The Patriot Post® · Heather Mac Donald Takes on Race vs. Merit

Author and researcher Heather Mac Donald has made a career of applying objective, statistics-based analyses to tell the most uncomfortable societal truths — truths, for example, about diversity and social engineering and the Left’s war on cops. Her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, is no exception.

“Over the years,” as City Journal Editor Brian Anderson writes, “Heather’s scrupulous and groundbreaking work has shed light on important trends in American life. Her new book brings relentless reporting to perhaps the most dangerous one yet, which is the equity craze that is threatening our scientific, cultural, and public institutions. In this new book … she details the rise of disparate impact ideology and its potential to do enormous harm to our society. Her book also represents a powerful defense of our civilizational inheritance.”

And what is disparate impact? It’s the idea, Mac Donald says, “that any standard, meritocratic in terms of academic skills, that has a negative impact on certain minority groups, and above all on blacks, is by definition racist, unless, in the legal context, it can be justified at a very high standard of business necessity.”

Mac Donald has witnessed the impact that disparate impact has inflicted on the building blocks of American society, and in a podcast with psychologist Jordan Peterson, she describes this assault as the inspiration for her latest volume:

This was a book written out of a combination of sorrow and rage: sorrow at the fact that the institutions that I love — classical music, art, philosophy, literature — were being torn down by a false narrative, saying that if a tradition has a demographic history that is predominantly white, that is, the European tradition, it is per se a racist tradition. So classical music, because the great Western composers … were all white, therefore we should look upon that tradition with contempt and suspicion; and rage because the arguments that are being made are so completely false.

At the center of the arguments Mac Donald mentions is a single word: equity. It’s a word that we began more earnestly paying attention to two years ago, when we noted, first and foremost, that equity and equality are two entirely different things. While the latter has its roots in some of the great and ennobling struggles of Western civilization, the former has its roots in Marxist theory and racial hucksterism.

Why is the equity doctrine so catastrophic? Peterson put that question to Mac Donald, and this was her answer:

Well, here’s what the Left is doing today. It looks around, and it chooses institutions almost at random, and if it finds that there is not a proportional representation of blacks in that institution — whether this is Google’s computer science force or Harvard’s Medical School faculty, or a classical music orchestra, or the Western art collections of a museum, or the partners at an elite law firm — if there is not 13% blacks in that institution, that institution is per se racist. … The only allowable explanation is racism. And with that rule, it means that any kind of standard that has a disparate impact on blacks — such as an expectation of mathematical skill or an expectation of a grasp of fundamental medical principles — it must be discarded. … There is not a single institution in our world that is not vulnerable and that will not be torn down.

But if racism isn’t the cause of these disparities, then what might it be? Mac Donald suggests the real reason: The academic skills gap:

It is mathematically impossible … to maintain meritocratic standards and to engineer diversity as the diversity-mongers define it, which is basically racial proportionality. … Sixty-six percent of black eighth graders do not possess even partial mastery of the most basic 12th-grade math skills. … The number of black 12th-graders who are merely competent in those simple 12th-grade math skills is 6%, and the number who are advanced is too small in the United States to even show up statistically. The reading picture is not much better. The American College Testing organization, the ACT, says that only 6% of black 12th-graders are college ready when you look at their combine math, reading and science scores. … So, given that, there is simply not enough competitively qualified blacks in the hiring pipeline.

Mac Donald noted that these meritocratic standards were originally developed to overcome racism and classism. They were objective, color-blind, and class-blind, and they allowed, for example, Jews and Asians to achieve entry into the elite Ivy League institutions based on objective standards, when they had traditionally been denied entry due to rank prejudice.

Mac Donald also stresses that the “Bourgeois values” that have defined the American experiment — “habits of self-control, of conscientiousness, of respect for authority that used to be middle-class values” — are disappearing from our country.

The disappearance of these values seems to us more like an eradication. Why? Because it removes our focus from some uncomfortable truths that are plaguing the black community. For example, Peterson made this observation about cognitive ability: “At the age of 5 or so, the difference between Caucasians and Blacks, for example, is something more approximating five points than the, say, 10 to 12 points that seems more standard by adulthood. And no one really knows why that is — why that gap expands across time. … I suspect phenomena like fatherlessness play a role.”

He suspects? Mac Donald thinks he’s underplaying how bad it is for blacks, and we think she’s right. She notes: “When Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his astoundingly prescient report in the 1960s [‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action’] warning that the country was about to screech to a dead halt with regards to civil rights progress, his reason was not a resurgence of white racism or changing … opportunities in the country, his reason was what he saw at the time as a catastrophic breakdown in the black family. … When Moynihan wrote this report, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for blacks was 23%. And Moynihan said that with that number of young black males growing up in single-family homes without fathers to socialize them, to civilize them … this population is doomed. … Well, what are we at today? We’re at 71%.” (Of course, the effects of fatherlessness aren’t limited to a disparity in cognitive ability. As our Mark Alexander points out, fatherless homes also tend to seed violence and other criminal behavior.)

Two years ago, we quoted neurosurgeon and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson on the topic of equity and the effect it’s had on American society: “In fact, race relationships have deteriorated,” he said. “Why have they deteriorated? Because of the great emphasis, trying to create white guilt and black victimhood. Those are two very bad things and when you put them together, it results in some policies that absolutely make no sense. So the real conflict here is between common sense and idiocy.”

Common sense versus idiocy? That sounds like a pretty good summing up of Mac Donald’s latest book — and of the civilizational contest between racial proportionality and merit.