Heather McDonald exposes how equity policies—like Google’s 13% Black engineer quota or medical school hiring mandates—lower standards under the guise of anti-racism, tracing the shift to systemic racism claims after George Floyd. She blames hip-hop’s violence, a 71% Black out-of-wedlock birth rate, and "acting white" stigma for underachievement, rejecting reparations as futile while criticizing trillions wasted on failed redistribution. McDonald argues cultural collapse—not policy—drives inequality, warning that the "race hustle" perpetuates dependency and undermines meritocracy. [Automatically generated summary]
So, you know, it's one thing to speak honestly about the fact that the journalism, the journalists in this country have become part of the matrix, but there's still great journalism being done in this country, and that will continue to be true as long as there is a Heather McDonald.
You've seen her on the show a million times because I just love talking to her.
She is a great journalist, the author of several critically acclaimed best-selling books, including The Diversity Delusion and the New York Times bestseller of The War on Cops.
She's got a new book out called When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.
Heather, always great to see you.
How are you doing?
Thank you for such a great introduction, Andrew.
I greatly appreciate it.
Well, I mean it.
This is, you know, this is something I've been reading the book.
I haven't finished it yet, but I've just been starting it.
It's a heartbreaking book in a lot of ways.
I mean, you bring your usual great journalism to it, but the stuff that you're talking about is really difficult to face.
Let's just begin.
You say this has its roots in the past, but really got started with the George Floyd riots.
What exactly are we talking about when we say when race trumps merit?
We're talking about the idea that if we look around and we see an institution that does not have exact racial proportionality based on the national population.
So for instance, if you look at Google and it doesn't have 13% black engineers working there or black computer scientists, which is 13% is what the national population is.
Therefore, we have concluded it is per se racist and it must lower its standards in order to create the requisite diversity.
Or if you look at a medical school and you see that it doesn't have 13% black faculty or an Alzheimer's research lab and it doesn't have 13% black neurologists working there, the federal government, the medical school, whether it's Harvard Medical School or Duke Medical School, will conclude the lab is racist.
We, the medical school, are racist.
We have to lower our standards of admissions.
We have to lower our standards of hiring in order to engineer racial proportionality.
On the criminal side, if viewers are sort of scratching their heads of what the hell has been going on with criminal law enforcement for the last two years, why are these crazy prosecutors not prosecuting theft, shoplifting, turnstile jumping, trespass, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, which is the most appalling of all?
Why are police chiefs often telling their officers, don't make car stops, don't arrest for quality of life infractions like public camping?
All of this is the same issue.
It's driven by, in this case, the overrepresentation of blacks in prison and the disparate impact that the enforcement of the criminal law inevitably has on black criminals.
The thing that my book tries to do, Drew, is provide an alternative explanation to racism for why we have those racial disparities.
Before we get to that, I want to talk about that.
But before we get to that, this is such a bad idea.
Obviously, I mean, let's just start.
We've mentioned the medical profession.
You know, I want a surgeon who is the best possible surgeon.
I don't care if he's Scandinavian or Zulu.
I want the guy who can do the job best.
So this is such a bad idea.
It obviously is going to lower the quality of the schools that practice it.
How did we get to this point?
How did we get to the point where somebody thought that this would work?
I don't know if they're thinking about whether it works.
They don't think it works in terms of meritocracy and success.
They think it works simply as a way of engineering and imposing racial quotas on everything.
I think the reason we got here, Drew, is America, white Americans in particular, are very guilty about our racial past.
And I freely admit that that racial past was appalling.
It was gratuitously nasty for decades way after we got rid of slavery.
The South was behaving like a bunch of absolute psychotic neurotics towards blacks.
And at this point, we are not that country, Drew.
I can both say we were white supremacists and apartheid country, and today we have done a 180-degree turn.
The reality today is black privilege, and that can get you fired if you say that on a college campus.
Fortunately, neither of us are there.
So we hope we can keep our jobs.
White privilege is not the reality.
I don't know a single black high school senior applying to a selective college that puts his race down as white because he knows that being black will give him an enormous advantage.
Whites are terrified that the skills gap, despite decades of trying after the height of the civil rights era in the 1960s, we spent trillions of dollars on redistribution programs, on de facto reparations, on social outreach, on doing affirmative action up the gazoo.
And still there is a standard deviation in virtually every objective test of academic skills.
The whites are terrified that that will never close.
And so they are out there saying proleptically the only allowable explanation is racism.
They're terrified of looking at black culture.
And they're certainly never going to look at the whole very vexed issue of heritability, but they won't even look at the pathological inner city culture that says that academic achievement is acting white.
You know, you talk about it's so easy to see how this is going to lower standards in medical schools and medical practice, how it obviously lowers standards in policing.
It's been a disaster in terms of repealing the great advances we made for 20 years in lowering crime.
But one of the subtitles of your book, the title of the book is When Race Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity, Sacrifice, Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.
How does it destroy beauty?
The elites have turned on the extraordinary legacy of Western art, whether it's music, museums, art, you know, visual arts, theater, dance.
It is all coming down.
It is all being accused on a completely specious basis of fomenting white supremacy.
So if you love classical music as I do, and I know for a lot of people it's a very alien idiom, but I can just assure you that it is one of the most sublime expressions of the human spirit once your ears get acclimated to what is by now sadly a very strange and foreign idiom.
The idea is That because the vast majority of European musicians writing in this tradition of notated music were white because they were Europeans, therefore, the only reason anybody thinks that Bach and Mozart and Haydn and Schubert and Beethoven are great is because they were dead white males and their power is due to white supremacy.
This is a preposterous idea, but you have, since the George Floyd racial psychotic breakdown, you have the very leaders of arts organizations, whether it's an opera company, a symphony orchestra, or an art museum, betraying their most profound obligation, which is to celebrate their traditions, pass them on, and teach young people why they should be down on their knees in gratitude for these works.
And instead, they're saying, oh, we're no longer an opera company.
We're an anti-racist institution.
We're no longer an art museum.
We're an anti-racist museum.
Let me show you the various ways that the last 5,000 years of Western art are racist.
You know, what's terrible about that is you have guys like Wagner, who actually was a racist, one of the greatest writers of opera who ever lived.
It just doesn't account for anything.
You know, I mean, talent is talent and talent is blind.
Lost Confidence in Bourgeois Values00:06:11
So let's talk about this.
I mean, you are one of the few people who actually speaks with not just with frankness, but without bias about some of the causes of this.
What is another way of approaching this problem where blacks don't seem to be able to move up?
I mean, everybody has faced prejudice in this country.
Obviously, the blacks are special in the sense that they faced this slavery in that long Jim Crow period.
But, you know, Jews have been put upon, the Irish have been put upon.
Everybody else sort of gets past it.
Why can't Blacks get past this?
Boy, that's such a difficult question, Andrew.
And, you know, I'm going to put my neck out here and say I look at this inner city culture and it is absolutely counterproductive.
It is destined.
There's no way you can look at this and think that there's any possibility of closing the skills gap.
You have the hip-hop culture that celebrates violence, cop killing, misogyny, drug taking, theft, bling.
And you have what I mentioned before, the anti-acting white syndrome, which says that if you're a black kid and you're actually taking your textbooks home to study and you're not going and running the streets, you're acting white.
And then you have an enabling elite that has lost confidence in the bourgeois values.
I was just today walking through Times Square in New York City and, you know, going past a strip joint.
And I remember the Halcyon days of the 1990s when Giuliani, Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, transformed the city by saying, I'm not going to apologize for bourgeois values like neatness, getting porn out of Times Square, not having people colonize the sidewalks, expecting law and order.
You jump the turnstiles, you're getting arrested.
And we've lost confidence in that.
And we're not enforcing public order.
And the elites have said, well, maybe we'll still kind of try to live by traditional norms when it comes to our own child rearing, but we're sure not going to tell anybody, especially blacks, who now have a 71% out-of-wedlock birth rate, which is cataclysmic.
It is impossible to civilize young males with 71% of black children being born in a fatherless home.
We are not, we have lost the confidence to say children need their mothers and fathers.
And there's many reasons for that.
There's feminism and there is also gay rights.
Let's be honest.
If you say that children need their biological mothers and fathers, you will not only be accused of dissing the strong women who say they can do it all and be single mothers just fine.
You're also dissing the lesbian couple and everybody's terrified to do that.
One of the things that is so appalling about this is that blacks actually were making more progress in terms of relative progress to where they were, rising into the middle class faster before the 1960s.
I mean, basically after Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Act, but before the Great Society, so much of the money being pumped into the government is coming from these programs that are basically have broken the back of black culture.
Is there any way, you know, how do you get people to unclaw their hands from that money and say, you know, this is actually hurting people?
Well, Drew, I get asked all the time, what can we do?
And I have to say, I've sort of lost patience with that concept.
You could say, well, as a form of reparations, we as whites, it's still our responsibility.
But frankly, even if as a moral issue, you thought that were the case, and I'm not sure I do, there's not a whole lot more that so-called we can do.
It's up to the black culture right now to heal itself.
We, you know, you can throw all the money you want at these failing inner city schools.
The child learns to read by actually putting in the effort.
There's no social worker that can do that for him.
There's no parent that can substitute and say, I'm going to actually monitor my child's homework.
Is he going to school?
The black truancy rate is astronomical in California.
It's at least four times higher than whites.
You better believe it's a lot higher than Asians.
And so if you're not in school, you can't learn.
If you're not taking your textbooks home, you can't do your homework.
I have observed inner city classrooms, and they are absolute frightening zones of insubordination and chaos.
And of course, the other disparate impact concept, you know, the book is about the fallacy of disparate impact is that if teachers discipline the insubordinate, unruly students as they deserve to be, and it turns out that disproportionately those are black students, then we can't discipline the students because discipline has a disparate impact on blacks.
And we're all supposed to believe that there's no behavioral differences.
Well, when you have black teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 committing gun homicide at 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17, the idea that that population is going to go to school and be immaculately attentive to their teacher and, you know, doing their homework and not disrupting their fellow students is ridiculous.
The same lack of socialization, the same lack of parental involvement that leads to that gun homicide rate is also creating these chaotic inner city classrooms.
So we can do our charter schools, we can do our vouchers, we can try to re-embrace a belief in bourgeois values, but at some point, the race hustle, which is what's going on, we are all embracing a fiction of ubiquitous white supremacy.
That race hustle has to stop by the hustlers themselves.
Race Hustle Must End00:00:30
Wow.
No, this is a big step toward it.
This book, When Race Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives by the great Heather McDonald.
And I'm just thrilled to say, I didn't even know this, that this is being published by us.
This is a Daily Wire book.
I'm just, I am honored to have you on the team, Heather.
It is always great to see you.
And I look forward to finishing the book.
It's really good.
Thanks, Andrew.
Well, I chose Daily Wired in order to have you as a colleague, so it's mutual.