When Race Trumps Merit with Heather Mac Donald

We live in a society where Race Trump's Merit.

American companies are more interested in meeting diversity quotas than hiring the best and the most talented people. So how soon will it be until we have surgeons who don't know how to operate, pilots who can't fly, and what are the dangers of it all? New York Times best selling author Heather McDonald joins me to talk about our new book, When Race Trump's Merit. Here's Heether, Heather. I always love having you on the show. You're always willing

Lisa, It's such a pleasure to be with you, and you're one of the great interviewers out there, So thank you for having me on.

Well, that is very kind coming from you, so I really appreciate it. You know, so your book talks about disparate impact theory.

You know, what is it? What should people know about it?

Well, what they should know is that every major institution of American or Western civilization is now.

In the crosshairs.

It's all coming down unless we have a better explanation for racial disparities than racism. Right now, the left controls the discourse, and if there's any institution that has anything less than thirteen percent black representation in it, So if Google's engineering force is not thirteen percent black, or an elite law firm doesn't have thirteen percent black partners, the only allowable explanation at present is racism, and when that

If Blacks were not passing that.

Test at an equal rate, then the test has to throw out be thrown out. The idea is the test has a disparate impact, bad bad test.

We're going to blame the test. And now we're doing the same thing. We're getting rid of SATs, we're getting.

Rid of law school admissions tests. There's a big pressure on to get rid of the medical college admission test.

We're getting rid of grading in medical.

Licensing exams because Blacks don't do as well. So disparate impact is being used to take down every meritocratic standard. And it also explains if you're looking around your world for the last two three years since George Floyd, and you're saying, my god, what's going on with the criminal justice system. Why aren't these prosecutors prosecuting theft and shoplifting and resisting a rest and disorderly conduct and gun possession

What drove this or when did you start saying it take hold of a versus society.

Well, I've been watching the attack on merit and the idea that any kind of standard is racist for decades. But things really got insane. They got at a sort of psychotic breakdown, George Floyd, And that's when you had every single important institution in this country, whether it's the of science, of medicine, the arts, music, theater, basic functions of government, all standing up and saying we are by definition racist because we have too many whites in our organization.

Well, guess what.

That's what the demographics were. There was not discrimination going on against black classical music composers in the eighteenth century because.

There were none.

But right now, all you need to do to take down an institution or an individual is to say it's too white.

The New York.

Times will routinely, if it wants to discredit a judge or a prosecutor or a police officer, it will say a white judge. Here's a rule of thumb. If the race of a criminal is not identified, it's a black criminal, because if it's a white criminal, the New York Times at CNN will tell you it's a white criminal.

To be white today is to be at the bottom.

To be a white male, a straight white male, is to be at the absolute bottom of the totem pole. The reality today is not white privilege.

It's black privilege. If there's a privilege, it's family privilege.

But if you want to get your child into a selective school, hope that he is a underrepresented minority, and if he's a white male, you can kind of forget about it.

I mean, how hard would it be for a white male to get into college these days?

It's very hard.

I mean I got a friend sent me a notice he'd gotten from a friend. My friend teaches criminology at a military academy, about his daughter who has perfect SATs.

You have sixteen hundred SATs.

Perfect National Merit scholar, you know, a plus on every single AP course under the sun Honor Society's athlete. She's been waitlisted at every school she applied to because she's white. Being female doesn't even get her over the bar. And meanwhile, every school, every single selective college, employs vast racial preferences. It admits black and Hispanic students with SAT scores and GPAs that are so low that they would be automatically disqualifying if presented by whites and Asians.

But they're brought in, and these.

Racial preferences do their beneficiaries. Alleged beneficiary is no good whatsoever.

You're putting students up.

To fail, if you're catapulting them into a college for which they're not competitively prepared. Black students should go to college on the same terms as everybody else, which is with peers that share their academic qualifications.

It's cruel to put somebody.

If Mit admitted me with six hundreds on my math SATs and all my peers had eight hundred, in other words, a perfect score on the math SATs, and MIT said, oh, we have to have more females, We need more gender diversity. So it brings me in, what's going to happen to me my first year? I Am going to fail calculus because the teaching is pitched to my peers who had eight hundreds.

They had perfect math scores.

Well, that's what happens to black students that are admitted to selective colleges. They end up switching out of STEM majors, they end up at the bottom of their class. The law school data is utterly horrific. Black law students, you know, the vast majority end up at the bottom tenth of their classes. This is after neutral, color, blind, objective, non human graded tests. So we are watering down the caliber of our institutions. Medical schools are admitting students on the

We are playing with fire.

Lisa, Well, I'm awful at math, so you know, God helpt if they admitted me, and then and every and every teacher I would come across, so it would be it would be a headache for all involved.

Yeah, but these days, you know, you cannot be sure that you're not going to be chosen to had some mathematics counsel because you're a female.

I mean, that's what's going on math. You know, the American.

Association of Math Society is is always saying, oh, we're racist and we're sexist, and so I mean, I've been chosen. I was asked to be on some Fox Nation program on interest rates and I said, what, I don't know, I think about instruments. Am I a gender quota for you guys?

And they basically said yes. So it happens constantly.

Let's take a quick commercial break more with Heather MacDonald about when race Trump's merit. I mean, of course there's an impact to tell all of this, right, I mean we're talking about a lot of jobs, like the medical profession or engineering. I mean, so if you look at these professions where competency is critical to preserving life, what impact does this have? If we're leading people to posicians who aren't qualified.

It's going to eventually put lives at risk for sure. What's happening right now? Is it slowing down research? You have the federal science agencies that are telling labs you should hire if you're in Alzheimer's lab, you should not hire the most qualified scientists if they're white and Asian. You should hire on.

The basis of diversity.

Well, given the academic skills gaps. And you know, this is what I do here is actually give readers the data about why it is that diversity is at this point incompatible with meritocracy. You can have diversity or you can have meritocracy. You cannot have both. Here's the facts, Lisa. Sixty six percent of black twelfth graders do not even

Only seven percent.

Of black twelfth graders are competent in those skills. In other words, they can perform them, and the number who are advanced is so small to not even show up statistically. This is based on the National Association National Assessment of Education Progress. So it's got tens of thousands of students

No, it's not.

The reason is the academic skills gap.

But we have the federal.

Agencies now, the National Institutes of Health, national Science Foundation, telling labs you must have proportional representation in your lab or you ain't getting any more federal money. So we have decided that diversity is more important than medical progress, curing cancer or curing Alzheimer's disease.

You talk in your book, you're right.

The reality remains that a dysfunctional inner city culture is hindering black progress. You just talked about the skills gap that is happening. You had mentioned some of those scores where you know, unfortunately black students are being left behind.

So what do we do about that?

You know, talk a little bit about this dysfunctional inner city culture and what we can do to help You know where zip code, for instance, does it determine a child's future.

You know what I'm going to be really really stark and bleak here. There's what we can do is less. The culture has to heal itself.

There has to be an This is on academic achievement. You have this pervasive view that to study hard, to care about your studies and exams is acting white. So black students who do take their homework home and do it and are not truant, they're criticized for acting white. There's nothing that anybody else can do to fix that. The students have to study. You can't come from the outside and put that knowledge into students' heads. Parents have

They are acting out.

More Black teenagers males between the ages of fourteen and seventeen commit gun homicide at least at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens in those ages combined, at least.

And then we think that, well, if.

Those same teens that are gangbanging, we expect that they're being docile and obedient in classroom. And the only reason that explains the higher discipline rate is teacher racism. It's preposterous. No, I've seen these classrooms.

They are chaotic, and then the.

Teachers are told, you can't impose discipline because that has a desperate impact. Another key disparate impact theme. You can't impose those expulsions or suspensions because it has a disparate impact on unruly black students. So the first thing that has to happen is a cultural change. Yes, there's things that the rest of society have been trying for years, whether it's the conservative recipes of vouchers and charter schools.

The left would say we need more spending.

That's quite questionable given that many inner city schools on a per capita basis are funded at much higher rates than any other schools. The money is not the problem. The problem is the lack of a culture of academic achievements.

So do you think any sort of bring you just laying out the break down that's happening in schools, So do you think you know, obviously many of those of those a's and the right, you know, support school choice, So do.

You think that would have an impact?

I mean, I agree with you that parents are the most important thing in a child's life.

But you know, would school choice help well, I.

Think the data is kind of mixed.

Uh, I'm betraying my conservative policy want colleagues here. But certainly every parent that does want a stricter environment for.

His child should have that option. But it's not always clear.

You know that that inner city voters are voting for politicians that are promising these I mean, I think we've got a little bit.

Of a whitewash going on. We saw this as well with crime, with.

The Chicago neighborhoods that had the highest crime rates were the also ones that voted most for the anti police mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson in the recent Chicago mayoral election runoff, putting a somebody who believes that the police are racists in the mayoralty.

This is a total disaster.

So yes, it would help, but I think that the real problem again is culture, and you've got to have black leaders getting up there and saying, don't use the excuse of racism. You have efficacy, you have power, you have agency. And I am a supporter of what used to be called the no excuses charter schools, and you know.

They've gone left as well.

The insanity of this, you know, race trumping merit idea has has even poisoned some of the best charter schools and networks like KIP. This is an acronym k i PP that was founded by these two white civil rights activists and it had It was one of these no excuse of schools that every every everything a child did basically during the day was scripted.

They had to the students have.

To walk in line, the teachers have a very strictly regulated way of teaching, and they're basically trying to inculcate the self control and deferred gratification that these kids are not getting at home in these chaotic inner city homes, and to give them the ability to have the virtues, the bourgeois virtues of self control that will allow them to hold a job. So KIP was a good leader in this well.

After George Floyd.

They decided to retire their motto, which was work hard, be nice, because they thought that embodied white supremacist values. So another example of an institution that would rather flagellate itself for phantom racism. KIP was not a racist institution.

That's concerning to hear, you know, And it's always interesting to get different perspectives on the issue because that's how you learn, you know, getting different opinions, and you know, kind of just having those conversations you had mentioned Obama and Biden, you know, two people who are really intentionally trying to drive racial divisions in the country. You know what do they get from that? You know, what do they get from from driving this this equity stuff.

Self respect, self love? You know, they view themselves as superior to these yahoo maga hat wearing red state Americans, and so it's just an incredible infusion of virtue they feel. You know, the biggest virtue in America today is to be anti racist. Uh, nothing else really matters.

You know, being a good parent.

Raising law abiding children, staying married, accomplishing you know what, learning to the up most of your capacity.

That doesn't really get rewarded, but being anti racist does.

So they get acclaim and plaudits from the mainstream media and from academia. But it is they are parasites on a civilization that did value excellence and that believe that human beings should not be limited by by the trivialities of identity. Now, I am not going to pay over America's horrible history.

It's just sickening.

Hypocrisy that the centuries of gratuitous cruelty towards blacks. I mean, one wonders you know, who were these Southerners? They were absolutely insane in their hatreds and nastiness, and a lot of the North was for very long as well. So that is a reality, and it undercuts any facile conservative narrative about America being founded on equality. It was not.

We were a white supremacist state.

I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that, and it breaks my heart for our treatment of blacks for so long. But I can also say that that is not our reality today.

It is not.

There is not a single mainstream institution that is not twisting itself into to hire and promote as many blacks as possible. They are not facing discrimination from a single mainstream institution. And to continue making that as the predominant explanation means that we will continue tearing down our civilizational meritocratic standards for disparate impact, when the problem is not

Quick commercial break more with Heather on her new book When Race Trump's Merit. You know what, it also scares me because you look at some of these airlines too, who are saying that you know, they're going to focus on, you know, diversity in the hiring. You know, we're going to meet this fifty percent quote of the five thousand pilots it trains or the company trains in the next decade or whatever to be women or color or when I think most people are like, I just want.

To get home safely.

You know, I fly a lot, and so that's a concern of mine as well, of these airlines hiring people on the basis of meeting quotas as opposed to just hiring people who can get me safely.

To point A to point B.

You know, the left has moved from a quality to equity, you know, talk about that transition.

Well, I'm not sure.

Yeah, it's been a long time since we've had any sort of common sense.

Idea of equality.

I think certainly the great civil rights heroes of the nineteen fifties nineteen forties, they were thinking in terms of.

Equality and wanted to remove.

The horrific strictures that blacks were facing in both the South and the North. But even in the sixties, with the Civil Rights Acts, there were already little glimmers that this was going to move more very quickly into quotas and looking at equality of outcomes. And the problem with that is if the only reason anybody talks about this is because of the racial skills gaps and the crime gaps. If those gaps didn't exist, we wouldn't have this problem.

And yet we've got.

These solutions that mean that we can't even look at those gaps.

So the only reason.

And we have all these colleges talking about diversity is because if they admitted students on a color blind basis, on the basis of academic preparation, they wouldn't be in certain instances. But it gets complicated because you'd have a cascading effect. Eventually you'd have the same you would have the same number of blacks going to college black should go to college that you shouldn't go to colleges that they're not prepared for.

They should go to.

Like if you're a white male and you're admitted to Boston College, you're going to be prepared for Boston College, you know, if they even dained to let you in. If you have those same qualifications and you're black male, you'll be admitted to Harvard. But you're not prepared for Harvard, but you are prepared for Boston College.

So go to Boston College. It's not the end of the world, you know. The elitism in this discourse.

So anyway, it became very quickly not about equality. It became about outcomes and lowering standards, double standards everywhere.

And as I say, we are.

Playing with fire, and we need to have an alternative explanation. As I say, the only explanation now, all the New York Times needs to do is look at this law firm or that bank, or this cancer lab or that engineering department or architectural firm, and do the counting and the being counting.

And if it's not.

Racially proportionate racist left, no, it is impossible to be proportionally diverse and meritocratic at the same time, you can't have both because of the skills gaps.

And you've got to know this data, and we have to be prepared to start.

Fighting back against the left's discourse because we are losing things very fast, Lisa, well, and.

We're losing the country, you know, I mean equity of course, as a race to the bottom, and all those different institutions you had mentioned, and you know, these professions that you had mentioned, they're going to decrease in their ability to function, and as a society, we're going to decrease

Well, I think a lot in our world today it's all about race, and whites are very guilty. I mean, Shelby Steele was writing about this long ago of this dysfunctional, codependent relationship between white guilt and black victimhood, and nobody wants to They're terrified that the racial skills gaps are not going to close, and they don't want so. The only allowable explanation for that white sort of preemptively say, Okay,

Which is this inner city culture.

You know, right now, black juveniles are dying of gun homicide at one hundred times the rate of whites. That's a civil rights problem. It's not one that the activists want to talk about, because the reason that black juvenile are getting killed in gun homicide at one hundred times the rate is because they're committing gun homicide and as juveniles at that rate. This is post George Floyd. I gave you before the ten time number. Post George Floyd,

You have these teens sprang.

Bullets across sidewalks, not caring whom they hit.

If this was.

Happening to white kids, there'd be a revolution. But because it's blacks that are being mowed down, nobody wants to talk about it. Because it's blacks who were mowing them down. Dozens of blacks are killed every day in homicide. That's more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined. Nobody hears about them. So we're scared about that, And so meanwhile we're saying, oh, we've got to get rid of

So we've decided.

We're just going to get rid of the program. We're going to get rid of the standard. We blame the standards, We don't blame the skills gaps. Meanwhile, China is taking its most mathematically competent talent and throwing everything it's got at them. It's accelerating them, it's giving them intense mathematics education because.

It knows that this is war.

They are in a technological war with the US, and they are already beating us in many nanotechnologies. As we're sitting there dithering about whether mathematics is white supremacist, ablest, you know, misogynist, the Chinese are just saying, give it to me, you know, let me master this, and we're saying mastery is itself a form of white supremacy.

Well, I almost wonder, you know, if some of this is being driven by China when you look at things like TikTok and the fact that you know it is a Chinese company, which I think TikTok's done an incredible amount of damage to young people and sort of a brainwashing effect.

You know, did anything surprise you?

Obviously, you do a ton of research and writing these books, and New York Times bestselling author in writing this and in doing research, is there anything that surprised you in the process.

What surprised me was the willingness of the leaders of great traditions to completely cancel their own traditions.

I would that somebody.

That runs a classical music organization, an orchestra, or an opera company, or a great art museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Art Institute of Chicago, would feel so privileged to be in the position to curate this legacy, the civilizational legacy, and would say to young people, come and listen to my art, see my art. This is a form of sublimity. It will take you out of your narrow, petty self. And instead what I have seen, especially.

Post George Floyd, is leaders.

Of arts organizations, of medical schools, of physics, of art museum. They are all turning on their own tradition and blaming it for phantom racism. I cannot begin to understand that these are people who, in many cases have given their lives to sting or tradition, whether it's in physics or music, and they would rather throw completely fictional, lying accusations of racism at their own tradition than stand up and defend it before we go.

What do you hope people take away from this book when race strump's merit.

The courage not to apologize, the courage not to back down, the courage to have our alternative explanations for lack of racial proportionality, The understanding that Western civilization has nothing to apologize for. There is no civilization that was less equal than ours or more excuse me, more equal than ours, that cared more about equal rights and ours. The concepts that the left uses against the West, our Western concepts colonialism, slavery, predation,

Slavery of its own peoples. We have we have hurt people, We have extremity people. Yes, we have, so is everybody else.

But we have also given the world science, medicine, prosperity, freedom from hunger, equality, representative government. These are all Western concepts. We have to stop apologizing.

Heather, I always learned so much from you. I really appreciate you taking the time. Everybody go check out when Race Trump's Mara an important conversation to have the Thank you for bringing this conversation to the forefront, and thank you for being so fearless and what you do well.

Thank you for giving me a voice with yours, Lisa, I greatly appreciate it.

Those Heather MacDonald. I appreciate her joining the show. She's so smart, she does so much research. I always learn so much from her when I have her on the show, so I appreciate her time. I want to thank you guys at home for listening to the show every Monday and Thursday, but of course you can listen to it whenever you want. Please leave us a review, give us a rating on Apple Podcast. I want to thank John Cassio and my producer for putting the show together.

Until next time,