We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well, and subscribe
to the premium version of our website over at the Federalist dot com. We're
joined today by Heather McDonald. She is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at
the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. More importantly, for
the purposes of this conversation, she's out with a new book. It's called
When Race Trump's Merit. How the pursuit of equity sacrifices excellence, destroys beauty,
and threatens lives. Heather, thank you for joining us, Emily.
It's an absolute honor to be thank you. Of course, this book is
organized into three different parts, and each is sort of individually terrifying. But
I'll just break it down. Science of Medicine, culture and arts, and
law and order. I want to start by just asking you if you could
tell us a little bit about the history of desparate impact because this seems to
be the thread that you weave through all three of those categories. This is
kind of a poison pill, a cultural poison pill that is wreaking havoc on
these institutions. So could you struct us by telling us a little bit about
what it is and how it came to be right, desparate impact is what
is now making us tear down every single meritocratic or behavioral standard in the name
of avoiding negative consequences for blacks. It began in the nineteen seventies as a
way to spanned traditional civil rights laws. The civil rights acts that were passed
in the nineteen sixties banned intentional voluntary discrimination. So if an employer said I
just don't want to hire blacks. I don't care how qualified they are,
but I just don't want any blacks in my workplace, the Civil Rights Statute
said you cannot do that. You cannot use race to in this artificial and
unconstitutional and demeaning manner. But after a while there were very few employers that
were actually still discriminating in that way, and so the move was on to
expand the reach of civil rights statutes. Also, we were not seeing the
same proportional representation in workplaces, as everyone had expected. Once the formal barriers
to integration had come down, and so a new way of challenging employment practices
came about. The idea was, if an employer was absolutely color blind,
was not intentionally discriminating, had no desire to exclude blacks or other so called
underrepresented groups from his workplace, but he had some kind of employment test or
expectation that resulted in disproportionately disqualifying blacks, then that test or that expectation or
that standard had to go. So for decades, people may have noticed firefighting
exams, exams to become a police officer, to enter the academy have faced
one set of lawsuit after another on the charge that the exams are racist.
Now, rarely can anybody come up with an actual question that somehow in testing
reading skills for firemen so that they know how to understand chemical reactions as described
in the firefighting materials that they use. Rarely as anybody ever alleged that the
actual question is racist. But if blacks don't pass those written exams, those
tests of reading at the same rate of whites, well, then a judge
says, well, that's a racist test. We're going to throw it out.
You have to lower your standards, come up with some kind of reading
test it is at a much lower level, or get rid of the test
entirely and just higher on the basis of race. Well, that disparate impact
concept spread into federal statutes, federal regulations, but now it has leaked the
boundary and it exists virtually everywhere. It doesn't depend on a judge, it
doesn't depend on a legislator, it doesn't depend on a federal or a crat
writing some kind of disparate impact regulation into the Code of Federal Regulations. It
has been embraced by every leader of our mainstream institutions who since the George Floyd
race riots, are going around fanatically declaring their own institutions racist for no other
reason than they don't have a proportional representation of blacks and are discarding one meritocratic
or one behavioral standard after another. Yeah, and you've been studying this obviously
long before twenty twenty happened. And that's actually why I want to get your
perspective on how this theory of disparate impact or the cult of disparate impact made
the leap from academia sort of fringe activist circles into not just as you mentioned,
legal statutes, but also into just mainstream standards of what constitutes racism,
what falls under that giant umbrella definition of racism. How did that happen?
Well, that's a great question, and it results from the same reason we
came up with disparate impact analysis in the first place, which is widespread discomfort
that we still have racial disparities in meritocratic institutions on the one hand and in
the incarcerated population on the other. In the one case, we have an
underrepresentation of blacks at in the Google computer science department or engineering department, or
at a medical school, at a Alzheimer's research lab, and on the other
hand, we have an overrepresentation of blacks in prison compared to their national population
ratio, which is thirteen percent. And this is very troubling to well meaning
Americans, and most people, as I've governed, do not want to even
consider that there may be cultural differences which are driving the underrepresentation of blacks and
maritocratic institutions and the overrepresentation incarceration rates. And so our elites have decided that
as sort of proleptically in order to fend off any discussion of culture, they're
just going to declare themselves racist, an America racist, and standards racist,
and they're tearing it all down. The purpose of my book is to make
a very data based argument that disparate impact is not the result of racism.
Standards are not racist. Here are the facts about academic skills, about crime
skills that people turn their eyes away from an understandable sense of racial etiquette.
But at this point, the time for racial etiquette is over because we are
busily tearing down the institutions of American civilization. Well, yeah, let's talk
about that. Let's talk about the future of medicines. As in a turelier
you have those three sort of category science, medicine, culture, and arts
in law and order. The medicine chapter is particularly harrowing, and you definitely
include a lot of statistics and data and its points in a really frightening,
disturbing direction. And so I guess one way I wanted to ask the question
is what does the future of medicine look like in a world where the sort
of meritocracy is crumbling down among the people who are supposed to keep us safe.
It's a terrible future, Emily, and you're absolutely right among the people
whore supposed to keep us safe. The thing that was the most astounded to
me in writing this book was seeing how the leaders of the most prestigious and
in some case, in the case the art sublime institutions have turned on their
own traditions and are embracing patent fictions such as that science as racist or medicine
is racist. We have the leaders of the American Medical Association, the leaders
of the medical schools, the American Association, and medical colleges journals, the
most some of the most prestigious scientific journals, whether it's Scientific American Journal,
of American Medical Association or JAMMA Lancet, all pumping out propaganda based on spurious
analyzes, spurious data, claiming that racism is the predominant trait of American science
in American medicine today. So what we're seeing in medical schools is a accelerating
evisceration of academic standards. The Medical College Admissions Test MCAT, which is the
counterpart of the SAT for Medical college admissions. It is color blind, it
is objective, it is computer graded. There is not a single question on
the MCAT that has any kind of racial overtone, and in fact, recently
they've added all these sort of social psychology and community oriented test questions simply in
the hope of boosting black scores on the MCATs, even though those questions have
nothing to do with one's capacity to understand self physiology, and so this is
not a racist test. And yet there are medical schools now that are waiving
the MCATs for some black students simply because the MCATs have yet again a disparate
impact on black college seniors. The first part of the of the medical Licensing
Exam, it's known as Step one, used to be a graded exam,
and it tests. It comes after medical students second year, and it's tests
their absorption of a whole range of academic material about body anatomy, drug interactions,
canser, you know how how the nervous system works, how the digestive
system works. And there too, black students having been admitted to medical schools
with racial preferences, and therefore admitted to schools for which they're not competitively qualified,
though they would be qualified for a whole host of other medical schools.
Blacks were scoring at the rock bottom. So rather than saying, well,
maybe we should consider racial preferences, maybe we should admit based on merit,
not based on race, the medical board that administers this licensing exam last year
said, okay, no more grades. From now on. Step one is
no longer graded. We're going to pass fail system in the hope that this
will qualify more black students. The pressure is on for every other type of
test that is administered during, during medical school and after to get rid of
objective standards and replace them with an attention to race. And what this means
emily for the individuals among us is that if you're brought into an emergency room
having been in a very serious car crash and a doctor walks through the door,
who is the recipient of all of these racial preferences, you are going
to have no way of rationally knowing if that is the most qualified doctor,
or if that is the most qualified doctor within a preferred victim group. This
embhasis on racial composition is also slowing down our medical research progress because the federal
science agencies who fund medical research, and the schools themselves who carry out the
medical research, have declared that the racial composition of an Alzheimer's research lab or
a cancer research lab is as if not more important than the qualifications of the
scientists working in that research lab. And I was just going to ask you
to tell us more about that because and people obviously should pick up the book
for all the specifics on this, But it reminds me of what happened with
some of the transgender ideology in research on biology, and that there was sort
of it had obviously a chilling effect and then completely distorted some papers and things
that were coming out for a while. And that's still happening. Of course,
what are we seeing when it comes to the research section here in particular,
and that desperate impact analysis or that desperate impact standard. How is that
skewing all of the millions of dollars worth of research, billions of dollars worth
of research that we are supposed to be the best in the world are doing.
It's skewing in so many ways, Emily. It's skewing because again we're
choosing researchers not based on their medical qualifications, but based on their race.
This is very explicit in the guidelines put out by the National Institutes of Health,
national Cancer Institutes, the National Science foundation, And you know, it
would be the same if it was saying, well, we really want to
choose on the basis of sex, which they're also doing. Sex is simply
an irrelevant characteristic. I do not care if the lab that cures Alzheimer's is
all Asian, is all black, is all Indian, is all white,
is all female. It doesn't matter to me. What matters are they the
best scientists. Are they the ones that have the leading edge in discovering the
pathways and how to solve this crippling disease. But it is also affecting the
substance of what may get researched. It is now absolutely taboo to say that,
well, if there's racial disparities and health outcomes, that personal decision making,
personal behavior, culture may be part of that. And so, you
know, we saw that there was higher death rates among blacks for COVID and
the only allowable explanation for that is that somehow doctors are racist and they were
not treating black COVID patients with the same degree of care as white COVID patients.
Well that, Emily, I'm sorry, that is completely bs. Doctors
do not care about the race age and if they want all of their patients
to get well. The real reason was much higher rates of obesity among blacks
and obesity this is something that of course was not allowed to be said,
regardless of the race aspect of it. During COVID obesity was one of the
greatest comorbidities that determined how one would react to a COVID infection. Now we're
told that to even talk about obesity as a health problem is racist. That
Scientific American published a whole issue devoted to racism in policing, racism and health
and one article said to talk to black women about obesity is racist. Well,
what if it turns out that the problem with black mortality rates is not
doctor racism but its behavior. But if we can't talk about it, you
are making sure that we will never solve that problem. And the third way,
emily that this obsession with race and disparate impact is affecting our scientific and
medical progresses. The NIH is actually distributing, determining its research priorities based not
on what is the most important scientific problem that we hope to solve, but
simply based on how does it get the number of black awardees for its research
money up? And it turns out that black doctors do less pure science,
less work in the laboratory trying to figure out genetic coding, and more doing
research on racism, more sociological inquiries on how systemic racism allegedly affects black health.
And so the NIH simply moved funding from pure science to research on health
disparities and racism simply in order to say, well, we now have a
higher percentage of principal investigators who were black. Yeah. And it strikes me
that because so much of this research is funded by the government, I wonder,
are there any obvious policy solutions along the lines of what the Trump administration
did with critical race theory after Chris Ruffo did some research on that front.
Is there anything that is sort of a Republican president could approach on a policy
level could do to approach this as a solution on a policy level. Absolutely,
Emily for one. You know, as I say, although the disparate
impact idea has leaped out of the code of federal regulations into the culture at
large, there still are many spots in statutes and regulations that a president could
change and return America to the ideal of color blindness. So he could extirpate
from the Code of Federal Regulations all disparate impact mandates. He'd have to go
through the usual processes of notice and hearing and comment statutes that would require Congress
to change, but he could put up make a campaign for that, and
the federal science agencies, he could definitely say, get rid of the tens
of millions that you're spending each year on subsidizing research into intersectionality, one of
the most ridiculous concepts, into head noormativity. This is what you know,
this is what's going on at the National Science Foundation. He could say,
get rid of all of it and let's return to doing pure science. Now,
you rightly you sort of bring up the federal government or the government aspect
of this. It's not as if this is only coming out of the government.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is the largest private funder of medical
research and was started by Howard Hughes in the nineteen fifties who wanted to push
back the frontiers of ignorance and expand our scientific knowledge. Hughes would have been
astounded what his institute is doing now. But they are doing the same thing.
The federal government is making race a primary criterion for their grant making.
Well, another place where there are some federal dollars involved, probably not nearly
as much, is culture and arts. And you talk about beauty in the
book. It's actually in the title of the book, which is so interesting
because you're weaving this threat of disparate impact. They're all of these differentis and
you talk about opera, you talk about all different examples of where this disparate
impact standard has started attacking beauty itself through attacks on the arts. And I
wanted to ask on that note, is there a maybe particular Marxist strategy behind
these attacks on beauty and art or is it just sort of part of that
ideology. It's so baked into the ideology that we can't have beauty and artistic
expression that it ends up attacking them anyway, what's behind this? I don't
think there's a strategy or a conspiracy. I think it's just in the zeitgeist.
The elites are obsessed with racial issues, racial outcomes, and after George
Floyd, everybody went into mass psychosis, declaring America white supremacist. And you
had art institution after out institution putting out these preposterous apologies and maya culpus for
their own alleged racism, which is absurd. Classical music orchestras, you auditioned
behind a screen so nobody can see your identity. The idea that that somehow
conductors are discriminating against black bassoonists is absurd. Conductors only care about the getting
the top flight musicians in their orchestra who will not flub the horn solo in
a Rigard Trios tone poem. They I interviewed the Indian conductors Uben Meda from
my book, who began as a sort of child prodigy very young age,
and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I went to those concerts with my family Sunday
matinees growing up in the nineteen sixties. He went on to conduct leading orchestras
across the world. He that he has never ever witnessed anybody in his field
discriminate against blacks. But now you have again the very leaders of these organizations
saying our mission now is anti racist. And in order to be anti racist
and to sort of argue that what the status quo anti was racist requires a
complete rejection and annihilation of artistic traditions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York City recently mounted a show built around a sculpture, a bust of a
black woman with a rope around her chest, and the statue is called Why
Born Enslaved. It was an abolitionist work by a nineteenth century French sculpture named
Jean Baptiste Calpo. It is a work intended to move the viewer to feel
the inhumanity of slavery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art built an entire show around
this bust, which it had recently acquired. The show was titled The Fictions
of Emancipation. In other words, emancipation is a fiction whites never wanted to
emancipate blacks. This sculpture, according to the Met in its post George Floyd
Mode, is actually all about keeping blacks enslaved. The thesis of the bust,
according to the Met, is that the only way blacks can be free
is to be enslaved in the first place. The Met accused Cockpo the sculpture
of racism because he had not named his model for the sculpture. No,
practically, no Western artist in history has named his model. We don't know
models names. They've never done that. Unless there's been you know the artist
was having an affair with his model, then maybe we do some bike rafical
research and we find that out, but generally that's the standard. They Met
also complained that it was racist for Carpo to have shown one of the model's
breast as naked. Well, guess what Practically the entirety of Western civilization art
has portrayed the nude. They have overwhelmingly been white. They have been much
more exposed, much more erotic than the woman who's the portrayal in this case.
And so here you have the met in order to make its absurd claim
that an abolitionist work is in fact white supremacists needing to turn on the very
traditions of Western art. Emily, it is beyond to perverse. And you
have a really I think you put this really well. You ask in the
book what happens when a culture condemns itself so decisively. We don't yet know,
but we are robbing children of an essential source of identity through a one
sided take on the pass and a groundless indictment of the presence. Can you
talk to us about that particular focus on children, because as we sort of
think about the moment that we're in right now. We know how it's influencing
the way we talk about politics, and infuriatingly so to most Americans right now.
But as you contemplate what it must be like to grow up as an
American child post twenty twenty, what do you think it is doing to them
as they grow into their teens and become adults. It's terrifying, and my
heart goes out to these children. We are denying them any source of beauty,
any source of pride, any source of joy elation. Everything is negative.
We are rubbing their nose in dysfunction, in perversity, and in guilt.
They are not allowed to read without being told that if a book doesn't
match their own ridiculously narrowly defined identities, that they should not be reading it
because it's an oppressive book. We have given them no pride in what is,
in fact, objectively a civilization that has liberated the entirety of humanity from
the squalor of premature death, maternal child death, children's premature death, the
most debilitating diseases. We have built bridges, plumbing, sewage elevators, electricity
that you can turn on with a flick of a switch. It's all miraculous,
and yet children are being given no source of pride or joy, and
the vast bountiest bounties of Western art students have no interest in it. They're
told that they should only be interested in their own petty, narcissistic selves.
In fact, what art does is give you the opportunity to escape the count
fines of your own identity, enter selves that are quite different from your own,
Enter errors that are different from your own, experienced forms of expression that
are not ours. They're alien, and that's what makes them wonderful. Nobody
I talked about the destruction of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the rewriting of Schiller Frederick
Schiller's Owe to Joy on Defloida, which Beethoven used. Nobody would write Schiller's
poem today. It is in a different idiom. It is classical, romantic,
elevated. That's precisely why we should read it. We don't need to
rewrite Schiller's poem as hip hop poetry. We've got enough. We go to
the past because it's a different mode of being, and that now is being
denied. Young people. Do you sense, and maybe you've even I'd be
curious if you even heard from people who are at some of these institutions,
even you know, scientific institutions, medical institutions. Do you sense that there's
change of foot I imagine it's a tug of war, you know, between
sane people, not even necessarily Democrats and Republicans, but just some sane,
grounded people and activists. Do you sense that there's a shift happening? And
are you optimistic or do you think of anything? It's being overpowered by the
activists, by the left insists everyone else as a bigot, so they'd scare
everyone out of having an honest conversation. What's the trajectory sort of look like
at this juncture. Well, here's a disclosure. I'm a pessimist by nature,
and so I know that pessimists and optimists are simply constitutionally different. We
look at the same set of facts and one half of us say, jeez,
things are really bad in the other but look at there's all these little
shoots of hope, same facts, So you know, take that into account.
I'm not optimistic yet. I mean, I think what desandis is doing
is showing that you can really fight back and just not be cowed by charges
of racism. So that that does give me hope. On the other hand,
the really tough nut to crack here, Emily is people's worries about their
employment. At the end of the book, I talk about a conversation I
had with an oncologist who had been told by the director of the deputy director
of the National Cancer Institutes that all of the National Cancer Centers had to send
in a more diverse group of nominees for this very prestigious research grant for doing
cutting edge cancer research. And everybody was told, we haven't been giving diverse
enough awards, so in effect, change your standards, lower your standards so
that we can give diverse awards regardless of whether these are the most cutting edge
scientists most likely to cure cancer. And I said to him, when are
you guys going to stand up to this? I mean, they are destroying
your field, the thing that you've worked all your life for. And he
said, we value our jobs, We need our jobs. People who have
stood up have been crushed. You know, nothing comes of it, He
said, The whole system is it's going to take fifty years. It's going
to have to collapse completely and be built, rebuilt from the ground up.
So giving people courage to speak the truth and to say I am not racist.
I'm not scared by your phony charge calling me a racist. My institution
is not racist. The tradition that I represent, that I studied all my
life to keep going is not racist. We need more people to say I'm
not caving into the race hustle. If we do that, if we say,
you cannot scare me by calling me a racist. I believe in standards.
The standards of the are not the problem. I believe that everybody can
succeed, then we will. This thing will evaporate. It will evaporate overnight.
But getting that courage for people who feel that their job may be on
the line is very tough. Heather McDonald, thank you so much for joining
us wonderful conversation. Emily, thank you for reading my book. Of course
once again, that book is called When Race Trump's Merit, How the pursuit
of equity sacrifices excellence, destroys beauty, and threatens lives. You've been listening
to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshinsky, culture editor
here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray