Earlier: VDARE Book Club: When Race Trumps Merit By Heather MacDonald

I have been reading Heather Mac Donald’s new book, When Race Trumps Merit. That is exactly its subject: the destruction of meritocratic standards in education and the professions for the sake of DEI. Or, as the book’s subtitle spells it out, ”How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

You probably know in outline some of what the author is writing about from occasional news clips and social-media posts. If the dumbing-down affects some one area you are particularly interested in, you may know a lot about its consequences in that area.

Heather Mac Donald covers all the bases: science, medicine, music, ballet, opera, the visual arts, law, and justice. She backs it all up with numbers, statistics. This is quantitative journalism at its best.

As good as the book is, though, it leaves one depressed at the scope and power of stupidity and negativity in current American society. Quote from Chapter Six:

Ultimately theatre itself may have to be segregated, since to claim that a white audience can identify with a black-themed work is another form of cultural appropriation. A recent play, lauded twice by the New York Times, asked white audience members to leave the theatre before the play’s conclusion so that black attendees could experience undisturbed racial solidarity. (One account implies that this mandate was obeyed.)

Most depressing of all is the feebleness of the resistance. Mac Donald does have one chapter, Chapter Twelve, titled ”Abstainers,” but its examples—black conductor John McLaughlin Williams, Tulsa Opera, Long Beach Opera—are obscure and marginal.

And there’s this, on DEI in the medical field, from the book’s Conclusion, quote:

I asked the cancer researcher: when would white and Asian male scientists fight back? How much longer would they continue to allow their hard work and accomplishments to be disparaged and sidelined? His response, sent by email, explains why the disparate impact crusade has heretofore been unstoppable.

We value our jobs.

We need our jobs.

Our peers will turn on us.

Speak out, lose job forever, be quickly forgotten and abandoned.

I admire the bravery of those who speak out but they are being exterminated and will systematically be exterminated until they are all gone.

The system will have to rot from within and be reinvented, which will take 50-100 years.

And I can’t leave Heather Mac Donald without urging you to read her April 25th article at City Journal, title ”On Race and Crime, a Counterfactual Narrative.” It’s a devastating rebuttal, again all backed up with statistics, to our nation’s current Big Lie: the fantasy that black Americans scurry around in terror of white supremacists seeking to harm them.

Thank you, Ma’am; and thanks to Heather Mac Donald’s publisher DW Books and to City Journal for supporting her.