When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

by Heather Mac Donald

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, all of the major institutions of American society and culture – from corporations and universities to media and entertainment to the arts and sciences – have embraced the view that the only way to reckon with systemic racism is to ensure equality of outcome. In her brand new book, When Race Trumps Merit, Heather Mac Donald exposes how the application of such a radical theory is not only undermining our academic standards but is poised to cause real harm and damage to society by lowering standards in science and medicine, erasing classic music and art, undermining military preparedness, and compromising the safety of our cities—and will ultimately eradicate Western civilization as we know it.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Race, Sociology, Cultural, Society, Social Science

320 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 2023

About the author

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. She is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize. Mac Donald’s work at City Journal has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, policing, homelessness and homeless advocacy, criminal-justice reform, and race relations. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Mac Donald's newest book, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (2018), argues that toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.

Mac Donald’s The War on Cops (2016), a New York Times bestseller, warns that raced-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. Other previous works include The Burden of Bad Ideas (2001), a collection of Mac Donald’s City Journal essays, details the effects of the 1960s counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions. In The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan than Today’s (2007), coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, she chronicles the effects of broken immigration laws and proposes a practical solution to securing the country’s porous borders. In Are Cops Racist? (2010), another City Journal anthology, Mac Donald investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the anti-profiling lobby’s harmful effects on black Americans.

A nonpracticing lawyer, Mac Donald clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a volunteer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She has frequently testified before U.S. House and Senate Committees. In 1998, Mac Donald was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York.

A frequent guest on Fox News and other TV and radio programs, Mac Donald holds a B.A. in English from Yale University, graduating with a Mellon Fellowship to Cambridge University, where she earned an M.A. in English and studied in Italy through a Clare College study grant. She holds a J.D. from Stanford University Law School.

At the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation's 2018 annual meeting in downtown Los Angeles, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Mac Donald, “the greatest thinker on criminal justice in America today.”

Reviews

[Damian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an uncomfortable, depressing, and deeply disturbing work of journalism, but one that is vitally important in the current American moment.

Few journalists or public figures in America are willing to speak of the issues this book covers, so credit is due Heather Mac Donald for having the sheer courage to write and publish this book at all. With our government and virtually all of our institutions falling over themselves to espouse and promote a narrative of "white supremacy" in the service of disparate impact theory, the facts and figures thoroughly documented in this book become increasingly important for their rarity.

I am certain that if it hasn't happened already, Mac Donald will be getting some major pushback from all corners if this book were to be noticed by mainstream media or political pundits. So I'll say a few things about this book for those who are interested, but concerned about whether its content amounts to little more than far-right race-baiting. It does not.

Everything Mac Donald says in this book is backed up by raw data, thoroughly and conclusively. So much so that the readability of the book actually suffers for it, because the overwhelming majority of the book is simply stated fact after stated fact. There is very little in the way of a moral perspective taken here to even argue with, beyond the assertion that the arts and sciences should be merit-based and racially blind, and that law enforcement should be conducted in service to law and order in a racially blind way as well. Everything else in this book is raw facts and figures, painstakingly documented. No pontificating, no speculating, no pandering. There is no debating what Heather Mac Donald says here for anyone beholden to the truth. None.

The third section of the book on law enforcement is the most devastating to read for anyone with an ounce of empathy, because it reveals how the statistics that are twisted by our institutions to promote a narrative of "white supremacy" and "institutional racism" on the part of police, actually demonstrate the disturbing plight of inner-city black families and the dire need for more policing to ensure their safety from primarily black criminality. If that sentence makes you uncomfortable, then you more than anyone else must read this book, because either you have been severely misled, or you are willfully ignorant and a part of the problem.

Finally, for those who would brand Heather Mac Donald a racist for writing this book--you have no valid argument. You have no care whatsoever for the truth or for innocent black lives, only for the narrative that makes you money or earns you feel-good points on the internet. Educate yourself and repudiate this insanity, or shut the fuck up.

This isn't a light read that will put you in a good mood. Mac Donald is primarily interested in laying out facts, and unfortunately spends little time on potential solutions in her conclusion, which is about the only criticism I can offer this piece. However, it is worth reading because it is incredibly important, and is one of the only places you will find this kind of reporting untainted by political punditry or grandstanding for one candidate or another. It is a warning klaxon for where we are headed on a local and national level, and she deserves all the credit for having the courage to sound it at great personal and professional risk to herself.

[Armin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Important, articulate, and unassailable. But mostly very, very sad. Mac Donald is chronicling the slow death of American and western culture.

[Steve Eubanks · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book, well researched and written in gripping prose. All the points are clear and indisputable. Race has clearly become a cudgel to bludgeon anyone and anything that is merit based. It’s another regurgitation of communism, which has always needed an emotional wedge to drive people apart and make them accept crazy ideas.

My criticism is that while all her points are unassailable, Mac Donald chose some pretty high-brow examples that escape the reach of a broader audience. Yes, race is overwhelming merit in every profession, certainly in education. But opera might not be the best microcosm through which to make the point. Does the guy who owns an auto repair shop in Tennessee care that racialism has overwhelmed the casting of The Marriage of Figaro? Or that The Magic Flute is now being performed by artists chosen for their skin color? As a principle, yes. But there sure seem to be more universally relatable examples.

That aside, Mac Donald’s courage in tackling this subject should not be underestimated. I fear the retaliation that will almost certainly come from just reviewing her work. It’s what communism does.

This is definitely worth a read.

[Jason Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The word 'gaslighting' has perhaps been overused lately. But that may be because the practice itself has become so prominent (and successful).

In no area of which I am aware has the American public been gaslit so much than in the mythology surrounding systemic racism. The narrative is so prevalent and so ubiquitous that one may be forgiven for assuming its essential basis in truth.

And no author of whom I am aware is laying bare the facts more clearly and consistently than Heather MacDonald. In the latest of her books, she brings the data once again and this time with a warning. Because of the explosion of DEI initiatives and a passive acceptance of the demonstrably false narrative around systemic racism, the practical result will have dire consequences. Our science, engineering, law, and medical schools have begun rejecting objective tests of merit in favor of race-based quotas. The doctors who will be caring for our grandchildren will receive more social justice and less medical training. The competency tests are being watered down to enable sufficient numbers of minorities to qualify and in many cases are being eliminated altogether.

The same thing is happening in the arts, which covers about one-third of this volume.

America is committing suicide at the altar of wokeism. The meritocracy that made this country the world's leader in science and technology is already giving way to the mediocrity of racial quotas. The leading indicators in the form of math and reading competencies in our primary and secondary schools predict a grim future.

And yet the march goes on.

MacDonald's book suffers from being somewhat repetitive and a bit too long, perhaps, but is still a necessary contribution to the national conversation on race, to the extent that any 'conversation' is even possible.

[Cav · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The year 2020 may go down as a pivotal moment in American history. Major institutions—from corporations and the media to higher education and professional sports—endorsed the view that the United States is defined by systemic racism..."

When Race Trumps Merit was a good, albeit terrifying look into the current insane state of Western Civilization's pathological groupthink. The book is my second from the author, after her 2018 book: The Diversity Delusion, which was another excellent read.

Author Heather Lynn Mac Donald is an American conservative political commentator, essayist, attorney, and writer.

Heather Mac Donald:


I'll say right up front that most of the material covered here will be borderline unbelievable to someone who has not been paying attention to the culture war in the last decade or so. Which is to say, if you gave this book to the average person as recently as 10 years ago, they would have laughed it off as no more than ridiculous satire. Well, laugh all you want, but the inmates are running the asylum now, and the push for ideological conformity has hit its tipping point.

Mac Donald has a great writing style, that is both informative and engaging. She's a super-sharp mind, and a very competent writer. I generally enjoy the content that she produces.
She gets the writing here off on to a great start, with a high-energy intro, that lays out the scope of this modern insanity.

The quote from the start of this review continues:

"...The death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer in May 2020 epitomized such bias, according to elite opinion leaders. The riots following Floyd’s death were portrayed as a wake-up call: address America’s pervasive discrimination or face even greater disruption.
Those fiery months spawned a cultural revolution that could prove as transformative as its 1960s antecedent. That earlier youth-led upheaval challenged the adult establishment’s allegedly oppressive norms of propriety in the name of liberation. This time the targets are the very fundamentals of a fair society: meritocracy, fealty to the rule of law, and respect for our civilizational inheritance. All are now tarred as impediments to racial justice.
The driving concept behind this revolution is disparate impact. Under this ideology, any standard or behavioral norm which negatively and disproportionately affects blacks is presumed to be a tool of white supremacy. If academic admissions standards for colleges and high schools result in a student body in which the percentage of black students is less than that of the national population (13 percent), then those standards must be lowered for the sake of racial equity. If the enforcement of criminal law results in a prison population that is more than 13 percent black, then that enforcement must be unwound. If hiring and promotion criteria mean that a workplace is not proportionally “diverse,” then those criteria must be abandoned.
Disparate impact analysis first arose in the law as a way to expand then reach of civil-rights-era discrimination statutes. Those early statutes banned deliberate discrimination: an employer could only be found guilty of a civil rights violation if he intentionally discriminated against a minority applicant. A 1971 Supreme Court case, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., changed that rule.1 Even if an employer had no intent to discriminate and had used color-blind standards for hiring or promotion, the court held that he could still be liable under the 1964 Civil Rights Act if those job requirements - such as a certain level of literacy or a high school diploma— disproportionately affected underrepresented minorities and were not required by business necessity."

Mentioned above, disparate impact analysis is at the heart of this recent push for diversity agendas. She writes:

"The driving concept behind this revolution is disparate impact. Under this ideology, any standard or behavioral norm which negatively and disproportionately affects blacks is presumed to be a tool of white supremacy. If academic admissions standards for colleges and high schools result in a student body in which the percentage of black students is less than that of the national population (13 percent), then those standards must be lowered for the sake of racial equity. If the enforcement of criminal law results in a prison population that is more than 13 percent black, then that enforcement must be unwound. If hiring and promotion criteria mean that a workplace is not proportionally “diverse,” then those criteria must be abandoned..."
"...And now, even the greatest achievements of the West are being subjected to disparate impact analysis. The most devastating charge that can be levelled against a tradition today is that its practitioners have historically been white. Classical music, European art, and science are on the defensive for their demographic past as well as for inadequate “diversity” in the present. Objectivity, individualism, a respect for the written word, perfectionism, and promptness have been tarred as markers of whiteness because insisting on those values has a disparate impact on blacks."

The contents of the book proper are mainly a blow-by-blow account of how this line of thinking has permeated just about every aspect of our modern-day cultural landscape. Racialized politicking has now completely taken over. Most of what is covered here is likely to completely shock those unfamiliar.

Some of the examples talked about here by Mac Donald includes:
• Medical associations
• Classical music; orchestras, Julliard Music School
• Casting roles in theatre
• Ballet
• Museums; The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Law and order; crime, crime rates. Chicago's out of control crime.
• The Derek Chauvin trial and aftermath
• The disastrous "defund the police" initiative

In a stroke of supreme irony, and apparently towards efforts to correct the historical problem of racism, modern institutions have not stopped making race-based decisions. They have instead just switched the groups around.

Which brings us around to identifying the common thread that underlies this ideology. Although not mentioned directly by the author here, the modern-day leftist victimology, grievance collection and offense archeology are just cultural, or neo-Marxism. Historically, Marxist socialism broadly separated the population into two distinct groups; the oppressive bourgeoisie, and the oppressed proletariat - each who were where they were because of the other. This zero-sum, low-resolution view of the world has resulted in a disastrous social experiment that left roughly 100 million dead in the last 100 years.

Cultural or neo-Marxism has just substituted by proxy the groups it considers "oppressed" and "oppressors." White people have now replaced the farm owners and landlords of old, and people of colour and other assorted purported "victims" have replaced the old peasant class.
One only has to pick up a book about Lenin's/Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, or Chavez's Venezuela to see where this line of thinking leads, if left unchecked.

This race-based Marxist worldview does not take into account that there are such things as group-level differences; in many different areas and fields (mentioned above). It has also prevented the objective examination of the facts and statistics around crime. If you are unable to identify where the problems actually lie, then any possible solutions will never be found. She writes:

"These double standards now predominate. Elite “anti-racists” absolve blacks from responsibility for their actions. All crime is the result of racism, if such crime is even acknowledged. This patronizing attitude is today’s real racism, and it guarantees that the bourgeois behavioral gap—the cause of lingering socioeconomic disparities—will continue. (Bourgeois values include respect for authority and the law, hard work, self-discipline, and deferred gratification.) No one in a position of elite authority is sending the message that society expects blacks to live by the same standards as other groups (even if those other groups abide by such standards imperfectly). Instead, we are unwinding every objective standard of conduct and achievement—whether it’s the criminal code or academic proficiency requirements for school and employment—if enforcing that standard has a disparate impact on blacks."

She closes the book with a great bit of writing, where she drops these quotes; speaking to the dangers of disparate impact analysis:

"America turns its eyes away from this pathological culture and blames itself for phantom racism. We pretend that the reason for the lack of proportional representation in institution after institution is racist measures of achievement rather than vast academic and behavioral gaps. As a remedy for this alleged racism, we create double standards of accomplishment and behavior. But double standards help no one. They are condescending, and they are lethal. The crime wave that began after the death of George Floyd claimed thousands of additional lives, mostly black, and there is no end in sight to the spreading anarchy. The redefinition of excellence in the medical profession, in engineering, and in other STEM fields will prove lethal as well.
Unless the criminal justice system goes back to enforcing the law without fear of disparate impact, vigilantism will rise, as law-abiding Americans lose faith that the state will protect their lives and property. White and Asian flight from “diverse” cities and communities will accelerate. And the willingness of non-elite Americans to acquiesce in the fiction that they are white supremacists may eventually give out. Ideally, that vanished acquiescence would lead to an overdue defense of the Western heritage and of color-blind standards. It may, however, result in a country violently divided along racial lines."

***********************

When Race Trumps Merit was well done, but it's a pretty depressing book, tbh...
It looks like the communist long march through the institutions is just about complete now.
I don't know when and/or where all this insanity will end. Soon, I hope, or God help us all...
5 stars.

[Sabin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do you remember the George Floyd riots? Do you remember the outrage and the protests and the Black Lives Matter organization(s) and how stuff started to change afterwards? Well Heather Mac Donald remembers them very well and she’s telling us how badly it’s interfering with her enjoyment of classical music, opera and the Met exhibitions.

This book is quite simple, both in purpose and structure. The purpose is to show how new regulations and public pressure have changed the activity of certain domains like higher education, science research, the arts and how they have, ultimately, impacted the law-and-order establishment that her corner of the US is so proud of. The structure is translates loosely to this: Medicine shouldn’t worry about racial differences since the left says race is a cultural construct anyway, diversity in scientific research means that you can’t use government funding to get the best researchers on the project because you have to fill diversity quotas, a lot of problems with classical music, the musicians, the schools, the composers and the repertoire, something about museums and their unfair focus on white racism instead of an equal treatment for all forms of art, no matter their origin (quote: “the greatest sin of the diversity crusaders is to teach students to revile some of the most sublime creations of the human spirit”), then the fact that people can’t speak out against this treatment because they lose status or their job and, finally, the issues with the police, the crime numbers in aggregate and the dangers of more crime. Honestly, this is real evidence of stuff that is hard to understand from my vantage point. However, on an instinctual level, there are some things that I’d tend to agree on, like a refusal to treat African art and history with the same scrutiny as its European counterpart. As an aside, I also agree that anti-racism, the ideology which underpins some of these cultural choices, at least as presented in the for kids version of the shortened version of Ibram X. Kendi’s book, Stamped, is just stupid.

But one thing’s clear. Whatever is being done now to address the discrepancies between different populations in the US is not working and creates tension between racial groups, unrest, resentment and it also widens the ideological gap. Everybody says it and they all seem to get it wrong. Case in point, the solution is nowhere to be seen in this book.

[Edwin F. Bogdanowicz · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ugly truth

This book does a great job of laying out the facts, methodically, to advance the thesis that merit is no longer driving our institutions. As a child in the 70s and 80s, I remember the debates about affirmative action well. They said that it was temporary, a necessary evil to right previous wrongs. Now, we have moved on to outright quotas. I only wish this was required reading for policy makers.

[John Reis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read her The Burden of Bad Ideas many years ago.

First off, the lack of an index costs this book one-star.

MacDonald‘s book is about how after four decades of affirmative action in the numbers of doctors, the numbers of scientists, the number of orchestra musicians is not very much greater than it was 40 years ago. It is claimed that this has nothing to do with personal choices but rather with systemic racism and white privilege.

The thinking seems to be that by making people feel good today and giving them positions they have not earned, racially motivated advancement will have no long-term consequences for the population or the institution involved. But how can that be?

If qualification tests are eliminated and people are invited into a program based solely on their skin color how can one expect good performances? Is it always about race? Or are qualifications merely an example of white supremacy? Isn’t it rather that the health of the patient or the structural integrity of the bridge is the standard by which to judge a hire?

We are facing a strong wind, which has been blowing for over 40 years. The wind is the notion of racial proportionality, which is that no matter what institution you examine its participants and members must be racially proportionate to the national numbers. From what I understand every piece of a hologram contains the entire image. I have no idea how that works. But the notion is that if the US population is 14% black then blacks should make up 14% of the members of a faculty, lawyers in a law firm, symphony, a hospital, etc.

Chapter 1 looks at medicine. Chapter 2 looks at the sciences. Chapter 3 looks like classical music. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the mistreatment of Beethoven. Chapter 6 and look at opera in the culture wars. Chapter 8 looks at Juilliard. Chapters 9, 10 and 11, look at the politicization of the museums.

Some of the stories mentioned are familiar. They were big enough to make it into the national press. But for the most part, the national press never discusses the downside of this focus on identity.

When one of these stories pops up somewhere one wonders if this is an example of making a mountain out of a molehill. This is some bizarre reaction to an event. It’s isolated. These new conditions in this place are not a reflection of the conditions and all places.

But a book like this catalogs hundreds of examples. It shows that the acceptance of a wild accusation against one person or institution can be applied systematically to the rest of the institutions in their field. And then the field is diminished as a result.

In the chapter on Swan Lake, it is mused by some that perhaps classical dance should be eliminated as a form of dance, since it represents white European dance forms. I suppose that is not too far off.

For the most part, it is too soon to write a book like this. If it is true, that race trumps merit in the case of hiring, then the immediate results would only be a huge change to the population of the institution.

The future performance of the institution or its very existence, or customer base, would take some time to come to fruition. But it is true that if every single institution in America now has a goal of antiracism, it does seem to me that the clients, patients and customers will lose the previous variety found in the arts, when the mission itself was art.

Hiring anyone for any reason other than merit is a mistake. Anyone who has worked for a small company when the owner brings in family members knows this. Incompetence follows them. They gather followers to their side, who get special treatment. They blame others for their mistakes. Then resentment sets in among the rest of the workforce. And then they begin to leave.

Contrary to critical race theory, we are not simply or fundamentally members of groups. We are first and foremost individuals. Liberals and conservatives vilify collectivism. Alas, liberals no longer do. The use of collective terms in our language must be used carefully. The use of “Blacks” or “whites” as collective terms might be linguistic conveniences, but they can be very dangerous. They encourage groupthink and tribalism.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is filled with examples about institutions that have swapped ideology for merit when choosing people, art, music and. Legal actions. We all know that it’s true, but we also know that anyone who speaks out against the “ideology first” narrative will be ruined. They’ll lose their job and be banished from the market and from society. It’s like the inquisition, if you don’t accept the dogma, you’ll be burned at the stake. None of it makes sense. Choosing doctors based on their activism rather than their skills is just crazy. Dismissing Beethoven, Mozart et al because they’re all white Europeans is insane. Their musing has passed the test of time. If people want to add other races to music the people they add should be of the same quality as the masters. The same is true art. We shouldn’t dismiss art because it was produced by white men. Thats the worse kind discrimination because we lose so much values. The book is filled with anecdotal and statistical evidence. That makes it valuable and boring at the same time. I listened on audible and had to listen in short chunks to keep from drifting off

[Alex Edmundson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could give this book more stars. Everyone needs to read this book

[Jon-Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

This kind of book is not my normal fare, but I was interested by the hypothesis I read in a review. Mac Donald's hypothesis is that the meaning of "systematic racism" boils down to what is called in the context of civil rights law, "disparate impact." Most of the book is the usual nutpicking and statistical gish gallop that leave little doubt about the author's views, or her objectivity. There is the usual out-of-context quotation of certain politicians and the bolstering of the context of certain others. It is a conservative's book for a conservative audience.

Still Mac Donald has an interesting lens to understand something critical to current politics. In civil rights law, there is a concept whereby employers can be held liable for discrimination even if there is a neutral rule if the result impacts a protected class. There's more to it than that, of course, but as is often the case the original legal concept only survives in a Cliff's Notes version when it escapes into the punditocracy.

It's interesting because intersectionality is similar. Kimberle Crenshaw rose to fame for her work on a situation where black women were facing discrimination both because they were black women even though the employer wasn't, at least by the applicable standards, discriminating in particular against blacks or women. Yet once this concept lept into the Internet and the pundit class, it took on a less specific meaning and formed the basis for guiding leftist politics management of overlapping identities.

If Mac Donald is right, the discourse around "systematic racism" boils down to a broad application of disparate impact to, well, everything.

Unlike Mac Donald, I think disparate impact is good enough to form a prima facie case there there is some discrimination taking place somewhere. Where I agree with her is that the inquiry should not stop there, since simply tweaking the stats won't always, or even usually, fix the underlying problem.

People's political beliefs change over their lives, but one that I've always held is that real affirmative action would take place in pre-school and kindergarten, not to see who goes to a top 12 law school and who goes to a top 25, something I wrote in a piece for the University of Hawaii's student newspaper decades ago. It is well documented that outcomes are affected much more by early childhood than later on. Not that I would object to fixing everything all the way up, but that's where I would start.

Perhaps this is because I misunderstood the intent. If the program was meant to legitimize elites by giving them proportional representation, then who goes to Yale Law makes more sense. But if it's actually a matter of broad social justice, it makes little. If you want to legitimize the ever increasing wealth disparities, one way to do it is to take away a racial basis for the 1%. But this helps the other 99% little in any way other than symbolically, which, I will grant matters more than you might think. Yet I don't get the sense that Mac Donald would countenance an education reform program measured in then tens of billions like I would.

It is also not the case that causes need be mutually exclusive. It can be the case, for example, that Black incarceration rates are disproportionate for many reasons. It doesn't need to be that it is all down to racist cops, as some suggest, or something else altogether as Mac Donald seems to. I suspect there are multiple causes behind this, but simply writing it off as some kind of original sin is only slightly less nihilistic than blaming it on some immutable racial characteristic. The first question I always wonder about is, what happens when you control for poverty. If you do that and there is still a racial disparity, I tend to think the case moves from prima facie to guilty until proven innocent. Unfortunately, our current politics seems unwilling to shed light on poverty, which is something other nations have shown how to confront, even if nowhere in the world seems to get identity politics quite right.

The middle third of the book is taken up with woke nutpicking in the classical music world of all things. This is, I think, Mac Donald's "western civilization is collapsing due to wokeness" offer. But, with apologies to her apparent love for it, classical music has been in decline long before even the hippies were making conservatives seethe. That the remaining organizations are using woke politics to elbow each other out of what little funding remains shouldn't be a surprise at all. If it wasn't that, it would be something else.

Mac Donald seems to have little sympathy with the minorities in question. This is a shame because a much stronger version of this book would argue how this approach of using statistics to find a problem and then focusing more on the statistics than the problem is actually harmful to everyone involved. In some cases, surely it is a "pipeline" problem, but in others it surely is not.

Some groups of people may simply exercise their freedoms and choose to participate in certain activities less, like classical music, not due to racism but because in a society where choice is given, one might prefer rock music, pop music, rap, or country. I don't think rap music is the end of civilization as we know it, either. On the other hand, there is probably a less benign reason for things like the under-representation of Blacks in things like Oscars and starting quarterback roles, both fields where you find an overrepresentation of Blacks in all the roles except the leading ones. Again, I think the mistake on both ends of this argument is oversimplification and overgeneralization.

Like most anti-woke books, it fails to land for me. Yascha Mounk's book is one exception. This book has an interesting hypothesis worth considering, but offers little in the way of advancing it in a non-polemical, constructive way.

[Mike Lisanke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with this author's assessment of Diversity Equity and Inclusion DEI policy and directives applied by Corporations companies and our government. And while this book does a wonderful describing How that DEI happens and the Damage its doing to US (our society) and the ability for US to conserve our culture... it does almost nothing to explain Why this is being done now!

IMO the answer to the Why question is certain... we are living in a Communist Color Revolution in America, and they are attempting to destroy all of American Culture and foment race riots and civil war. It's actually told in story by Hollywood (funded by Obummer itself).

So, the author does Not have a perfect or complete book. She can't bring herself to ascribe motive to the cultural destruction. And writes as if somehow American institutions (all of them) woke up and decided to Equalize Outcome among the races in America (because they think it'll be good for US)... and that's just Bullshit. And we know Black Rock and other big money are behind this woke agenda and the reason why is as I state above.

[Benjamin Reardon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn’t finish this one. Not because it isn’t a great or informative read (it 100% is, and the provided evidence against DEI-hiring is proven and trustworthy), but because it’s been three years since the start of this DEI-hiring craze. It’s self-evident that merit is under attack, and I’ve witnessed it in real time over the last three years, so I’m not really gaining anything from reading it; I’m familiar with most of the evidence Heather Mac Donald cites because I read about it as it unfolded since 2020.

Still 100% recommend this book. Very informative, grounded in verifiable facts, very focused. Perhaps DEI may have been founded with good intentions (though I don’t believe so), but, if so, it has spiraled wildly out of control into a “reverse racism.”

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe 3.5

Another polarizing offering by HMD. This one is sure to make everyone angry, albeit for different reasons.

[Kris]

Zach says read this.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Race Trumps Merit by Heather MacDonald

A black cover with white text

AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Heather MacDonald’s book is a firehose of information. It canvases the events of the last half-dozen years and provides the receipts about the sea change we have lived through. This is a useful service. Even to someone who has been paying attention, the sheer volume of gaslighting and Orwellian euphemisms that we have lived through renders the period an amorphous blur.[1] MacDonald’s book looks back on the record, fixing the relevant facts in a relatively permanent matrix. The book is worth having as a historical record alone.

MacDonald’s principal thesis is that the legal doctrine of disparate impact” has fueled the 'cultural revolution’ we have seen, where our elites hand out privilege based on racial identity rather than merit.[2] MacDonald explains:

The driving concept behind this revolution is disparate impact. Under this ideology, any standard or behavioral norm which negatively and disproportionately affects blacks is presumed to be a tool of white supremacy. If academic admissions standards for colleges and high schools result in a student body in which the percentage of black students is less than that of the national population (13 percent), then those standards must be lowered for the sake of racial equity. If the enforcement of criminal law results in a prison population that is more than 13 percent black, then that enforcement must be unwound. If hiring and promotion criteria mean that a workplace is not proportionally “diverse,” then those criteria must be abandoned.

Disparate impact analysis first arose in the law as a way to expand the reach of civil-rights-era discrimination statutes. Those early statutes banned deliberate discrimination: an employer could only be found guilty of a civil rights violation if he intentionally discriminated against a minority applicant. A 1971 Supreme Court case, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., changed that rule.1 Even if an employer had no intent to discriminate and had used color-blind standards for hiring or promotion, the court held that he could still be liable under the 1964 Civil Rights Act if those job requirements—such as a certain level of literacy or a high school diploma—disproportionately affected underrepresented minorities and were not required by business necessity.

Disparate impact analysis has been used to invalidate school discipline policies,2 bank lending standards,3 and written tests for first responders.4 Now the disparate impact approach has jumped from judicial opinions and the Code of Federal Regulations into the world at large. Disparate impact analysis is no longer primarily a legal tool but a cultural one. Even if it were extirpated from the law, it would continue to alter our world by discrediting high standards and color-blind policies.

The key to disparate impact thinking is the presumption of racial proportionality. Absent some form of unfairness, it is assumed that the racial demographics of every institution would match that of the population at large. If blacks are underrepresented in science research labs or overrepresented among arrested felons, the only allowable explanation is racism. The possibility that such racial disparities reflect the actual distribution of skills or differences in behavior is taboo.

Mac Donald, Heather. When Race Trumps Merit (pp. 6-8).

All of this is true, but I don’t think that leftwing elites move directly from legal doctrine to a weltanschauung. “Disparate impact” analysis and Woke/DEI culture both appeal to a shared pool of shallow reasoning that confuses correlation with causation, namely, since racial proportions are disparate, race must be the cause for the disparity. More sophisticated analysis often relies on factors that are not readily apparent. Such thinking can appear ad hoc, or even like “legalese” to paraphrase the Biden appointee to the Supreme Court, i.e., “bafflegab” designed to confuse the issue when the truth is apparent and obvious to anyone who can see the obvious.[3]

But this worldview does not arise merely from laziness. Anyone who has read the post-modern jargon that passes for thought in leftist-race-reasoning knows that leftists put a lot of effort into making their inane arguments that “color-blindness” is “racism.” As MacDonald points out repeatedly, the Left piles the double standards high, condemning whites for things that blacks may freely do. No one accomplishes this feat without the ability to keep separate mental ledgers of accounts.

There is something more than stupidity going on here. I think part of it may be a matter of love. Leftists love to hate America. MacDonald’s book provided an answer to a question that cropped up this week when it was reported that only approximately 36% of leftists are “extremely proud” to be American. In contrast, Republicans have remained at around 90% for the last 20 years, even when the other party has held the presidency.[4] Democrats, on the other hand, began their slide from 90% to 36% starting in 2012.

What happened in 2012?

The answer is that in approximately 2012, President Obama and the power structure of the Democrat Party determined that the principle message of the Democrat Party should be that White America was irredeemably racist. Democrat elites started promoting stories about blacks whom police officers had shot. It did not matter that these blacks were often criminals and they had acted in ways that threatened police officers or black civilians. This agenda allowed the coinage of the new concept of “white Hispanic” to fit George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin fit the paradigm. Between 2012 and 2024, there was a torrent of news stories and opinion pieces about white systemic racism. Democrats bought into this toxic narrative, leading to this statistical phenomenon:

A graph with red and blue lines

AI-generated content may be incorrect.
As MacDonald shows, this toxic ideology has polluted science, art, and criminal law.

The most significant concern for America as a whole may be in the realm of science. Racial identity politics is being used as effectively as Lysenkoism to end the careers of talented scientists while pushing the careers of mediocrities. Smart students know that the leaders being held up as models are ignorant after a few minutes of conversation and may leave the field. It may take 100 years to correct.


In addition, a significant amount of time is being wasted on the ideology of DEI. Time is a finite resource, and time spent attending committee meetings about DEI is time not spent on curing cancer. I read this book while reading Frank Dikotter’s “Mao’s Great Famine.” The parallels between Marxist nonsense with “struggle sessions” and servile fear of retaliation between being a Marxist subject and an academic scientist are overwhelming. American science was once able to eclipse the Marxist world because of its freedom from such nonsense; that is no longer the case.

MacDonald spends a good deal of time on the boorish destruction of ballet, opera, classical music, and museums in the name of “inclusion.” If inclusivity continues for much longer, there will no longer be a “high art” for anyone to appreciate. I was most impressed by MacDonald’s discussion of how the Metropolitan Museum of Art managed to reverse aesthetic judgment so that black artists could be feted for what was condemned in white artists. What sold me on MacDonald’s argument was looking at the two relevant art pieces.

Immediately below is “Why Born Enslaved” by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Because Carpeaux was white, this piece is described as perpetuating “a Western tradition of representation that long saw the Black figure as inseparable from the ropes and chains of enslavement.” MacDonald describes the Met’s presentation of this piece as basically part of the perpetuation of “white supremacy.”

A white bust of a person

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On the other hand, the piece below – Forever Free by Edmonia Lewis - gets glowing praise for style, impact, and theme. This piece also features a chain, but not as “an enslaved and racialized type” but as a black man breaking his fetters in a showing of strength and determination.

A statue of two people

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The Met observes:

Unlike virtually all other such images of the period, the Black man stands rather than sits or kneels. With a broken shackle in hand, he raises aloft his fist in a gesture of strength and self-determination. He rests his other hand protectively on the shoulder of his female companion who kneels and clasps her hands in gratitude. The differing postures of Lewis’s figures anticipates the divergent experiences of emancipated men and women. Yet the inscription on the base, neither pleading nor beseeching, proclaims: "Forever Free."

Really?

Chains are part of a tradition there, but not here?

That was “racialized,” and this is not?

Is that a woman or a child?

What is the deal with the feet of both people?

Even I can tell that this sculpture is bland and non-descript. The first sculpture has a real power and intensity that this one lacks. In order to explain the weird mismatch of sizes, the Met creates a narrative about the “divergent experiences” of freed men and women….which apparently made women really tiny and put them on their knees.

It should come as no surprise that Lewis was part black, while Carpaeux was white. That difference explains why “Forever Free” is the star of the show, and Lewis does not get criticized for continuing the tradition of chains and slavery or putting a tiny slave on her knees with big feet.

MacDonald then discusses the myths and legends that have emerged regarding the disparate impact of criminal laws. The important detail that is forgotten by those flogging the “systemic racism” narrative is that, unfortunately, blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than other racial demographics. They also commit hate crimes in higher numbers:

Local data tell the same story. In New York City, from 2010 to 2020, blacks were 2.42 times as likely as whites to commit a hate crime, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known.4 Blacks in Los Angeles committed anti-Asian hate crimes at 4.8 times the rate of whites in 2021, according to internal LAPD data.5 Blacks in LA committed anti-gay hate crimes at seven times the rate of whites, and anti-Semitic hate crimes at 2.4 times the rate of whites, among hate-crime suspects whose race and ethnicity were known. Blacks committed anti-trans hate crimes at 2.5 times the rate of Hispanics; there were no white suspects in anti-trans hate crimes in LA in 2021.

Mac Donald, Heather. When Race Trumps Merit(p. 276).

MacDonald concludes with a section on “what is to be done?” Her suggestion is to form associations that push back on the trite misinformation that has made the public world a toxic stew of racial grievance.

That may be one solution. I know that I have tried to network with classical liberals to promote color-blind discourse and have found no such network. A promising alternative is that one of President Trump’s first acts in office was to eliminate “disparate impact” analysis in the federal government.

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It may be that a critical mass is emerging to counter the noxious grievance industry.

With luck, the cult of racial identity in America may weaken, and even Democrats will find that America is something to be very proud of again.

Footnotes:

[1] The concluding chapters of the book offer a number of examples of this in MacDonald’s discussion of how media efforts to force crime stories to fit into racial paradigms. So, stores that begin with a statement that a white shooter’s motivation was “hate” are dropped completely from the media narrative when the hate aspect is dropped. Likewise, media stories will be spiked when the facts about the perpetrator and victim don’t meet the required paradigm. This leaves news consumers living in something akin to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth where the facts are subject to revision based on political needs. It is not wonder that Americans have the news memory of a goldfish.

[2] Elites also know how to rig the game to keep their elite position. For example, we have long had the clown-show of Elizabeth Warren claiming to be Native American based on spurious family myth in order to obtain access to the highest echelons of elite academia, but this week we learned that the Democratic Socialist candidate for mayor of New York claimed to be Asian and “African-American” in his Columbia admission application because he was an Indian ethnic born in Uganda.


Christopher F. Rufo
Zohran Mamdani’s SAT Score Revealed
Over the long weekend, the New York Times scooped a story about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s application to Columbia University, in which he claimed that his ethnicity was “Asian” and “Black/African American.” In his defense, Mamdani claimed that his parents are both Indian, which is why he checked Asian, and that he was born in Uganda, which is why he checked black…
Read more
7 hours ago · 232 likes · 34 comments · Christopher F. Rufo
The absurdity of racial identity could not have been imagined by the most brilliant parodists of prior generations.

[3] This may be the worst paragraph outlined in any Supreme Court opinion (including dissenting opinions):

To hear the majority tell it, this suit raises a mind-numbingly technical query: Are universal injunctions “sufficiently ‘analogous’ to the relief issued ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act’” to fall within the equitable authority Congress granted federal courts in the Judiciary Act of 1789? Ante, at 6. But that legalese is a smokescreen. It obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?

Trump v. CASA, Inc., No. 24A884, 2025 U.S. LEXIS 2501, at *107-08 (June 27, 2025) (Jackson, dissenting)(Emphasis added.)

“Legalese” is nothing less than “legal reasoning,” the very thing on which Supreme Court expertise is based.

The majority’s response is apt:

Justice Jackson skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” post, at 3, she seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” Ibid. In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” Ibid. That goes for judges too.

Trump v. CASA, Inc., No. 24A884, 2025 U.S. LEXIS 2501, at *33 (June 27, 2025)

And there, Ladies and Gentlemen, is proof of MacDonald’s thesis that race has trumped merit in the most sensitive place imaginable – the Supreme Court.

[4] See this and this.

[Juny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Realmente chocante.

A pesar de ser tan solo una construcción social, Estados Unidos, especial y casi exclusivamente la izquierda progresista, trata la raza como un Santo Grial. Este libro es perfecto para comprender muchas de las repercusiones de fetichizar esta construcción social (la raza) y ponerla por encima de… todo. También es excelente para comprender las consecuencias de demonizar y menospreciar consciente y deliberadamente una construcción social (raza) en particular y el fetichismo con otras construcciones sociales (razas). Su subtítulo —«Cómo la búsqueda de la equidad sacrifica la excelencia, destruye la belleza y amenaza vidas»— no es una exageración, como inicialmente pensaba. Lástima que sea uno de esos libros cuyos muchos de sus argumentos no pueden decirse en voz alta hoy en día.

Es la primera vez que leo a Heather Mac Donald y he disfrutado con su trabajo. Buena escritura, buena prosa y buen trabajo periodístico por su parte.

[matthew Moustakas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read!

When Race Trumps Merit is a must-read for everyone.

It is imperative that as a nation, we head back to judging those based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

[Terrance D Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Equity vs. Equality

Heather MacDonald is well researched and spot on concerning the lowering of standards and qualifications for most every field today. It is having a profound effect on our lives when people are hired, promoted, and placed in the various professions based on the color of their skin and not their qualifications.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I prefer authors that address issues with data rather than assertions. That is why I would feel much better about political discussions about race set in context like those of authors such as Heather Mac Donald, John McWhorter and Glenn Loury. Instead, today, much is only based on essentially ideological books like DiAngelo's "White Fragility" and Kendi's "How to Be an Antiracist".

Unlike DiAngelo and Kendi, Mac Donald deals with what is really happening in our country, especially low-income urban communities. She spells out in great detail all the types of growing oppression, declining excellence, and sources of violent deaths - and makes it clear how the current extreme leftist ideological push is only making lives worse, rather than dealing with the sources of poverty and crime today.

I would pair Heather's new book with McWhorter's "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America". This pair of books, widely read, would be far more productive in promoting truly effective political engagements.

[David Maywald · Rating 5 out of 5]

An explosive book that consciously dives into controversy. Full of truth-telling that challenges the prevailing political discourse. It is enlightening, provocative, refreshing.

“The key to disparate impact thinking is the presumption of racial proportionality. Absent some form of unfairness, it is assumed that the racial demographics of every institution would match that of the population at large. If blacks are underrepresented in science research labs or overrepresented among arrested felons, the only allowable explanation is racism. The possibility that such racial disparities reflect the actual distribution of skills or differences in behavior is taboo.”

“What is never asked is the proportion of competitively qualified blacks in the hiring or promotion pool. It is assumed that such competitively qualified candidates are available in the same measure as in the population at large. They are not. The underrepresentation of blacks in many professions is the result of the unequal distribution of skills, not of bias. Sixty-six percent of black twelfth graders nationally were “below basic” in twelfth-grade math skills in 2019, as measured by the National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam.”

New York mayor Eric Adams “would perform an enormous public service if he repudiated disparate impact thinking. Such repudiation will require telling the truth about black crime, which no elected official has been willing to do. As New Yorkers grapple with brutal above- and below-ground shootings, stabbings, and subway crime, the need for such candor never appeared greater.”

“Blacks going about their quotidian chores in inner-city areas do have reason to fear, but the threat is not from white supremacists. It is from other blacks… The typical mass shooter in America is not a white supremacist. He is black and either retaliating for a previous shooting or impulsively reacting to a current dispute. In 2020, more than two dozen blacks were killed every day – more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined – even though blacks are only 13.6% of the population.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA4uB...

Heather Mac Donald points out that medical training has been dumbed down, with the removal of core material to make way for courses on diversity and equity. She argues that this harms patients, due to lower standards of competence:

“As for average SAT scores, the average total SAT score in 2021 (on a 1600-point scale) was 934 for blacks. For whites, the average score was 1112, and for Asians, it was 1239. Most white and Asian students who presented a combined SAT score of 934 would have little chance of admission to a selective college.”

“From 2013 to 2016, only 8 percent of white college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school; less than 6 percent of Asian college seniors with those qualifications were offered a seat, according to an analysis by economist Mark Perry. Medical schools regarded those below-average scores as all but disqualifying – except when presented by blacks and Hispanics. Over 56 percent of black college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCATs were admitted, as were 31 percent of Hispanic students with those scores, making a black student in that range more than seven times as likely as a similarly situated white college senior to be admitted into medical school, and more than nine times as likely as a similarly situated Asian senior.”

She is particularly passionate about the diminished standards in art, music, and culture:

“The attack against classical music is worth examining in some detail, for it reveals the logic that has been turned against nearly every aspect of Western culture over the last few years. The logic displays a hatred of beauty, a brittle intolerance of the past, and a self-righteous certainty that the orthodoxies of the present are uniquely just… Western civilization is not about whiteness; it is a universal legacy. The guardians of that civilization, however, portray it as antithetical to racial justice because of its demographic characteristics. They are impoverishing the world.“

“Western civilization contains too much beauty and grandeur, too much achievement, and too much innovation – from advances in the sciences to the blessings of republican self-government – to be lost without a fight. It will be lost, however, if disparate impact continues to be our measure of injustice.”

Mac Donald decries the regressive and anti-intellectual approaches being pushed through policing, government, education, and society:

“Instead, we are unwinding every objective standard of conduct and achievement – whether it’s the criminal code or academic proficiency requirements for school and employment – if enforcing that standard has a disparate impact on blacks.”

“This “just believe” mandate is the credo of the #MeToo movement as well. To test a claim of discrimination or sexual assault against the evidence makes official victims “unsafe” and violates their sanctity. Thus, the routine complaints of employees in nearly every workplace are converted into unfalsifiable proof of discrimination when articulated by a particular group of employees. If a white job applicant is not hired, it is acceptable to assume that he was less qualified than other applicants. If a black job applicant is not hired, it is because of discrimination.”

During the last 20 years there has been 140% increase in the number of Australians identifying as Indigenous, increasing from 2.2% of the population in 2001 to 3.8% in 2021. There are almost two and a half times more Aboriginal people compared to two decades ago… After having done Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to excess perhaps what we need now is less DEI and more EMC (Equality, Merit, and Colourblindness):

https://loneconservative.com/2023/01/...

[Patrick O'Hannigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree with everything that Michael Knowles says in his own review of this book, which is featured on the dust jacket of the hardcover edition: "Heather Mac Donald's When Race Trumps Merit is a tour de force that brings to bear the author's prodigious cultural formation, clear prose, and, most important of all, unflinching courage. Mac Donald observes the growing threats to the West, from criminal acts to cultural degradation-- burglaries to rewriting Beethoven -- and she proposes to excise the pernicious ideology behind these evils at a time when more cowardly commentators dare not even criticize it by name. A book to strengthen both mind and spine."

Shorter Knowles: If you don't know what "disparate impact" analysis is, or why it's wrong-headed, read Heather Mac Donald's formidable defense of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again Heather Mac Donald goes right to the heart of what is rotting within modern society (a result of the self-imposed blindness of political correctness's "systemic racism" hoax). Her writing is direct, clear, articulate and well documented, (dealing with three different realms; medicine and science, arts and culture, law and order), and is thoroughly depressing and infuriating. It can be summed up by this quote;

"The rejection of objective standards of accomplishment is nihilistic.... to maintain that color-blind tests are meaningless in demonstrating cognitive mastery is to deny the very possibility of assessing accomplishment. Knowledge and skill exist, and they are measurable - if not always perfectly. Standardized tests are under attack only because blacks and Hispanics, on average, score poorly on them. The SAT was developed in the mid-twentieth century to overcome college admissions biases that favored traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites. It allowed students from non-elite backgrounds and social classes to demonstrate superior academic capacity. Now, because of disparate impact, the diversity movement deems color-blind measures of competence to be unjust instruments of racial exclusion. If there were no group differences in outcome, however, no one would think about eliminating the very measures that were introduced to overcome group favoritism.

"The next step in the unwinding of objective standards is to reject the notion of accomplishment itself. It has become career-ending to hold that some individuals or cultures achieve more than others. The ever-more sweeping depreciation of Western civilization refuses to acknowledge the West's unparalleled contributions to human progress. And now the behavioral norms that lead to individual success are being relativized as well..." (p. 26-27)

Mac Donald makes the point that although this concern for political correctness (liberal self-censure) has been going on for decades it increased to a frenzied pitch after the death of George Floyd.

"The Black Lives Matter movement in the arts is only nominally about "inclusion." In fact, it is about exclusion and the power that has motivated every revolutionary mob: the power of negation, the power to tear things down. This purportedly "inclusive" movement will result in a world of constricted imaginative possibility and stunted human growth.

"A leader in the arts world, told of Juilliard's travails, observed: "This is a crucial time to stand up and call out what is an overly emotional and irrational attack on the best of what humanity has to offer."

"He would not allow me to reveal his name or affiliation." (p. 131)

As misguided as these attacks on merit, quality and accomplishment are it's easy to understand them when coming from the traditionally underclassed (minorities, impoverished, incarcerated, mentally challenged), but what is harder to understand and far more pernicious is that it is the elites in education, government, media, and culture who are pushing this distorted, self-destructive, nihilistic and narcissistic agenda. Apparently every one of them is terrified; terrified of being cancelled, terrified of being on the wrong side of history, terrified of the seething, undereducated (but overfed and stimulated) masses. Oh well, we know how this will end.

As the makers of the movie Idiocracy stated, they started out making a comedy fantasy flick and realized they'd made a documentary.

[Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heather Mac Donald has done it again. She takes on the thorniest of contemporary issues - in this case, diversity, equity, and inclusion - and cuts it down to size. DEI has been an absolute disaster, as most recently on display as Ivy League University presidents, arguably diversity hires themselves, testified before Congress that calls for genocide of the Jews does not necessarily violate their universities' codes against bullying and harassment. It depends, they say, on "the context." Of course it does not depend on the context, calls for genocide against any group is morally and ethically reprehensible, and yet the systemic rot at the highest levels of American education cannot concede such a point without their entire DEI house of cards tumbling to the ground.

In this book, the author demonstrates the extent to which the DEI cancer is pervading not only schools, but every field from science to the arts. No longer are a person's character and content of utmost importance, rather it's a person's skin color and gender identification (science need not apply here either) that define whether society must reward that person to right some perceived past wrongs. Or something.

What I love about Heather Mac Donald is that she deals in facts, not emotional hyperbole. But that makes her especially threatening to the whole DEI enterprise, which deals of emotionality. Mac Donald illustrates that crime in America is mostly committed against blacks by blacks, even though prevailing narratives would have us believe it is open season on "black lives." False narratives have guided every movement from Black Lives Matters to the anti-cop pandemonium that broke up post George Floyd despite the complete and utter dearth of evidence that the unfortunate result in that case was motivated by racism, individual or systemic, or that Derek Chauvin's training and protocol in fact caused Floyd's death and not his own systemic illicit drug use.

Fortunately, those like Heather Mac Donald are not cowed from speaking the truth in a very hostile climate oppressing the free speech of countervailing points of view. It's refreshing reading well considered, measured, and persuasive writing on such monumental topics of our time.

[Jeff Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

There has been lots of talk (read: clickbait) lately about book bans. The thing is, very commonly in these talks, the so-called ‘book bans’ over which people claim to be outraged aren’t really bans at all. At worst they’re simply adhering to the concept of age-restricted content, a concept long-employed and rather uncontroversial.

But if we don’t have outright ‘book bans’ in today’s America, what’s the closest thing to it? For me, it’s the treatment of books such as Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage,” which a confluence of big tech, big retail, legacy media, and academia tried to suppress. Hell, even the ACLU and certain library associations (that’s right) tried to keep IR from readers.

Into this miasma of books like “Irreversible Damage” and “War on the West” comes Heather Mac Donald’s “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives” (2023). Has the book been ‘banned’? Hard to say. But the book and its ideas have certainly been forbidden, exiled, banished, and deemed verboten in modern culture. The message is clear: as far as actually reading this book and pondering its message, don’t even think about it!

I, however, did think about it, then read it. My take? “When Race Trumps Merit” comes out of the gate strong, but then gets bogged down in a middle section about how the storied “racial reckoning” has affected culture. No, not pop culture—high culture. And it’s almost a misnomer to call this a “middle section,” as it’s far too outsized for that label. Yes, Mac Donald has ample land to mine in this part of her book, but if you’re not already familiar with things like ballet, opera, classical music, historical art and ‘theater,’ your eyes might gloss over.

Luckily, MacDonald makes a comeback in the last quarter. She hits the reader with statistics, lots of statistics. We’re talking the kind of statistics woefully incongruent with the set narratives, and thereby wholly unwelcome.

So give “When Race Trumps Merit” a chance, or don’t. But when deciding, consider how many in positions of power and influence would rather you not.

[Caitlin Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my gosh, I literally just finished reading this book, and it left me feeling so bummed and freaked out about how off-track our schools have gotten!

Like, I seriously think we might need to hit reset and focus on real ‘teaching’ again, instead of all this ‘leftist indoctrination’ nonsense. If you ask me, we should totally be rewarding people who put in the effort instead of catering to those who just demand stuff.

Heather Mac Donald is obviously super worried about how ditching ‘merit’ is hurting students, and honestly, I am so on board with her. We’ve got way too many ‘privileged mediocrities’ stirring up resentment and drama.

As a department head, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had to manage these so-called ‘diversity’ hires who were brought in, even though they had, like, zero qualifications compared to the white males they replaced.

It’s totally wild how white males are at such a disadvantage despite building this country!

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars.

Another book that falls into two linked categories - a) wish circumstances were different and it never had to be written and b) those who most need to read this, never will.

First of all, the title says it all.

But should you open the book and read it, you will be treated to an eye-opening description of the size and magnitude of the issue. (I for one was aware of the topic and am aware of a number of case examples that I have seen in the news, but these days it is often hard to sort out whether those are rare signals trumpeted *because* they are rare, or is it truly a wide-spread issue). The author clearly, competently, and with both facts and passion, lays out her argument convincingly.

[JV · Rating 4 out of 5]

I commend the author for tackling this thorny issue. As she concluded near the end, if things don't change soon, all of the STEM fields will be watered down by less deserving people. This will hurt America's competitiveness and with it, our economy and healthcare system just to name a two.

I felt the first third of the book focused on race vs merit in the arts and music. I was less interested here because it will have less impact on America's future than reverse racism in STEM fields will have.

Additionally, much of the book read like a police blotter. Nonetheless, the author included some very pertinent statistics about crime versus race and made sensible conclusions.

[Robert Bloom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prepare for facts

Fact. 50% of all homicides are committed by blacks. And that is why blacks are disproprtionately in jail. It's also why they have disproportionate encounters with police. Its not the police. It's not "structural racism." It's not "white supremacy." It's because blacks commit more crimes than anyone else. But no one on the left can acknowledge this reality. The self delusion and intellectual dishonesty of the left is just stunning. Because of this delusion the whole system of law enforcement is being torn down. It wouldn't be a problem if this ideology of delusion impacted only leftists. But its destroying the foundations of the whole country.

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I agree 100% with the content but was very bored by the format. Most (95%) of the book is her listing things that have happened with barely any summary or conclusion. I was longing for a well thought out dive into the ethics and history of the movement, in addition to the examples of what is happening and how we can correct it. The majority of the read feels like the equivalent of "Did you know __________ happened?" Her conclusion at the end barely feels like more than her saying: "This better change or things will get REALLY bad." Unfortunately, I feel like this book was a missed opportunity.