My guest this week will no doubt be familiar to many of you. Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of many books, including the recently published When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. The book reflects Heather’s wide-ranging expertise on race, inequality, policing, art, music, literature, and a host of other matters. Her impressive portfolio gave us an opportunity to stretch out in this conversation.
One of the things I like about having Heather on the show is her ability to draw connections between such seemingly disparate concerns as medical school admissions data, the policing crisis, and Beethoven. Her critique of diversity-obsessed institutions and policies is that powerful, and perhaps a phenomenon as ubiquitous as the one she analyzes requires that kind of capacious analysis. Heather suggests that we haven’t yet achieved “peak woke.” And yet, somehow this conversation doesn’t leave me in despair. Neither Heather nor I are even close to throwing in the towel, and there’s something galvanizing about sitting down with a fellow traveler to think things through, no matter how bad things may look at present.
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Featured Content from the Manhattan Institute
Robert VerBruggen argues the United States should select immigrants based on skills, not family ties. Read his new Manhattan Institute report on the topic.
0:00 Heather’s new book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives
8:20 Are racial disparities in medical school the result of racism or skills gaps?
20:03 Do we really know what causes racial disparities?
32:23 Closing racial achievement gaps begins at home
40:39 Will black doctors necessarily provide better care to black patients?
50:26 Canceling Western art
1:00:37 Heather: Colonialism cannot explain the development of art
1:05:21 The stupidity of arguments against “cultural appropriation”
1:18:24 Heather: Lack of policing is a civil rights problem
1:29:43 Is it possible for a cop to get a fair trial?
1:34:40 Race and the future of progressive DAs
Recorded April 16, 2023
Links and Readings
Heather’s new book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives
Stephen Carter’s book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby
Glenn’s conversation with Charles Murray
Charles Murray’s book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox
Ronald Ferguson’s learning network, The Basics
Pierre Bourdieu’s book, Distinction
Heather’s City Journal essay, “Stirring Sounds”
Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michael Fortner’s book, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment
Glenn’s conversation with Michael Fortner
James Forman Jr.’s book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
Fred Siegel’s City Journal essay, “The Riot Ideology, Reborn”
Heather Mac Donald – When Race Trumps Merit