Heather Mac Donald rejoins High Noon podcast to discuss her critical book When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. Heather and Inez discuss how unfair racial preferences have jumped from the courtroom to private institutions, and how they’ve seriously undercut scientific progress and artistic accomplishment. They also talk about how the inability to speak frankly about group differences in culture or accomplishment endangers Americans of every color thanks to a police pullback.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. So happy to have Heather Mac Donald back on the show, especially given the important subject of her latest book. Heather is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and her newest book is When Race Trumps Merit. I think addressing, if not the central issue of our times, at least a central issue of our time, and I think she argues pretty convincingly that it is the central issue of our time. So welcome, Heather to High Noon. I’m so pleased to have you back on.
Heather Mac Donald:
It’s great to be with you Inez and thank you for the kind words.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. So I want to start with how you start your book, because basically, you talk about the summer of 2020, the summer of Floyd, if you will, as a moment of Cultural Revolution. I, myself, and my husband, when we were talking about it at the time, we said we feel like we’re living through a regime change. Like that, something is fundamentally… We’ve reached some kind of fundamental tipping point. There’s statues coming down, half the country is on fire. It seems like every single institution is coming out with nearly identical statements, repeating the sacred words about how America is a systemically racist country. Why do you choose to begin the book with this tipping point? And what does it say about the setup of your premise, that in fact, the idea of disparate impact is now the default setting in American society?
Heather Mac Donald:
It was the moment where the idea that any racial disparity in an institution, if there’s an underrepresentation of Black computer engineers at Google compared to their proportion in the population at large, or an overrepresentation of Blacks in prison compared to their population at large, it was the moment when that idea, that that meant racism, that the only allowable explanation for racial disparities in an institution is racism, became adopted by every elite, mainstream institution. And that’s what makes this revolution so very bizarre, Inez because we usually think of revolutions as against the power structure. Some excluded marginalized group, the poor, or bourgeois, that feel like they haven’t gotten their rights sufficiently, as we saw in 19th-century revolutions, 1848 and 1830, it’s against the ruling class. And what was so bizarre about the George Floyd mass hysteria, mass psychosis, was that it was the most powerful secure institutions that themselves embraced this fantastical lie that they were racist.
Even though there’s not a single mainstream institution that is not twisting itself into knots to hire and promote as many remotely qualified Blacks and other underrepresented minorities as possible. And yet here were our elites saying, “We’re racist, and more importantly, you guys are really, really racist.” And so that has had enormous consequences. As we were saying before, it’s not unprecedented, these trends have been long time in making. The idea of racial preferences, of celebrating an anti-success culture, that’s been going on, both in the corporate world and in academia, for a long time. But what was different about the George Floyd mass meltdown was its volume and the effects it has had on tearing down meritocratic standards at a really, really fast rate, whether it’s in sciences, or when it comes to behavior in criminal law.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I think you make a really critical observation that is at once sort of obvious when we look around at our post-2020 world, but somehow under-discussed, even on the right. So for example, I’m sure you’re very familiar with Christopher Caldwell’s thesis and Age of Entitlement, and there’s a lot of focus on reforming the Civil Rights Act, at least among people who are, let’s say, a part of the right-wing spectrum that is not itself covering its language. And we’ll get to that in a moment. But you make this very critical observation that it’s jumped from law, in other words, the civil rights law and you cite some of the cases that use disparate impact analysis, and that underlying assumption that actually if there are not perfectly matching to the population quota numbers in anything, it must be due to discrimination. So that idea jumps to regulations, Dear Colleague letters from the Department of Education as you point out.
But you make a third point about this, which is you say now it’s basically a free-floating principle in operation, either explicitly or implicitly, everywhere, in private institutions, in public institutions. This kind of self-critique that you are talking about has made its jump to widespread culture, totally separate from whatever the Civil Rights Act does or doesn’t say, or whatever the Department of Education issues in terms of Dear Colleague letters.
Heather Mac Donald:
Right. Disparate impact concept arose as a legal concept within the law. It was the result of a lawsuit that was brought against a company that was not affirmatively discriminating, but the company had an employment test that assumed a certain degree of literacy, and Blacks failed that test at a higher rate than Whites. There was nothing discriminatory about the test, and the employer did not intend to exclude Blacks, but because the test had a so-called disparate impact on Blacks, it had to be thrown out, absent a very high showing of business necessity. And that concept, as you say, Inez, did then enter a code of federal regulations, statutes picked it up. But now you have cooking magazines, they’re not being sued by anybody, but they’re getting out there and saying, “We’re discriminating because we don’t have enough Blacks on our staff. There must be some kind of racism here.” Or a law firm that has a certain expectation of ability to draft documents. If that expectation has a disparate impact on Black associates, the law firm will voluntarily, absent any litigation, declare itself as racist, promise to make amends.
And so it would be good to get rid of the disparate impact concept in the law, and I advocate doing that. A federal, a president could start rulemaking that would get rid of every place disparate impact shows up in federal regulations. He could urge a Congress to change those statutes. But at this point, we have to do the work as well, Inez, because as you say, it’s in the culture. And what I do in this book is propose an alternative explanation for racial disparities. They are not the result of racism. They are the result of, on the one hand, very, very large academic skills gaps that make it simply ludicrous to expect that absent racism you would have proportional representation in highly demanding meritocratic jobs.
And the other explanation I propose for the overrepresentation of Blacks in the criminal justice system is very high rates of criminal offending. This may strike your listeners, Inez as self-evident, like, “You have to write a book about that? Come on. Obviously, there’s higher rates of crime.” Well, it is not so obvious. The defenses, the denials, that I have encountered over and over again talking about Black-on-Black crime are mind-boggling. So it needs to be said. It’s difficult to say. It makes people uncomfortable, understandably, to talk about these skills and behavior gaps. Racial etiquette advocates against doing so, and I appreciate the rationale for racial etiquette, but at this point, the hour is late and we cannot allow ourselves to be silenced by phony charges of racism by talking about facts. Facts are not racist.
Inez Stepman:
I want to talk about one, perhaps surprising, group of people who is engaging in that inability to just talk about baseline rates, whether that’s about criminality or how many academically prepared kids of any given racial group there are, and that’s the conservative institutions, that’s on the right. Because I remember one of the most depressing things about living through the riots in the summer of Floyd, in 2020 were the number of conservative institutions that, for example, released those creepily verbatim statements about systemic racism in America and “how we have to do better as institutions to purge the sin of systemic racism from ourselves.” What accounts for… Even institutions that are declaredly on the right. What’s that rule? Like every institution that’s not explicitly right-wing will move left-wing over time. Well, here we have explicitly right-wing institutions getting caught up in this cultural revolutionary mania in 2020. What does that say about the state of the right?
Heather Mac Donald:
Well, it says that I guess being White is more important than being right. White people are just extremely guilty and they’re also terrified, just as much as the left is apparently, that the academic skills gap is never going to close, that this problem is always going to be with us. And so they are just as eager to proleptically put out the only allowable explanation as racism, in order not to look head-on at the pathological inner city culture that is driving these racial disparities. And everybody is terrified to death of anybody even going near heritability. But you don’t need to do that because the cultural disparities are so big. So it is unfortunate because caving into that analysis does put everything that conservatives value at risk.
But I was talking to another big name in the conservative podcast and speech world, who told me that after he’d given a speech, a supporter of his organization came up to him and said, “I love everything you do, but I really don’t like it when you talk about race, that’s racist.” And this is somebody who is… His supporters are going to be very on board, a very, very conservative platform, and they should know that they’re going to get the truth from this guy, but it makes even conservatives flinch. Again, as I say, the time for racial etiquette is over. It’s very bizarre to me, the self-canceling attitude of many Whites, that they go around being called racist and White supremacists by Joe Biden every couple of weeks, the New York Times, all it needs to do is label an individual or an institution White, and they have immediately discredited that individual and institution. And yet we put up with that.
It was extraordinary to me when Biden’s inaugural speech was greeted both by CNN and the New York Times, and by even Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire, and I have to say Daily Wire published my book, Bill McGurn at the Wall Street Journal, they all celebrated Joe Biden’s inauguration speech as unifying, transcending differences. The conservatives didn’t hear in that speech that Biden was hammering his usual theme about White supremacy. So Whites at this point just take it as a matter of course, that everybody’s going to accuse them of being the source of this “enduring stain on America’s soul” as Biden put it.
And they don’t mind. They kind of say, “Yeah, I guess we deserve it.” And they go on with it. But identity politics, it is going to come full circle. If every other ethnic racial group gets to say, “Well, we have a racial identity.” It may be just a matter of time. And maybe not, maybe Whites are going to be endlessly self-flagellating and prostrating themselves, but some are going to say, “Okay, well maybe I’m not going to embrace a White identity, but it is sure legitimate and long past time, to start defending Western European civilization.”
Inez Stepman:
So let’s talk about some of the consequences of what you’re terming racial etiquette. Some of the consequences of accepting, across pretty much the entire mainstream political spectrum, and in business, and elsewhere, in just institutions, private institutions in America, this underlying disparate impact premise. You divide your book into the sciences, including medicine, which is a particularly scary thought, and then the arts, and then move to crime and punishment essentially. This book is really exhaustive. I really recommend it to my listeners. You have gone into every institution and cataloged a thousand different examples of how this kind of thinking has destroyed the merit and the output, the scientific advancement. Any output of these institutions has been really damaged by this. But why don’t you give us a few examples. Let’s start with the science and medicine category.
Heather Mac Donald:
As I say, the origins of disparate impact was that if Blacks failed a test at a higher rate, you had to get rid of the test. You didn’t say, “Well, maybe they don’t have the same level of academic skills.” No, we blame the test. So that’s going on in medicine now. And again, your viewers and listeners, Inez, should really think hard about whether this is the road they want to go down, or whether it’s time to start fighting back. Law schools use something called the Medical College Admissions Test, the MCATs, to sort students for admission. It’s like the SATs. It’s an objective, colorblind, computer-graded exam that test basic concepts in math, reading. It’s not heavily medical, because you haven’t gone to medical school yet, but it’s testing people’s capacity to learn. And Blacks fail the MCAT or do more poorly on the MCAT than other groups.
So again, we’ve decided the problem is the test. Now, I can guarantee you, Inez, that the MCATs are not racist. They do not contain racist questions. They do not contain questions that assume any kind of racial or economic background. In fact, any question that has a particularly disparate impact on Blacks is just thrown out, presumably because it’s just too difficult, but they just throw it out. And they’ve actually rejiggered the MCATs recently to put more emphasis on psychological aspects, that are irrelevant to whether you can learn the nitty-gritty of cell functioning and how neurons work in the brain. So some schools have said, “We’re just waving the MCATs completely for certain Black students.” Others just employ vastly different standards. They will admit Black applicants that have MCATs and GPAs that would be almost automatically disqualifying if presented by Whites and Asians.
And then not surprisingly, once those preference beneficiaries enter medical school, a school for which they’re not competitively qualified, now they would’ve been competitively qualified if they’d entered a school without racial preferences, but the way our system works now, Blacks are almost universally catapulted into schools where they start out at a competitive disadvantage, and so they don’t do as well. In subsequent measures of medical knowledge, there’s something called Step 1 of the US Medical Licensing Exam that is a test taken after the second year of medical school, that tests what students should have learned in their classes about anatomy, about drug interactions. Here again, Blacks ended up at the bottom of the grading scale, at the grading curve. So what do we do? We don’t say, “Well, let’s rethink racial preferences.” “Let’s get rid of the grading on the Step 1 of the US medical licensing exam.” So last year, Step 1 went pass-fail.
So we no longer have any ability to figure out how much students have learned. It’s just this very gross distinction between pass and fail. And the problem was Blacks were not getting their favored residencies, so now those residencies won’t be able to select with as much precision or any degree of knowledge, their students. This is going to continue and continue. Other tests of medical knowledge are under fire. They will all go down. We are changing the curriculum to put in more critical race theory, more implicit bias, more intersectionality. It’s all a zero-sum. Every hour that a student spends learning about intersectionality is an hour not spent learning how to save you when you come into the emergency room with a critical car crash destroying your body. So this is something that is going to have very real-world consequences in the future.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I had Aaron Sibarium on here, and he’s done some great reporting, specifically in medical schools and some elsewhere. I’m sure you’ve cited him, I didn’t look at the footnotes, but I’m sure that some of this journalistic work that you cite in this book is from him.
Heather Mac Donald:
No, actually not.
Inez Stepman:
No, really?
Heather Mac Donald:
I did it myself. No.
Inez Stepman:
Oh, you did all of it yourself?
Heather Mac Donald:
Yeah, yeah. I preceded him.
Inez Stepman:
We talked about on this podcast, we called it the planes falling out of the sky sort of tipping point, at what point do the outcomes in these institutions start to take a market decline? And even at that point, will we just find other reasons to excuse it? So obviously, if you are admitting less qualified surgeons to a surgical residency program, the outcomes in that surgical residency program will decline over time. But the reason we brought up the planes example is… Let’s say now, and I don’t know the exact numbers, but let’s say now there are, I don’t know, one plane crash a year that’s due to pilot error. Okay, so let’s say there are two, that would be an increase, a doubling of the plane crashes. But each individual crash, you can say, “Okay, well, there was a miscommunication with the tower.” It’s very difficult to, in a rich and successful society, to pinpoint why outcomes are declining.
Now, it makes basic common sense that there would be a decline in outcomes if there’s a decline in standards. But given all the silence around this topic and the fear of speaking out, even on the right, do you have hope that even sharp declines in output, in ways that really impact American’s lives, like, what happens when they show up at the emergency room after a car crash, even that will actually point us back to a conversation about this sort of conspiracy of silence and underlying disparities? Or are we just going to find some other excuse for it?
Heather Mac Donald:
On the analogy with crime, I’m not optimistic, because, with crime, we see the absolute bodies falling out of the sky. When the police backed off for the second iteration of the Ferguson effect, which I wrote about. The initial one was after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, in August of 2014, that led to de-policing across the country following riots, and you had a sharp spike in homicides. But that didn’t change our narrative about a racist criminal justice system. And then after George Floyd race riots, you had an even more acute de-policing, and the largest one-year increase in homicide in this nation’s history. You can see the bodies, you can just count them, this amount of surplus, mostly Black bodies, that were killed because prosecutors stopped prosecuting the law, enforcing the law, in the name of avoiding disparate impact. Police chiefs told their officers, “Stop making arrests for trespass, turnstile jumping, farebeating, resisting arrest, drug dealing, theft.”
All of this matters to the criminal environment. And yet we are still going around talking about racist police officers. Now one thing you could say there is that when the police back off of policing, overwhelmingly the disproportionate number of victims are going to be Black because that’s where crime is happening most, it’s Black-on-Black shootings, Whites are not shooting Blacks, police officers are not shooting Blacks. Blacks die of homicide between the ages of 10 and 24, at 25 times the rate of Whites between the ages of 10 and 24, because they’re being killed by Blacks at 25 times the rate. But it hasn’t mattered. Now, whether if we had more White victims, if children, if White children were getting gunned down in drive-by shootings, maybe that would change the discourse. It hasn’t so far, so whether… And it’s harder in medicine and in sciences to make those connections.
One can also say, and this is even more subtle, is that for sure it is going to slow down our medical progress in making medical breakthroughs of understanding cancer transmission, Alzheimer’s disease because we have… The federal government now is saying, “You should make race of researchers more important in essence than their medical competency. What we care about is the racial demographics of your lab, not whether it is the most scientifically accomplished.” That is going to weigh down what we can do. Where China is forging ahead at top rate and doesn’t give a damn about identity politics.
But in general, no, I am not optimistic. Until Americans swallow hard and say, “Yes, we had a terrible past. It was one that contradicted every narrative we tell about ourselves as far as being the land of opportunity,” the land of hope. To quote a recent textbook by a conservative, “None of that was true with regards to our treatment of Blacks. But we are not that country today. We are not that country in the least today. And it is time to be honest about what our real problems are.” And those are, as I say, a pathological inner city culture and an unwillingness to expect everybody to meet standards, rather than lowering standards on their behalf.
Inez Stepman:
What happens in the crime context? And I like actually that there’s a… We’re listening, I’m talking about crime and there’s a police siren.
Heather Mac Donald:
Yes, of course.
Inez Stepman:
Very appropriate. But back in the eighties, we had this case in New York with Bernie Goetz. And have a New York jury basically acquit on the premise that crime and disorder in the city had gotten so bad that merely observing young Black men positioning themselves around you in a subway car, and one of them walks up to you and asks you for $5, you could reasonably assume you were about to be violently mugged. It seems to me that we’re a very, very different country than the one that acquitted Bernie Goetz for shooting these guys in the subway car. He was convicted on essentially illegal handgun charge, and he was civilly sued and had to pay out, I don’t think he ever managed to pay the money, but he got a million-dollar settlement for the people he shot.
But nevertheless, this jury of New Yorkers in the eighties refused to convict somebody for essentially acting on the evidence of his eyes. What happens to the next Bernie Goetz? Because as crime escalates in the cities, it seems to me the chance of somebody becoming that next Bernie Goetz is somebody… And maybe there’s an argument that it’s already happened multiple times, but I don’t think there’s been that kind of case that has really risen to national prominence in the same way. How will we respond to a 2023 Bernie Goetz?
Heather Mac Donald:
That’s a hilarious and wonderful analogy, Inez, and I’ve never thought about it, but it’s a fantastic comparison. We had sort of a Bernie Goetz within the last year in New York. Where there was a Hispanic bodega owner that was being hassled, harassed, threatened by a big guy shoplifting, and the bodega owner stabbed him, pulled out his knife, and stabbed him, turns out, fatally, and our Manhattan DA charged him initially with murder. And there was a big outcry, at least in the conservative press like the New York Post, saying that this was a understandable act of self-defense so that Bragg eventually did change the charges. And I think the shop owner was also thrown in jail, without bail, as if he was some kind of public threat. Whereas clearly, this was a one-off, absolutely sui generis, resulting from this particular threat that he faced. He wasn’t like a drive-by shooter gangbanger that’s going out there, willy-nilly, at a drop of a hat, shooting across sidewalks. So that’s just somewhat of a reaction, but I don’t think there was the same widespread revulsion.
And then we still are in this mode of denial about what… To the extent that the public knows the degree of crime differences… And I don’t think they actually do, because everybody but the New York Post, and even the New York Post, will no longer say the race of criminals. Here’s a rule of thumb, if in a act of street violence, a shooting, a robbery, a mugging, the race of the criminal is not listed, it’s almost a hundred percent certain that it’s a Black criminal, because had it been a White criminal, the criminal’s race would’ve been given. And so even the New York Post now is engaging in this coverup, because we all feel so uncomfortable. This began in the 1990s when newspapers stopped giving the race of suspects that were still on the lam.
Their failure to give their race was a betrayal of the public trust because if somebody hasn’t been arrested yet, you want the public to know every relevant piece of information. And if you’re trying to find somebody, or know who to look for, race is relevant. You’ve got an individual suspect, his race is relevant. But the newspapers stopped publishing race because they were so uncomfortable with the fact that overwhelmingly the people committing the shootings, the robberies, the shoplifting, were Black. And that’s still going on.
But we saw with the Kansas City shooting, which was a tragic shooting. But the 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to this 84-year-old man’s house, mistakenly rang the doorbell. The homeowner says that he was pulling on the door, the glass storm door, Yarl, the 16-year-old boy, denies this. And the 84-year-old who’s living by himself, he’s very frail, bent over, looks like he’s maybe early stages of dementia, he shot through the door at Yarl, hit him in the head and the leg. Yarl has been released from the hospital. It looks like he’ll make a recovery. But this was the homeowner shooting, was universally attributed to just the rankest racism. And we have this whole narrative about ringing the doorbell while Black, or existing while Black, this racial bathos, that Blacks are at risk of their lives from Whites, which is preposterous, I wrote an article about this.
But let’s face the facts. In Kansas City, Blacks are nine times as likely to commit homicide as Whites. Blacks are about 26.5% of the population. They commit about 75% of all shootings. So if you’ve got a Black guy at night showing up at your door, and maybe pulling at it, it is not irrational to think that there’s a greater chance that that person will be violent. That doesn’t mean it justifies shooting him, but it is perfectly rational, and not racist, if you know what the facts of crime are, to be more concerned about Black teenagers than White teenagers.
And the solution to that is not to go around pummeling people for racism, it’s to get the crime rate down. If Blacks committed crime at the same rate of Whites, if they were not shoplifting, if they were not robbing people, you would not get the phenomenon of the Black store patron being followed around by the immigrant bodega store owner, or pharmacy owner, which makes Blacks angry. That Indian immigrant store owner is simply playing the odds in a completely justified rational manner. So let’s get the crime rate down, and then you won’t see those racial stereotypes.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I think even Al Sharpton… I can’t remember if it was Al Sharpton or one of the other sort of nineties-
Heather Mac Donald:
Jesse Jackson.
Inez Stepman:
Jesse Jackson yeah, who said that “he’s relieved when he turns around on the street and the three guys following him are White instead of Black.” Now, I don’t think that even, not only anyone on the left, but anyone on the right, in mainstream politics would say something like that.
Heather Mac Donald:
That’s right.
Inez Stepman:
Let’s go to the arts though, because we’ve covered… We’ve gone out of order in your book. First, your book goes into science and medicine, then it turns to the arts, then it closes with the argument on crime. So let’s go back and talk about the arts because in the arts it’s more subtle. You are making an argument here for objectively judging, for example, the quality of a Beethoven symphony, versus some of these contemporary and propped-up works, and you give several examples of them. This is something that has really been annoying me recently, because I moved to New York about two and a half years ago, and a huge factor in our decision to move here, for me was like a top factor, I love the Philharmonic here.
And for the last year, I have barely been able to find anything. I want to pay them money to go. And allegedly, by the way, they desperately wanted to get the next generation of symphony goers, and I’m getting advertisements all the time. But every single performance they have basically has to throw a bone to this underlying diversity self-flagellation. So they might have one piece by a recognizable great composer, and then they’ll have two more pieces on the… So half the time I’ll be spending in the symphony will be people who wrote in the last 30 years, and almost always, and I started looking it up, and it’s like clockwork, it’s always a Black woman or a… Because they feel the need to do that.
What are the consequences in the arts to getting rid of, say blind auditions, as is being proposed in some of these symphonies? What are the consequences of picking nondescript composers from the last 30 or 40 years, or plucking from obscurity some composer who didn’t really stand the test of time, merely because of his ethnic background or her ethnic background? What are the consequences overall in the arts? It seems like a lot of these institutions are already struggling to continue in the modern world. Will this be their final nail in their coffin or what?
Heather Mac Donald:
Yeah. Well, first of all, it’s a completely specious argument that if you program Black composers, you’re going to bring in a Black audience that will stay. That’s not what works. The solution is more classical music training in schools, more presence in the culture. The idea that you program a composer and that’s going to bring people back to the concert when it’s just a Mozart symphony, and a Brahms violin concerto, and a Dvorak serenade, is wrong. Now, I actually have been going to those New York Philharmonic concerts, Inez, out of a sense of repertorial duty.
And actually, I’ve been surprised. There was one that was an entirely Black program, it was called March to Liberation, and I’ll be honest, I went thinking I was going to write a negative review, and I wrote a very positive one. They had a symphony by William Grant Still, the second symphony, that had some fantastic moments. Its opening theme was just like an American… Right out of the American songbook. Now the symphony, ultimately became repetitive and tedious, as did the other works, and there was another work by a more recent Black composer, Adolphus Hailstork, that had some very thrilling moments.
What I really object to right now, and you alluded to this, is the deification of this Joseph Bologne, the so-called Chevalier de Saint-George, who was a late 18th-century composer, contemporary of Mozart. The hype that is being labeled on this guy is so disgusting. He’s an utter mediocrity. I can recognize his music from the first note when it comes on our local classical music station, WQXR, because of its utter unmitigated banality. And yet he is actually being said… There’s a movie out, that just came, and unfortunately, out of my same sense of duty, I’m trying to work up my self-discipline to go tomorrow night and subject myself to it. I’ve seen the trailer. It looks like it’s going to be an utter complete race con job. They claim he’s like the most famous composer of the 18th-century, and we don’t know him because of racism. I just did a research through some very standard classical music textbooks, The Grove Dictionary. He’s not mentioned. He’s a non-entity. And it matters. Objective, aesthetic judgment matters. You should not be lying about the quality of works.
As for the getting rid of blind auditions, it’s insane. Conductors are not… These are the way that for the last several decades, orchestras have selected their… If they have an open seat in the second violin section, they will conduct their auditions behind a screen, so that the audition committee doesn’t know anything about the person auditioning to guard against favoritism. The suggestion has been made by the former leading music critic of the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, to get rid of blind auditions so that orchestras could choose on the basis of race, not merit. This is absurd. There’s not a single conductor out there who is discriminating against Blacks. A conductor cares about one thing, perfection. He only wants the best musicians, and to make him accept somebody on the basis of skin color, not competence, is absurd.
What bothers me the most is institutions, and this gets back to the Cultural Revolution theme that we were talking about earlier, Inez, and the way that our most elite institutions have embraced this phony narrative about ubiquitous racism. The leaders of these arts institutions, whether it’s art museums, opera companies, symphony orchestras, dance companies, theater companies, have turned on their own tradition. And they too, in the post-George Floyd psychotic moment, put out statements saying, “5000 years of Western art, it’s all racist. Now, our mission is to be anti-racist.” It’s not to curate art and teach you about beauty, and why you should be down on your knees in gratitude for these works. It’s to condemn our cultural legacy as racist. And that is depriving children of the ability to learn to lose themselves in works of sublimity.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I’m getting an appropriate corrective. And I am ashamed. I think I am maybe now one of these equivalents to some of the people who underestimated Clarence Thomas in law school because they assumed he was there on affirmative action, that so enraged him. That’s one of the consequences of this regime, is that I assumed there was very little merit in a lot of these works, whereas if we didn’t live in such a crazy world, I would’ve been curious. And yeah, that’s a good corrective for me, not everything always fits this pattern.
Heather Mac Donald:
It can be both. It can be both. I’m not claiming that the works that I heard are comparable to Brahms, or to Stravinsky. I just heard amazing work by Lutosławski, Polish 20th-century composer, this weekend at the New York Philharmonic, The Concerto for Orchestra. I’m not saying that they deserve to be at the Canon, but nevertheless, it’s interesting, and I’m always looking for new repertoire. I actually don’t want to go to concerts that feature the Canon, because I’ve been listening to it all my life, and I’m very much a victim of diminishing returns. So I’m always on the lookout for new music, ideally from the 18th and 19th-century, and not contemporary serialism, bleep blap bloop music.
But it is, for me, it’s just an interesting way to hear other ways that the classical music tradition expanded. I’m actually going to a concert this week with a work by George Walker, who is a 20th-century Black modernist composer. But I don’t condemn your view either. And of course, it is the inevitable consequence of the racial preference regime. And it’s certainly true for females. Every female conductor and composer out there is absolutely the beneficiary of sex preferences.
Inez Stepman:
In one way, you validated in this book, my genuine prejudice, in pre-judging exhibits. Because I was recently in the Met and I walked by without even putting my head into the Origin… What is it? African Origin-
Heather Mac Donald:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
Of Civilization exhibit in the Met. Actually, I repeat one of my husband’s funniest suggestions, because in the American Wing now in the Met, they have these scolding placards that say the Native Perspective. Because they have a lot of art that centers around the West, and the push West and the suggestion was to find the opposing tribe that was warring with that tribe, and put the Native Perspectives, “Yeah, those Cheyenne, they took our land.” But there really is this Hall of Horrors aspect that takes away from… Especially somebody who was deprived to some extent of a real classical education. And you talk about some of… I read with jealousy, some of the courses that you took in Yale, when you were there in 1974. What is going to happen to the appreciation of these things, especially as we haven’t really continued the education on the Western canon of art when somebody’s first introduction to a great artwork has to come with a disclaimer about how they should be offended?
Heather Mac Donald:
Yeah. There’s no reason that any student would ever lose himself in beauty. You are told to hate, you’re told to reject, you’re told to belittle. And students are given an excuse for their ignorance. I remember before George Floyd, some group of Black students somewhere put out this manifesto against the Enlightenment concept of truth, and it was terribly written, ungrammatically written, and was a rather lame effort to regurgitate standard academic tropes from a semi, more sophisticated critical discourse, anti-Enlightenment. But you can be sure that not a single one of these students had read Voltaire, or Diderot, or Hume, or Adam Smith, and they knew nothing about what the Enlightenment actually represented within the history of Western thought. And it was groundbreaking, it gave us ultimately the scientific method, and yet these students now feel licensed to reject things that they know nothing about.
And I think that part of the cultural, psychological, spiritual malaise of America now, which is very troubling, the drug addiction is just unparalleled in Western civilization, and just the squaller of childrearing practices, part of it is because we’re not giving children, and parents don’t know to give children, beauty, and innocence, and a retreat into an imaginative world. We’re given only guilt, self-flagellation, or if you’re one of the seemingly lucky victim groups, a sense of resentment and entitlement to complain, and entitlement not to succeed. So I think that the cultural consequences for the civilization are very large.
And yeah, you were right to avoid that exhibit. It’s unbelievable because the Met is embracing phony history, Afrocentric discredited history. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is one of our primary cultural institutions, has thrown its lot into a charlatan Afrocentric view of the world, in order to make the point that Western civilization has its origins in Africa. It does not. And your husband’s question about, “Well, let’s have the victim tribe’s view of how the West was won”, is absolutely right. The thing that is so nauseating is all the African art in the Metropolitan Museum, at the National Gallery, at the Art Institute of Chicago, it is all celebrated without any kind of deconstructive, hermeneutics of suspicion. “Oh, look at this wonderful warrior bronze.” Nobody’s going to say, “Well, you know what? The head of Benin, or of the Dahomey Kingdom, was massacring his enemies. Was probably engaged in child sacrifice, no due process.”
Same with any other civilization, China, Japan, only the West turns on itself. And there’s no protestations on the part of these other cultures, no apologies, no groveling. They’re basically saying, “Yeah, you don’t like us, you’ll get over it.” Only the West is self-destructing, and that self-destruction has to end, Inez. It is not justified. We have given the entire world the most fundamental fruits and gifts of civilization.
Inez Stepman:
Let me close on this then. What will happen to… Or rather, not only what will happen to, because I think we can guess, but what will they do about it? To bright, ambitious, competent, mostly let’s say, young White men in these fields. What’s going to happen to the White male artist? What’s going to happen to the White male engineer or guy who would previously be admitted to Harvard Medical School? What are all of these smart and ambitious… I mean, there’s sort of one response to this, is to write BLM a hundred times on your college applications, and to compete on opening the number of transgender bathrooms that you can open in your school. And there is that competition.
But it can’t be lost on the young strivers of America that there’s a limited number of slots for young White men in particular. Even if they count out all of the… And they say all the right things, and cloak their ambition in this social justice language, there’s a more and more limited number of slots for them, in any institutions of honor and power. What are they going to do? Are they going to build something worthwhile? It seems to me like there’s at least some hope there because I just don’t believe that a bunch of 23-year-old, 25-year-old ambitious young men are going to consent that they’re in this society, they’re relegated to third-rate institutions that their personal trajectory of their lives is so circumscribed in this way.
Heather Mac Donald:
Very good question. And they certainly are seeing it. A doctor at UCLA said that people, the White males, are telling her, “We’re not going into medicine. We see the writing on the wall. We will be the last hired, the first fired.” And this is true in every profession. They don’t want you. They do not want heterosexual White males. If you have a son who’s a heterosexual White male, good luck to him. He is screwed until we have the revolution. So I think that what’s going on, you posit that they’ve gotten to the age of 23 or 25 with their self-regard intact, and aware of their capacities, and able to be in some way outraged at their treatment, and perceiving it as unfair. I see the entire project of K through 12 to emasculate males and persuade them that they are toxically masculine and that their role in life is to lie down and let the marginalized groups walk over them.
And I think to a certain extent that’s succeeding. We all know these pajama boy types, that proudly proclaim themselves feminist, and would presumably accept playing second fiddle. And I see, on the one hand… I’m very troubled when I see institutions now where they’re practically all female. In the ones that I interact with, and I’m not going to name names, the female-to-male ratio is very high. On the other hand, there are biological realities. On average, men are more interested in public affairs, in data, in facts. They are more risk-taking. They are more entrepreneurial. They’re more engaged in the world.
There are all these natural experiments that I have collected to test male and females’ innate abilities where there are institutions without gatekeepers, nobody’s keeping out the females, and still, males predominate. So whether it’s subscriptions to public affairs journals like The Economist, or the American Conservative, or National Review, New Republic, males way oversubscribed, compared to females. Nobody’s preventing females subscribing letters to The Editor, Wikipedia entries, males predominate. So I have noticed when I go to colleges, if there’s a group of dissident students that just want to get together and talk about ideas that are maybe conservative, but generally without fear of ostracism, it’s almost exclusively males. The females are not showing up. So that argues to your side, that maybe they will start creating new institutions where they can be male, give full reign to their innate inclinations to explore. Males gave us civilization because they wanted to take risk and they wanted to master the world through knowledge.
And I hope that the K through 12 system, and then I am so cynical that I don’t… I wouldn’t put it out of the range of possibility that there’s sort of… If we still have people actually getting pregnant any longer and not doing it all in vitro, or surrogacy, some kind of testosterone blocker in the womb, if feminists continue to take over, but if they emerge from the womb with their innate, inherited inclinations intact, I do hope, that’s an interesting thought, Inez, that they create alternative institutions where they could be themselves. Now, the other thing that’s needed for that is some kind of organizing mechanism. How many followers does Ben Shapiro have? Does Michael Knowles have? Jordan Peterson? Is this a significant force? And how do we organize them as a political matter to take our culture back?
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, it’s true. I have advanced the hopeful assumption, or sort of a hopeful assumption, that the arrogance of ambitious young men is somehow deeply enduring.
Heather Mac Donald:
Exactly.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. On that last topic, we don’t have time to get into it here, but I’ve cited at many other places, Heather has a fantastic article in City Journal a few months back called The Feminization of the American University, and highly recommend you check that one out. But of course, first, you should go over to Amazon or anywhere else, and buy When Race Trumps Merit, Heather’s latest book. It is chock-full of all of these examples, all the research, apparently, she did herself. There’s page after page after page of basically basic facts. This book, only in the introduction and in the conclusion, and maybe a few sentences here or there, are you even really expressing your opinion. You’re just documenting the facts of the matter and the reason that these disparities exist, and how that hate, those hate facts, are being treated and ignored in every one of these institutions in turn. So I highly recommend to my listeners, they go out and buy When Race Trumps Merit by Heather Mac Donald. Heather, thank you so much for coming back on High Noon to talk about this important book.
Heather Mac Donald:
Thank you so much, Inez. I’m grateful for such a good conversation.
