Equity Washing

Most of the time we heard about green washing. It means corporates or agencies trying to enhance their image of corporate social reponsibility on good environmental practices, but however with very tokenism real action. Most of the time it is a mere public relation exercise. For the first time in a lecture, I heard about equity washing. According to Mr Mitchell Silver, the Chief Planning and Development Officer of City of Raleigh, North Carolina that equity washing refers to an action of treating the marginalised people with justice and fairness, but in actual it is not but merely an exercise to ambush the public and getting the general public into believing that justice has been done. It is happening daily especially with entities that are financially sound and require a good public image. It is also happening because the vulnerable group, or so called beneficiaries cannot afford to say NO them. It is a struggle that the marginalised people has no bargaining power at all, I think.