER financial equity is also taught, rich people used to have complete control of the government and people with trillions of dollars will forvever be able to do whatever they want. so on that level maybe not. - carlotta

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i think on some level we will never have a fully equal society because there will always be people in charge that have different views and selfish ideas- alex

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I think that as of right now, society is not equitable. Although we have definitely come a long way, with pretty much equal rights for women and different races, people still are biased towards each other and have their own opinion, causing minorities to have less opportunities. I personally do not think it is achievable, at least anytime soon. There is no way to 100% erase racism and prejudiced beliefs, the only thing we can do is educate others as much as we can and locate racism and terminate it in your own lives/communities. Improvement is definitely possible (and needed), but there is no cure because the damage of Americas past actions are irreversible. Achieving that would only happen if we had a Utopian society, which also is not likely. - Ava

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I think the are black people in black communities are stuck in that cycle of not having the same amount of opportunity, but If anyone works hard enough they can do it. Again the I believe giving more funds to the public schools in low income schools will help. -Mika

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I don't think an equitable society is possible to be achieved. I feel like our world relies on competition and an equitable society takes that away.

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There is a lot more to work towards but I think it can be achieved in the future. Through learning from history and events in the past we can make changes that we think will benefit our generation and future generations to come. In terms of race, there should obviously be equity without argument. -Asha

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communism=bad

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I feel that our society is getting closer to racism being gone, but it still has time to go until racism is fully away - Shreyas

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"Capitalism: God's way of determining who is smart and who is poor" -Ron Swanson  (AJ)

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If the US had done enough then we would be able to say that racism is over but it is still ongoing and has not been stopped because there are so many racist people out there or just people who assume it will end eventually and they do not contribute or help end this problem. If the US and all the citizens wanted to end racism it would have ended and not led on for so many years.

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The U.S. isn't really doing much to address racism. Sure there are videos of it occurring and people stating to cancel racist people, but after a while, it just gets buried under other things and people just sort of forget about it. We talk about it, but we don't seem to do much about it. I feel like if the U.S. did address racism well enough, then it wouldn't really be considered a problem.

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I believe the US is not doing enough to address racism. I think the main problem lies in the fundamentals of our country. The system itself is broken. The constitution was written nearly 200 years ago and our founding fathers had no way to understand nor fathom what life would be like in 2021. Can we really use a document from 1787 and have it support us today? Amendments are like bandaids over a scab and eventually someone will pick at it enough that it will all fall apart. You have to get to the root of the problem to fix the other branches of issues that are messed up in this country today and the root is the constitution. The more we live with a document that only gives rights to "ALL MEN" but does not specify every person can we really say we'll ever live in a racism free country.

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In a new book, Louis Michael Seidman claims that arguing about the constitutionality of laws and reforms is the cause of our harsh political discourse

smithsonian.com

Why would we stop obeying the Constitution?
When James Madison and his fellow statesmen drafted the Constitution, they created our system of government, with its checks, balances and sometimes awkward compromises. The laws of the United States are based on this document, along with the Bill of Rights, and for more than 200 years, Americans have held it sacred.
Are there certain parts of the Constitution you find most onerous?
But Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman says that adherence to the Constitution is both misguided and long out of date. In his incendiary new book, On Constitutional Disobedience, the scholar who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argues that giving up on the Constitution would improve American political discourse and government, freeing us from what he describes as an "intergenerational power grab" by the Founding Fathers.

This is about taking the country back for ourselves. There's no reason to let folks who have been dead for 200 years tell us what kind of country we should have. The United States that the Founding Fathers knew was a very small country huddled along the Eastern seaboard. It was largely rural; large parts of it were dependent on slave labor, and there was nothing like modern manufacturing or communication. Many of the most important drafters of the Constitution, including Madison, owned other human beings. Virtually all of them thought that women should have no role in public affairs. I don't mean to say that they were not farsighted for their time, but their time is not our time.

One example hits home for me-I live in the District of Columbia, and the Constitution provides that the District of Columbia will be ruled by Congress, with the residents having no right to choose who's going to be in Congress. That might have been okay in the 18th century, but it's not anything any American would endorse in the 21st century. Another problem is the method we have for electing a president. It's not an arrangement that anyone would set up today, but we're more or less stuck with it. The electoral college is free to vote for whomever it wants-they could vote for Beyoncé for president if they wanted to.
A lot of people would agree with you on those points. But instead of scrapping the Constitution, couldn't we just amend it, so it's better in tune with modern circumstances?
If Beyoncé were 35 years old, as the Constitution requires the president to be.
What if we did as the founders did and simply wrote a new constitution from scratch?
That's right. Maybe she is, I don't know. [She isn't. Knowles will turn 32 this year]
Couldn't giving up on constitutional obedience lead to tyranny or chaos?
One really unfortunate thing in the Constitution is Article V, which governs the ways in which the Constitution is amended. As a practical matter, it's impossible to amend. The Constitution requires a very strong supermajority; an entrenched minority can prevent it from happening. And just as with the rest of the Constitution, there's no reason why people who are alive today should be saddled with amendment provisions that are no longer wise and practical.
What would we gain by giving up constitutional obligations?

I'm against people who are long dead telling us what kind of country to have, but I'm also against us telling people who aren't alive yet what kind of country to have. Starting over and writing a new constitution is an invitation to entrench our views against the views of future generations, and I don't think we have a right to do that.

I think that's extremely unlikely. We all have an interest in not having tyranny and chaos, and it is that interest, and our willingness to stand up for it, that ultimately prevents that from happening. The Constitution is a piece of paper. What prevents tyranny and chaos is not a piece of paper, but a willingness of all of us to realize that we're all in this together, that freedom is better than tyranny and order is better than chaos. There are lots of countries that get by just fine without constitutions. Last time I looked, there wasn't tyranny and chaos in New Zealand or the United Kingdom.
Is there historical precedent for constitutional disobedience?
It would improve deliberation and rhetoric about issues that divide us-gun control, for example. Now, to the horror of most of my friends, I am actually quite skeptical about gun control. But that's a subject on which reasonable people can disagree. But what happens when you start thinking about constitutional obligations? All of the sudden the argument is not, "How are you going to enforce this? Would it actually prevent violence? Would it cause more violence?" The argument is about, "What exactly did the word 'militia' mean 200 years ago? What is the relationship between the 'bear arms' clause in the English Bill of Rights and the American Bill of Rights?"

Those are questions that historians ought to have some interest in, but they're completely irrelevant to the issue of gun control in 21st century America. Without enlightening us, arguments of constitutionalism unnecessarily divide us. Now, all of the sudden, instead of talking about a policy decision that reasonable people could disagree about, we're talking about whether one's opponent is really an American, whether they are violating the document that defines us and creates us as a nation.
You also say that the circumstances surrounding the framing of the Constitution argue for disobeying it. Can you explain?
My view sounds really radical, but most of our greatest presidents had a lot of skepticism about the Constitution. No one had more doubts than Thomas Jefferson. Throughout his life, he expressed real doubt about allowing one generation to rule another. He said at one point that it was like allowing a foreign country to rule us. He proposed that constitutions automatically expire after a single generation. The most consequential act of his presidency, the Louisiana Purchase, was in his own view unconstitutional. But he also thought that it was the right thing to do, and so he went ahead and did it, and we're better off for it.
Why now? Is this the historical moment for this idea?
The Emancipation Proclamation, that we're celebrating the 150th anniversary of now, was a massive constitutional violation. Virtually nobody in the 1860s thought that the federal government had the ability to interfere with slavery in states where it already existed. Franklin Roosevelt purported to believe in the Constitution, but the Constitution he believed in was a vague statement of aspirations, not a lawyer's document that would be enforced in all its detail. There's no doubt that in part because of that belief he did things that were outside the constitutional understanding at the time he did them. Teddy Roosevelt ran against constitutional obligation in his famous Bull Moose campaign. We have a long tradition of skepticism about the Constitution, questioning it, fighting against its yoke. This is as American as apple pie.
How would our government function without the Constitution?
When the framers went to Philadelphia in 1787, the call from the Congress was to amend the Articles of Confederation [the governing document adopted in 1783 upon the end of the Revolutionary War.] As soon as they got to Philadelphia, they immediately decided they were not going to follow their mandate and were not going to follow the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they threw out the Articles, and they wrote an entirely new document, in violation of the terms of the Articles. The Constitution itself was pretty clearly an illegal document-it was itself unconstitutional. I'm not saying that we should go back to the Articles of Confederation, but it is more than a little ironic that we are so insistent on obeying the Constitution when the people who wrote the Constitution itself were ready to disobey the constitution that was in effect at the time.
Aren't the roles of the President, the Senate and the House prescribed in the Constitution? How would the separation of powers be detailed? Are you arguing that the process should just be self-policing, without any underlying rules or regulations?
We're at a moment when people are more willing to really think seriously about constitutional obligation. There's an unstable situation right now in the United States. On the one hand, people express this deep commitment to obeying the Constitution. And yet on the other hand, both conservatives and liberals are using the Constitution for political purposes. We have this amazing coincidence that on the Supreme Court, justices appointed by Democrats read the Constitution as if it were written by the Democratic platform committee, and justices appointed by Republican presidents read the Constitution as if it were written by the Republican platform committee. And then each side accuses the other of constitutional violation.
How would we determine which laws or government actions are appropriate or inappropriate? Would we still have judicial review?
If we didn't have a constitution, that would not mean that we didn't have longstanding institutions, and settled ways of dealing with things. Not having a constitution does not mean not having a Senate and a House, presidents, states, even a Supreme Court. All of those things we've had for a very long time, and I don't think people would want that to change.
What would judicial review be based on, without the Constitution?
It's not at all clear that as things stand now constitutional obedience is what is enforcing separation of powers. Many separation of powers questions-especially with regard to foreign affairs-are not judicially enforceable. What prevents one branch or another from overreaching-to the extent that they haven't overreached-is political forces, not constitutional obedience. So, for example, when the Reagan Administration unilaterally armed the Contras, Congress stopped the program not by going to court to enforce the Constitution, but by holding public hearings, attaching riders to appropriation bills, etc. In any event, it is very unlikely that our current divisions of power would be changed dramatically and quickly if there were no constitutional obligation. We have long traditions in this country and are used to certain ways of doing things, and people have vested interests in the status quo. These forces would constrain sudden change in much the way that they do in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Israel, where the structure of government is not enforced by a constitutional document, but nonetheless is relatively stable.
How would our rights to, say, free speech, be protected without the Bill of Rights?
I certainly understand the argument that we don't want a pure democracy, and there is something to be said for an elite body that is separated from day-to-day politics, pronouncing on questions of political morality. But if we look at the most important Supreme Court decisions over the last century or so-things like Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas, which established the right to gay intimacy-those are not, in any meaningful sense, tethered to the constitution. They are judgments by the justices about our traditions, about prior precedent, about their own sense of political justice. That might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing-I think that is something for the American people to decide. There is one thing that would change, and that is people would not be able to stop an argument by saying, "But that is unconstitutional."
If we don't have to obey the Constitution, does it still have value? What should its place be?
It would be based on our values. I take no position on judicial review in this book. What I do think is that if we are going to have judicial review, judges have an obligation to be honest with us about what they are doing. As things stand now, they are not being honest. Important decisions rendered by the Supreme Court on issues like abortion, the rights of gay men and lesbians, and affirmative action, have virtually nothing to do with the Constitution. Instead, they reflect contestable value judgments made by the justices. It's important to emphasize that this is not something I'm proposing-this is how things are now. Maybe it's a good idea to have an elite body, somewhat insulated from political majorities, making judgments of political morality that bind the political branches. But people need to decide on that question without being confused by the pretense that the justices are only enforcing the Constitution. One of the virtues of my proposal is that it would force the Supreme Court to be more honest about what it's actually doing.

Freedom of speech and the press are important rights that we ought to protect. In the long run, though, if we're going to have freedom of speech, we're not going to have it because people are told, "Your betters said this was something you've got to have." The people who favor it have got to do the hard work of telling their fellow citizens why this is something we should cherish and why it's important to all of us. One of the problems with constitutional obligation is if people start depending on it, they get lazy, and they stop making arguments that make sense to people today.

The Constitution, in the great words of its preamble, speaks of "we the people," of forming "a more perfect union" and providing "for the common defense" and "general welfare." Those are things that anybody could favor. To the extent that we treat the Constitution as kind of a poem that inspires us, or even as a framework that allows us to debate how we should achieve these things, I don't have a problem with that. Poems inspire us, but they don't command obedience, and I don't think the Constitution should either.

About Amy Crawford

Amy Crawford is a Michigan-based freelance journalist writing about cities, science, the environment, art and education. A longtime Smithsonian contributor, her work also appears in CityLab and the Boston Globe.

Read more from this author | Follow @amymcrawf

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smithsonian.com Why would we stop obeying the Constitution? When James Madison and his fellow statesmen drafted the Constitution, they created our system of government, with its checks, balances and sometimes awkward compromises. The laws of the United States are based on this document, along with the Bill of Rights, and for more than 200 years, Americans have held it sacred.

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I think that we need to do everything in our power to make sure racism does not spread but cancel culture who makes everyone and everything racist is discrediting real racism. For example the cat in the hat is being cancelled for apparently resembling black face. We should try and weed out real racist stuff and not give these meaningless things that arent really racist attention. - Jason Glassman

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I put my sticky in the middle because there are being things done to address racism but at the same time other things are not being address with racism. But I do agree sometimes things about racism are overkill but people should and are allow to say and believe want they want because America is a free country. -Olivia

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A familiar face is about to disappear from kitchens and store shelves.

After 131 years, Quaker Oats said it is retiring the Aunt Jemima name from its pancake mixes and syrup along with the image of a smiling African American woman.

The furor over the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody prompted the entire nation to re-examine racism and inequality between African Americans and other people of color, and white Americans.

Quaker Oats said it has been looking at its numerous brands to ensure they reflect company values and what customers expect.

"We recognize Aunt Jemima's origins are based on a racial stereotype. While work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough," spokeswoman Kristin Kroepfl said.

Activists have been trying for years to get the company to scrap the Aunt Jemima name and the picture on the box. They see it as a holdover from a time in the United States when many black women were seen as cheerful "mammy" characters and housekeepers.

The name Aunt Jemima was taken from a post-Civil War minstrel show and was used as the name for a new pancake flour in 1889.

The owner of the mix hired Nancy Green, a woman who was once enslaved, to pose for the picture and portray Aunt Jemima at fairs and other events, dressing her in a white apron and kerchief to cook pancakes for visitors.

White actresses also portrayed the character on radio programs and commercials in the 1930s and '40s.

The picture of Aunt Jemima on the pancake box has evolved over the years from an overweight, kerchief-headed woman to a slim, modern woman.

But no matter what she looks like, activists say Aunt Jemima was born out of slavery and must go.

Shortly after Quaker Oats made its announcement Wednesday, the global food giant Mars said its Uncle Ben's brand of rice would "evolve," without giving details. Uncle Ben's uses a portrait of an African American man as its trademark.

Earlier this year, Land O'Lakes dropped the picture of a Native American woman from its packages of butter and other dairy foods.

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For more than 70 years, the Confederate flag was a common and complicated sight at NASCAR races

Protesters tear down statue of 17th-century slave trader in Britain

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'Aunt Jemima' to Disappear From Store Shelves After 131 Years

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A familiar face is about to disappear from kitchens and store shelves. After 131 years, Quaker Oats said it is retiring the Aunt Jemima name from its pancake mixes and syrup along with the image of a smiling African American woman.

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I think there is some stuff that helps like affirmative action but i don't think the US is doing enough to educate the parts of the US where they might be ignorant

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I feel like that the US is not doing enough to address racism because there is still a lot of racism that is still around. If the US did enough, there would be less of that happening.

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I think the US Is not doing enough to address racism because there is still a major problem. Even though there have been many events, people are still ignorant and rude. And a lot of people don't understand. I feel people need to be more educated. When the BLM movement happened everyone was talking and supporting it, but as soon as people stopped protesting everyone stopped posting and it did not get as much attention.

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My sticky note is closer to the side that the US isn't doing enough to address racism. We see racist posts on social media everyday and as many times as we share and report the posts, more and more posts are made and there is no way to stop it. The government doesn't seem to do anything about the posts when they should be looking at social media apps and telling them to take them down. -Jenna

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The news talks about it a lot and tries to spread awareness but there is more that can still be done physically. Every place in the US is different and some are more racist than others. There are some places where racism will never go away but many places are getting better or have gotten better with it. - Aydan

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i think the fact that people are addressing that racism is a problem is progress, but if things are being completely taken care of these conversations wouldnt be so hard. it also seems a lot like a trend, everyone should be equal and treated equal, i dont understand why it has to be political, isnt it common sense?

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I put my sticky where it is because I feel like the US isn't solving any racial problems. I feel like the way they handled the capitol building being stormed compared to BLM protest is a great example of this. When people fight for the equality of black lives they are met with tear gas and police officers. I feel like the way the US handled this situation demonstrates how much work needs to be accomplished. - Sam

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I believe the US is not doing enough towards racism. There is a lot of hate crime against people only for their race. When you actually start bringing up the injustice, there is police backlash especially when it was BLM. Even now, there is a hate crime against Asians. There is inequality in the US and there isn't much talk about it. They are talked but forgotten.  -Alisha

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It matters where you are in the U.S. The state governments can be really bipolar, so it's hard to say whether or not the U.S is addressing racism correctly. The results that have been produced over the past 70 years are remarkable, but people think they aren't enough. As a whole, the U.S has made a lot of progress, but depending on where you are and what you're doing, everyone's exeriences and opinions can be different. - AJ

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the US still looks over a lot of poor areas in regards to lack of funding. They have more ethnic groups and a lot of the time they are discriminated against with payment and job acceptance. - alex grife

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I think the US is giving some efforts to help the racism crisis. I think we could do more to put words into action. -Jess

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I feel that we are doing a little less then we could be doing to address racism, but we aren't doing bad to address it. I feel that we are doing well to talk about it, but I feel that we should address racism more of a problem, and try to get rid of it.  - Shreyas

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I believe the US is not doing enough as a country to SOLVE the problem of racism. We DO have an overload of discussion and discourse about race that I think is overwhelming for people and turns a lot of people off from the issue, but I don't think there's enough action. I also feel like there is action sometimes in the wrong places (like renaming buildings, for instance, I'm not sure how much that does to help solve the problem of racism, it seems like more of a distraction from the actual issue). So what I want to think about is, what can we actually do about the problem?

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I think that we still have a lot of areas in US where people are uneducated, but for the most part we are doing a good amount to spread awareness of racism in this country. I would say that Affirmative Action is something that went overboard with helping the black community, but otherwise I don't think we have done anything to over-help the black community.

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Although many individuals and groups address racism, do their part and speak out against it, it is not enough. It is not enough to make a general statement that the US addresses it enough. It will be enough when there are no longer ignorant and uneducated people causing this issues to continue and still exist. Choosing to ignore it is part of the problem.

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Jonah Marcus- The news and many social media outlets were talking a lot about racism in America and the BLM movement while the protests were going on. As the protests died down though people started talking about it less as if racism just ended due to us being aware of it for a couple of months.

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I think people are overly addressing racism to the public society, now everything everyone does is considered ignorant or racist. The only thing that can truly fix racism is time and maybe including black history and culture in school curriculum. I believe the biggest thing that will help racism right now is training the police more properly. So there are a few things we could do to help but people can't expect immediate results like they do.