America is committing civilizational suicide, Heather Mac Donald warns in new book

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The continued mantra that racism defines America and is deeply embedded in all of the nation’s institutions is leading to policies and practices that are slowly destroying the nation from within, writes Heather Mac Donald in her new book When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

The book pulls together hundreds of statistics and anecdotes to illustrate how the left’s obsession with racial diversity, turbo-charged after the death of George Floyd in May 2020, has infected courtrooms, universities, law and medical schools, STEM research, and the arts. and cultural institutions such as museums and concert halls.

These important institutions have placed racial quotas and equity benchmarks over meritocratic achievement even though crime and the underrepresentation of blacks in many professions have less to do with racism and bias and more to do with unequal distribution of skills.

The concept of disparate impact is destroying America’s major institutions in the name of fighting invented racism, writes Mac Donald, who is on the advisory board of The College Fixes.

It jeopardizes future scientific advances by substituting racial quotas for meritocracy. It undoes decades of progress in fighting urban crime by declaring color-blind law enforcement racist, he wrote, describing it as a kind of cultural self-cancellation.

Conservative scholarship describes the rejection of normative goals as nihilistic.

America’s elites appear to have decided that if, after five decades of massive financial spending on inner-city education, income transfers, and social services, the academic skills gap still hasn’t been closed, it’s time to divide the objective metrics that measure it, Mac Donald wrote.

The pursuit of justice is the sacrifice of excellence, the destruction of beauty, and the threat of life.

My new book makes the case that abandoning meritocracy is not only unfair, it’s unsafe and damaging to society.

“When Race Trumps Merit” is now available: https://t.co/W5IirIRk68 pic.twitter.com/qrfgifGjKC

— Heather Mac Donald (@HMDatMI) April 24, 2023

The 319-page book is filled with details of how those charged with protecting Americans — scientists, scholars, doctors and police — now operate under this disparate impact orthodoxy.

Racial quotas are now more important than finding a cure for cancer, as Mac Donald spelled out how the National Cancer Institute expanded its Outstanding Investigator Awards because its previous winners weren’t diverse enough: No the deputy director clarified which aspects of scientific merit should be discarded in order to achieve a wider pool of nominees.

A leading cancer researcher told Mac Donald that the trend is now unstoppable, because few are willing to risk their jobs to speak out: The system will have to rot from the inside and be reinvented, which will take 50-100 years.

A section of the book devoted to law and order includes five straight pages of news headlines about the majority of young children killed by gun violence in urban cities while the homicide rate in major cities is rising after Floyd’s death.

These drive-by shootings occurred almost exclusively in black neighborhoods, Mac Donald wrote. … [S]because the black kids who attack are overwhelmingly black, the country changes the subject, lest it be accused of an illicit focus on black crime.

Yet the false narrative remains that racist cops are the problem. Mac Donald denied that: In 2021, eight unarmed black people were killed by police officers, according to the Washington Post. The eight unarmed black people represent .00001 percent of the nation’s nearly 47 million self-identified black people, or 1/100 of one person killed by a police officer for every 100,000 black people.

In addition to responding to attacks on the excellence and objectivity of science, medicine, and law enforcement, Mac Donald spends time reporting on the death of culture and the arts.

For example, the attack against classical music is worth examining in some detail, because it shows the logic that has been against almost every aspect of Western culture in the last few years, he writes. That logic reveals a hatred of beauty, a brittle intolerance of the past, and a self-righteous certainty that the orthodoxies of the present are strangely just.

Mac Donald has the receipts, providing a parade of anecdotes illustrating how the decline of cultural excellence extends from Beethoven and Swan Lake to operas to museums.

The end result stifles the imagination, stifles the capacity for wonder and joy, and strips the future of all that gives meaning to human life: beauty, greatness, and intellect.

We are in uncharted territory.

MORE: To embrace colorblind excellence, colleges must abandon DEI: Heather Mac Donald

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