Heather Mac Donald on Meritocracy Versus Diversity

'This country has decided it would rather lower everybody than raise them up'

Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, author of "The Diversity Delusion." Illustration by The Epoch Times, Ke Yuan/The Epoch Times

“You can have meritocracy, or you can have diversity,” says Heather Mac Donald. “You can’t have both.”

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek sits down with Heather Mac Donald to discuss the Tyre Nichols murder, the erasure of meritocracy in our schools and businesses, and the breakdown of law in our inner cities. Mac Donald is a Manhattan Institute fellow and author of “The War on Cops” and “The Diversity Delusion.” Her new book, “When Race Trumps Merit,” will be released in April.

After a traffic stop on Jan. 7, Nichols, 29, attempted to flee and resisted police arrest. Video footage shows him being repeatedly beaten by several police officers. He required hospitalization and died three days later.

Jan Jekielek: Let’s look at the Tyre Nichols attack. You always offer a thoughtful perspective. Based on what you know, what happened?

Heather Mac Donald: We don’t really know why he was pulled over. The officers initially said he was driving in the wrong direction. But when the videos kick in, these officers are already out of control, giving Nichols contradictory commands. “Show your hands,” “Keep your hands down,” “Get out of the car,” “Stay in the car.” Then they drag him out of the car. These tactics for arresting a suspect demonstrate incompetence.

My usual position on preventing the use of physical force is to comply with the officer. Don’t resist arrest. Do what he tells you. Don’t run or flee in your car.

But in this case, I don’t blame Nichols for running, because these officers were behaving like maniacs. One of them, Officer Martin, is kicking Nichols in the head when he’s down.

This incident has been falsely portrayed by President Joe Biden and the mainstream media as an instance of white supremacy. Obviously, there are many ironies. Nichols was black, but so were all the five officers who have been indicted for murder. White supremacy is a poisonous narrative, one that doesn’t accord with the facts.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s confusing to people, using this as an example of white supremacy.

Ms. Mac Donald: It’s a new narrative. Racism now has nothing to do with the perpetrator and everything to do with the victim. Van Jones, the CNN commentator, was first out of the gate with an essay saying: “This is still racism. It shows that policing is fundamentally racist, because anything bad that happens to a black victim is by definition racist.”

Even though in this case there’s no evidence of race coming in at all, you still had Biden saying, “This shows us once again the systemic inequities in the criminal justice system.” In other words, toward blacks.

He also revived a favorite trope that he picked up from President Barack Obama, which is that every time a black child goes into the streets, his parents are correct to fear that he might be abused or killed by a cop, something that is completely belied by the data. It’s just not the case.

Yes, blacks have much more reason to fear getting shot when they go outside. The reason is not because of white cops or white people, it’s because of black criminals. Blacks between the ages of 10 and 24 die of gun homicide at 25 times the rate of whites of the same age group. That’s the reality no one wants to talk about.

Mr. Jekielek: Is the high level of crime in the inner city, predominantly black communities, a consequence of racism?

Ms. Mac Donald: Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump, the civil rights attorney representing the Nichols family, went to Minneapolis for the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death, who is sadly our current version of a civil rights hero. This man had committed a crime. He had a long history of crime. He’s not somebody for young people to venerate. But today, our civil rights heroes are almost exclusively criminals who have been shot by cops. That’s a sad statement about the state of the civil rights movement.

In any case, there’s Sharpton and Crump showing up in Minneapolis. At that moment in a north Minneapolis hospital were two black children, a 9-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, who had both been shot in the head in drive-by shootings by black criminals. The boy’s skull had to be removed. He’s going to be paralyzed for life. The 9-year-old girl died several days later. And a few days after that another black child was shot fatally.

It’s not racism that makes these kids start spraying bullets across sidewalks because they’re hoping to take out their gang enemies, and instead end up shooting children. That’s not racism. It’s a total failure of self-control and respect for life. It’s a civilizational breakdown, and America turns its eyes away because it’s so disturbing a reality. Instead, you have these mainstream institutions blaming themselves for phantom racism.

Mr. Jekielek: Isn’t it a kind of patronizing racism where elite society tells itself, “Well, you’re not up to taking control of your life, so we’ll let you do this”?

Ms. Mac Donald: Yes. That’s what my book “When Race Trumps Merit” is about: disparate impact and race eclipsing merit. We tear down any standard that has a disparate impact on blacks rather than saying, “How about you meet the standards?”

We’re getting rid of LSATs and medical school admissions tests. We’re getting rid of gifted and talented programs. In criminal law, we’re getting rid of behavioral standards, because enforcing the law will have a disparate impact on blacks.

We’re not saying: “How about you do what other discriminated-against groups did, like Jews or Asians? Which is not just to meet the standards, but beat them.” It doesn’t help people to have lowered standards.

I’ve spoken to young black students who understand that they’re admitted to colleges and graduate schools at lower standards than, say, Asians. But it doesn’t seem to bother them too much. They think, “Well, it’s owed to me.” But it can create a sense of self-doubt. And it should.

It’s a pernicious game that does nobody any good.

Mr. Jekielek: Many self-help books say you need to take responsibility for yourself. If you don’t take full responsibility, you’re not going to succeed. And some people preach this stuff to their kids and family, and you can see it in their lives. But when it comes to other people, they have this weird double standard that I don’t grasp.

Ms. Mac Donald: For the past 50 or 60 years, we’ve had an excuse factory come up with one excuse after another for inner-city pathologies. It’s an absolute refusal to say, “You are responsible for yourself.”

The worst has to do with fatherhood. The norm in the inner city now is that you impregnate females serially, and you have children by different females, and it’s not viewed as a massive breaching of a taboo.

If you never learn responsibility for your children, it’s hard to have a sense of responsibility for anything else, because that’s primary. Instead, the community and the outside world have written fathers and responsibility out of the picture.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s certainly easier to equalize things across the bottom than to lift everybody up.

Ms. Mac Donald: And it’s going on everywhere. We’ve decided we would rather not cultivate our top math talent if that produces racial disparities. The gifted and talented programs are disproportionately Asian, and they’re being dismantled. California has this insane math curriculum that’s all about equity, narrowing the achievement gaps between blacks and Hispanics on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other.

So they defer the teaching of algebra in the hope that blacks and Hispanics will catch up. But then there’s less time for the subsequent math courses, and algebra and calculus are being replaced by this phony math course called data science, which is basically just reading graphs.

Because of its white guilt, this country has decided it would rather lower everybody than raise them up. And it’s not just the schools. The entrance exams for the police force, for example, have a disparate impact on blacks, meaning they’re not passing at a sufficient rate. These are basic reading tests, but their reading skills are so low that the exam disqualifies blacks at a higher rate than whites. So we throw out the test.

Sixty-six percent of black 12th graders don’t have partial mastery of 12th-grade math. Partial mastery of 12th-grade math skills means being able to do basic arithmetic. How, then, do we reach the conclusion that if Google doesn’t have 13 percent black engineers, Google must be discriminating against competitively qualified black applicants? It’s mathematically impossible.

You can have meritocracy or you can have diversity. You can’t have both. Given those academic gaps, it’s premature to go around noting the racial ratios of any institution and saying, “If it’s not proportionally representative, then the default explanation is racism.” As long as racism remains, the only allowable explanation for racial disparities, the left wins.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.