This can be healthy for America: equity is a discussion in need of updating, but only if the dialogue evolves beyond campaign unpleasantness over hair and cleavage, or name and religion, or MLK vs. LBJ.

Like most important issues, America’s progress towards gender and racial equity is trivialized in the media industry. Real quality-of-life and economic questions are degraded into a game of “gotcha” where the press waits for someone to slip up and then spends a dozen news cycles analyzing words before an apology is issued and the offender takes a breather in rehab.

A productive dialogue around equity in America needs new considerations, not least of which is looking where the debate diverges along generational lines. A whole generation has only known an America with Title VII; they grew up filling out applications with little bubbles to identify sex and ethnicity. They have a different perspective because of their experiences.

It’s not that they don’t see race and gender, but they may not immediately see those things as the obstacles that they historically have been. This, plus more tangible realities such as today’s more culturally inclusive middle class, and the financial emancipation of a generation of women should count as progress.

Today’s dynamics of race, sex and politics don’t breakdown cleanly: Sen. Obama’s gender and heritage did not bar him from winning white female voters in Iowa, nor are they cinching him South Carolina, where large numbers of black primary goers report favoring Sen. Clinton.

Likewise, the modern equity debate won’t fit neatly around traditional assumptions of privilege and victimization, government mandates or bootstrap pulling. There is room in the dialogue for both personal responsibility and realism about historic and institutional disparities. It will involve honest — if not always comfortable — dialogue, and in my opinion will come down to broadening access to quality education and sustainable economic opportunities. 

The new dialogue must include numbers, such as the AMA’s finding that women are two-to-three times less likely then men to receive life-saving treatments for heart disease; or The Economist’s report that only 31 percent of African-Americans born in the 1960’s now earn more than their parents, signaling a troubling reversal in economic upward mobility.

These are just two random figures that bring emotionally charged questions into specific relief. Numbers provide a better snapshot than Sen. Clinton’s neckline or Mel Gibson’s neurosis about where we must go as a nation that rightly holds the belief that we are all created equal as our highest ideal.