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We're back with another edition of the
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshinsky,

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culture editor here at the Federalist.
As always, you can email the show

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at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.

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Make sure to subscribe wherever you download
your podcasts as well, and subscribe

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to the premium version of our website
over at the Federalist dot com. We're

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joined today by Heather McDonald. She
is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at

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the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor
of City Journal. More importantly, for

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the purposes of this conversation, she's
out with a new book. It's called

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When Race Trump's Merit. How the
pursuit of equity sacrifices excellence, destroys beauty,

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and threatens lives. Heather, thank
you for joining us, Emily.

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It's an absolute honor to be thank
you. Of course, this book is

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organized into three different parts, and
each is sort of individually terrifying. But

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I'll just break it down. Science
of Medicine, culture and arts, and

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law and order. I want to
start by just asking you if you could

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tell us a little bit about the
history of desparate impact because this seems to

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be the thread that you weave through
all three of those categories. This is

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kind of a poison pill, a
cultural poison pill that is wreaking havoc on

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these institutions. So could you struct
us by telling us a little bit about

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what it is and how it came
to be right, desparate impact is what

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is now making us tear down every
single meritocratic or behavioral standard in the name

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of avoiding negative consequences for blacks.
It began in the nineteen seventies as a

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way to spanned traditional civil rights laws. The civil rights acts that were passed

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in the nineteen sixties banned intentional voluntary
discrimination. So if an employer said I

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just don't want to hire blacks.
I don't care how qualified they are,

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but I just don't want any blacks
in my workplace, the Civil Rights Statute

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said you cannot do that. You
cannot use race to in this artificial and

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unconstitutional and demeaning manner. But after
a while there were very few employers that

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were actually still discriminating in that way, and so the move was on to

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expand the reach of civil rights statutes. Also, we were not seeing the

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same proportional representation in workplaces, as
everyone had expected. Once the formal barriers

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to integration had come down, and
so a new way of challenging employment practices

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came about. The idea was,
if an employer was absolutely color blind,

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was not intentionally discriminating, had no
desire to exclude blacks or other so called

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underrepresented groups from his workplace, but
he had some kind of employment test or

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expectation that resulted in disproportionately disqualifying blacks, then that test or that expectation or

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that standard had to go. So
for decades, people may have noticed firefighting

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exams, exams to become a police
officer, to enter the academy have faced

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one set of lawsuit after another on
the charge that the exams are racist.

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Now, rarely can anybody come up
with an actual question that somehow in testing

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reading skills for firemen so that they
know how to understand chemical reactions as described

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in the firefighting materials that they use. Rarely as anybody ever alleged that the

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actual question is racist. But if
blacks don't pass those written exams, those

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tests of reading at the same rate
of whites, well, then a judge

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says, well, that's a racist
test. We're going to throw it out.

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You have to lower your standards,
come up with some kind of reading

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test it is at a much lower
level, or get rid of the test

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entirely and just higher on the basis
of race. Well, that disparate impact

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concept spread into federal statutes, federal
regulations, but now it has leaked the

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boundary and it exists virtually everywhere.
It doesn't depend on a judge, it

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doesn't depend on a legislator, it
doesn't depend on a federal or a crat

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writing some kind of disparate impact regulation
into the Code of Federal Regulations. It

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has been embraced by every leader of
our mainstream institutions who since the George Floyd

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race riots, are going around fanatically
declaring their own institutions racist for no other

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reason than they don't have a proportional
representation of blacks and are discarding one meritocratic

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or one behavioral standard after another.
Yeah, and you've been studying this obviously

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long before twenty twenty happened. And
that's actually why I want to get your

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perspective on how this theory of disparate
impact or the cult of disparate impact made

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the leap from academia sort of fringe
activist circles into not just as you mentioned,

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legal statutes, but also into just
mainstream standards of what constitutes racism,

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what falls under that giant umbrella definition
of racism. How did that happen?

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Well, that's a great question,
and it results from the same reason we

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came up with disparate impact analysis in
the first place, which is widespread discomfort

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that we still have racial disparities in
meritocratic institutions on the one hand and in

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the incarcerated population on the other.
In the one case, we have an

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underrepresentation of blacks at in the Google
computer science department or engineering department, or

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at a medical school, at a
Alzheimer's research lab, and on the other

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hand, we have an overrepresentation of
blacks in prison compared to their national population

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ratio, which is thirteen percent.
And this is very troubling to well meaning

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Americans, and most people, as
I've governed, do not want to even

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consider that there may be cultural differences
which are driving the underrepresentation of blacks and

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maritocratic institutions and the overrepresentation incarceration rates. And so our elites have decided that

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as sort of proleptically in order to
fend off any discussion of culture, they're

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just going to declare themselves racist,
an America racist, and standards racist,

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and they're tearing it all down.
The purpose of my book is to make

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a very data based argument that disparate
impact is not the result of racism.

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Standards are not racist. Here are
the facts about academic skills, about crime

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skills that people turn their eyes away
from an understandable sense of racial etiquette.

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But at this point, the time
for racial etiquette is over because we are

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busily tearing down the institutions of American
civilization. Well, yeah, let's talk

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about that. Let's talk about the
future of medicines. As in a turelier

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you have those three sort of category
science, medicine, culture, and arts

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in law and order. The medicine
chapter is particularly harrowing, and you definitely

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include a lot of statistics and data
and its points in a really frightening,

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disturbing direction. And so I guess
one way I wanted to ask the question

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is what does the future of medicine
look like in a world where the sort

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of meritocracy is crumbling down among the
people who are supposed to keep us safe.

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It's a terrible future, Emily,
and you're absolutely right among the people

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whore supposed to keep us safe.
The thing that was the most astounded to

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me in writing this book was seeing
how the leaders of the most prestigious and

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in some case, in the case
the art sublime institutions have turned on their

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own traditions and are embracing patent fictions
such as that science as racist or medicine

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is racist. We have the leaders
of the American Medical Association, the leaders

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of the medical schools, the American
Association, and medical colleges journals, the

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most some of the most prestigious scientific
journals, whether it's Scientific American Journal,

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of American Medical Association or JAMMA Lancet, all pumping out propaganda based on spurious

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analyzes, spurious data, claiming that
racism is the predominant trait of American science

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in American medicine today. So what
we're seeing in medical schools is a accelerating

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evisceration of academic standards. The Medical
College Admissions Test MCAT, which is the

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counterpart of the SAT for Medical college
admissions. It is color blind, it

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is objective, it is computer graded. There is not a single question on

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the MCAT that has any kind of
racial overtone, and in fact, recently

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they've added all these sort of social
psychology and community oriented test questions simply in

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the hope of boosting black scores on
the MCATs, even though those questions have

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nothing to do with one's capacity to
understand self physiology, and so this is

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not a racist test. And yet
there are medical schools now that are waiving

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the MCATs for some black students simply
because the MCATs have yet again a disparate

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impact on black college seniors. The
first part of the of the medical Licensing

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Exam, it's known as Step one, used to be a graded exam,

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and it tests. It comes after
medical students second year, and it's tests

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their absorption of a whole range of
academic material about body anatomy, drug interactions,

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canser, you know how how the
nervous system works, how the digestive

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system works. And there too,
black students having been admitted to medical schools

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with racial preferences, and therefore admitted
to schools for which they're not competitively qualified,

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though they would be qualified for a
whole host of other medical schools.

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Blacks were scoring at the rock bottom. So rather than saying, well,

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maybe we should consider racial preferences,
maybe we should admit based on merit,

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not based on race, the medical
board that administers this licensing exam last year

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said, okay, no more grades. From now on. Step one is

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no longer graded. We're going to
pass fail system in the hope that this

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will qualify more black students. The
pressure is on for every other type of

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test that is administered during, during
medical school and after to get rid of

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objective standards and replace them with an
attention to race. And what this means

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emily for the individuals among us is
that if you're brought into an emergency room

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having been in a very serious car
crash and a doctor walks through the door,

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who is the recipient of all of
these racial preferences, you are going

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to have no way of rationally knowing
if that is the most qualified doctor,

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or if that is the most qualified
doctor within a preferred victim group. This

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embhasis on racial composition is also slowing
down our medical research progress because the federal

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science agencies who fund medical research,
and the schools themselves who carry out the

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medical research, have declared that the
racial composition of an Alzheimer's research lab or

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a cancer research lab is as if
not more important than the qualifications of the

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scientists working in that research lab.
And I was just going to ask you

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to tell us more about that because
and people obviously should pick up the book

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for all the specifics on this,
But it reminds me of what happened with

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some of the transgender ideology in research
on biology, and that there was sort

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of it had obviously a chilling effect
and then completely distorted some papers and things

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that were coming out for a while. And that's still happening. Of course,

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what are we seeing when it comes
to the research section here in particular,

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and that desperate impact analysis or that
desperate impact standard. How is that

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skewing all of the millions of dollars
worth of research, billions of dollars worth

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of research that we are supposed to
be the best in the world are doing.

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It's skewing in so many ways,
Emily. It's skewing because again we're

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choosing researchers not based on their medical
qualifications, but based on their race.

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This is very explicit in the guidelines
put out by the National Institutes of Health,

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national Cancer Institutes, the National Science
foundation, And you know, it

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would be the same if it was
saying, well, we really want to

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choose on the basis of sex,
which they're also doing. Sex is simply

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an irrelevant characteristic. I do not
care if the lab that cures Alzheimer's is

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all Asian, is all black,
is all Indian, is all white,

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is all female. It doesn't matter
to me. What matters are they the

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best scientists. Are they the ones
that have the leading edge in discovering the

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pathways and how to solve this crippling
disease. But it is also affecting the

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substance of what may get researched.
It is now absolutely taboo to say that,

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well, if there's racial disparities and
health outcomes, that personal decision making,

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personal behavior, culture may be part
of that. And so, you

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know, we saw that there was
higher death rates among blacks for COVID and

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the only allowable explanation for that is
that somehow doctors are racist and they were

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not treating black COVID patients with the
same degree of care as white COVID patients.

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Well that, Emily, I'm sorry, that is completely bs. Doctors

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do not care about the race age
and if they want all of their patients

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to get well. The real reason
was much higher rates of obesity among blacks

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and obesity this is something that of
course was not allowed to be said,

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regardless of the race aspect of it. During COVID obesity was one of the

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greatest comorbidities that determined how one would
react to a COVID infection. Now we're

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told that to even talk about obesity
as a health problem is racist. That

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Scientific American published a whole issue devoted
to racism in policing, racism and health

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and one article said to talk to
black women about obesity is racist. Well,

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what if it turns out that the
problem with black mortality rates is not

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doctor racism but its behavior. But
if we can't talk about it, you

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are making sure that we will never
solve that problem. And the third way,

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emily that this obsession with race and
disparate impact is affecting our scientific and

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medical progresses. The NIH is actually
distributing, determining its research priorities based not

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on what is the most important scientific
problem that we hope to solve, but

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simply based on how does it get
the number of black awardees for its research

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money up? And it turns out
that black doctors do less pure science,

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less work in the laboratory trying to
figure out genetic coding, and more doing

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research on racism, more sociological inquiries
on how systemic racism allegedly affects black health.

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And so the NIH simply moved funding
from pure science to research on health

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disparities and racism simply in order to
say, well, we now have a

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higher percentage of principal investigators who were
black. Yeah. And it strikes me

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that because so much of this research
is funded by the government, I wonder,

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are there any obvious policy solutions along
the lines of what the Trump administration

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did with critical race theory after Chris
Ruffo did some research on that front.

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Is there anything that is sort of
a Republican president could approach on a policy

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level could do to approach this as
a solution on a policy level. Absolutely,

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Emily for one. You know,
as I say, although the disparate

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impact idea has leaped out of the
code of federal regulations into the culture at

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large, there still are many spots
in statutes and regulations that a president could

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change and return America to the ideal
of color blindness. So he could extirpate

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from the Code of Federal Regulations all
disparate impact mandates. He'd have to go

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through the usual processes of notice and
hearing and comment statutes that would require Congress

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to change, but he could put
up make a campaign for that, and

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the federal science agencies, he could
definitely say, get rid of the tens

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of millions that you're spending each year
on subsidizing research into intersectionality, one of

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the most ridiculous concepts, into head
noormativity. This is what you know,

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this is what's going on at the
National Science Foundation. He could say,

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get rid of all of it and
let's return to doing pure science. Now,

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you rightly you sort of bring up
the federal government or the government aspect

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of this. It's not as if
this is only coming out of the government.

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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which
is the largest private funder of medical

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research and was started by Howard Hughes
in the nineteen fifties who wanted to push

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back the frontiers of ignorance and expand
our scientific knowledge. Hughes would have been

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astounded what his institute is doing now. But they are doing the same thing.

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The federal government is making race a
primary criterion for their grant making.

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Well, another place where there are
some federal dollars involved, probably not nearly

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as much, is culture and arts. And you talk about beauty in the

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book. It's actually in the title
of the book, which is so interesting

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because you're weaving this threat of disparate
impact. They're all of these differentis and

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you talk about opera, you talk
about all different examples of where this disparate

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impact standard has started attacking beauty itself
through attacks on the arts. And I

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wanted to ask on that note,
is there a maybe particular Marxist strategy behind

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these attacks on beauty and art or
is it just sort of part of that

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ideology. It's so baked into the
ideology that we can't have beauty and artistic

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expression that it ends up attacking them
anyway, what's behind this? I don't

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think there's a strategy or a conspiracy. I think it's just in the zeitgeist.

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The elites are obsessed with racial issues, racial outcomes, and after George

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Floyd, everybody went into mass psychosis, declaring America white supremacist. And you

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had art institution after out institution putting
out these preposterous apologies and maya culpus for

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their own alleged racism, which is
absurd. Classical music orchestras, you auditioned

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behind a screen so nobody can see
your identity. The idea that that somehow

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conductors are discriminating against black bassoonists is
absurd. Conductors only care about the getting

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the top flight musicians in their orchestra
who will not flub the horn solo in

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a Rigard Trios tone poem. They
I interviewed the Indian conductors Uben Meda from

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my book, who began as a
sort of child prodigy very young age,

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and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I
went to those concerts with my family Sunday

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matinees growing up in the nineteen sixties. He went on to conduct leading orchestras

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across the world. He that he
has never ever witnessed anybody in his field

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discriminate against blacks. But now you
have again the very leaders of these organizations

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saying our mission now is anti racist. And in order to be anti racist

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and to sort of argue that what
the status quo anti was racist requires a

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complete rejection and annihilation of artistic traditions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New

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York City recently mounted a show built
around a sculpture, a bust of a

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black woman with a rope around her
chest, and the statue is called Why

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Born Enslaved. It was an abolitionist
work by a nineteenth century French sculpture named

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Jean Baptiste Calpo. It is a
work intended to move the viewer to feel

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the inhumanity of slavery. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art built an entire show around

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this bust, which it had recently
acquired. The show was titled The Fictions

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of Emancipation. In other words,
emancipation is a fiction whites never wanted to

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emancipate blacks. This sculpture, according
to the Met in its post George Floyd

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Mode, is actually all about keeping
blacks enslaved. The thesis of the bust,

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according to the Met, is that
the only way blacks can be free

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is to be enslaved in the first
place. The Met accused Cockpo the sculpture

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of racism because he had not named
his model for the sculpture. No,

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practically, no Western artist in history
has named his model. We don't know

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models names. They've never done that. Unless there's been you know the artist

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was having an affair with his model, then maybe we do some bike rafical

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research and we find that out,
but generally that's the standard. They Met

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also complained that it was racist for
Carpo to have shown one of the model's

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breast as naked. Well, guess
what Practically the entirety of Western civilization art

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has portrayed the nude. They have
overwhelmingly been white. They have been much

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more exposed, much more erotic than
the woman who's the portrayal in this case.

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And so here you have the met
in order to make its absurd claim

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that an abolitionist work is in fact
white supremacists needing to turn on the very

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traditions of Western art. Emily,
it is beyond to perverse. And you

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have a really I think you put
this really well. You ask in the

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book what happens when a culture condemns
itself so decisively. We don't yet know,

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but we are robbing children of an
essential source of identity through a one

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sided take on the pass and a
groundless indictment of the presence. Can you

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talk to us about that particular focus
on children, because as we sort of

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think about the moment that we're in
right now. We know how it's influencing

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the way we talk about politics,
and infuriatingly so to most Americans right now.

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But as you contemplate what it must
be like to grow up as an

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American child post twenty twenty, what
do you think it is doing to them

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as they grow into their teens and
become adults. It's terrifying, and my

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heart goes out to these children.
We are denying them any source of beauty,

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any source of pride, any source
of joy elation. Everything is negative.

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We are rubbing their nose in dysfunction, in perversity, and in guilt.

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They are not allowed to read without
being told that if a book doesn't

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match their own ridiculously narrowly defined identities, that they should not be reading it

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because it's an oppressive book. We
have given them no pride in what is,

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in fact, objectively a civilization that
has liberated the entirety of humanity from

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the squalor of premature death, maternal
child death, children's premature death, the

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most debilitating diseases. We have built
bridges, plumbing, sewage elevators, electricity

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that you can turn on with a
flick of a switch. It's all miraculous,

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and yet children are being given no
source of pride or joy, and

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the vast bountiest bounties of Western art
students have no interest in it. They're

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told that they should only be interested
in their own petty, narcissistic selves.

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In fact, what art does is
give you the opportunity to escape the count

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fines of your own identity, enter
selves that are quite different from your own,

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Enter errors that are different from your
own, experienced forms of expression that

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are not ours. They're alien,
and that's what makes them wonderful. Nobody

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I talked about the destruction of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony and the rewriting of Schiller Frederick

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Schiller's Owe to Joy on Defloida,
which Beethoven used. Nobody would write Schiller's

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poem today. It is in a
different idiom. It is classical, romantic,

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elevated. That's precisely why we should
read it. We don't need to

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rewrite Schiller's poem as hip hop poetry. We've got enough. We go to

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the past because it's a different mode
of being, and that now is being

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denied. Young people. Do you
sense, and maybe you've even I'd be

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curious if you even heard from people
who are at some of these institutions,

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even you know, scientific institutions,
medical institutions. Do you sense that there's

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change of foot I imagine it's a
tug of war, you know, between

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sane people, not even necessarily Democrats
and Republicans, but just some sane,

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grounded people and activists. Do you
sense that there's a shift happening? And

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are you optimistic or do you think
of anything? It's being overpowered by the

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activists, by the left insists everyone
else as a bigot, so they'd scare

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everyone out of having an honest conversation. What's the trajectory sort of look like

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at this juncture. Well, here's
a disclosure. I'm a pessimist by nature,

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and so I know that pessimists and
optimists are simply constitutionally different. We

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look at the same set of facts
and one half of us say, jeez,

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things are really bad in the other
but look at there's all these little

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shoots of hope, same facts,
So you know, take that into account.

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I'm not optimistic yet. I mean, I think what desandis is doing

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is showing that you can really fight
back and just not be cowed by charges

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of racism. So that that does
give me hope. On the other hand,

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the really tough nut to crack here, Emily is people's worries about their

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employment. At the end of the
book, I talk about a conversation I

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had with an oncologist who had been
told by the director of the deputy director

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of the National Cancer Institutes that all
of the National Cancer Centers had to send

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in a more diverse group of nominees
for this very prestigious research grant for doing

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cutting edge cancer research. And everybody
was told, we haven't been giving diverse

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enough awards, so in effect,
change your standards, lower your standards so

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that we can give diverse awards regardless
of whether these are the most cutting edge

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scientists most likely to cure cancer.
And I said to him, when are

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you guys going to stand up to
this? I mean, they are destroying

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your field, the thing that you've
worked all your life for. And he

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said, we value our jobs,
We need our jobs. People who have

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stood up have been crushed. You
know, nothing comes of it, He

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said, The whole system is it's
going to take fifty years. It's going

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to have to collapse completely and be
built, rebuilt from the ground up.

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So giving people courage to speak the
truth and to say I am not racist.

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I'm not scared by your phony charge
calling me a racist. My institution

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is not racist. The tradition that
I represent, that I studied all my

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life to keep going is not racist. We need more people to say I'm

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not caving into the race hustle.
If we do that, if we say,

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you cannot scare me by calling me
a racist. I believe in standards.

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The standards of the are not the
problem. I believe that everybody can

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succeed, then we will. This
thing will evaporate. It will evaporate overnight.

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But getting that courage for people who
feel that their job may be on

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00:32:44,240 --> 00:32:50,079
the line is very tough. Heather
McDonald, thank you so much for joining

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00:32:50,160 --> 00:32:53,720
us wonderful conversation. Emily, thank
you for reading my book. Of course

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once again, that book is called
When Race Trump's Merit, How the pursuit

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of equity sacrifices excellence, destroys beauty, and threatens lives. You've been listening

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00:33:01,920 --> 00:33:06,319
to another edition of The Federalist Radio
Hour. I'm Emily Joshinsky, culture editor

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00:33:06,359 --> 00:33:08,519
here at The Federalist. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then,

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00:33:08,720 --> 00:33:16,920
be lovers of freedom and anxious for
the fray