You Don’t Help Minorities by Lowering Standards - Heather Mac Donald

0:01 helping people of color, you don't do so by tearing down standards. You don't do so by having double standards and saying we don't expect the so-called marginalized groups, but above all blacks uh to live up to the same standards as white and Asians. We'll have a set of double admission standards. We'll have a set of double hiring, double promotion standards. That's not the way you help people. It's condescending and it means that you are for sure going to stunt people's ability to live up to their highest potential.

0:32 The book uh uses as a sort of core concept an an idea that arose in the law called disperate impact. And this grew out of a Supreme Court case in the 1970s that looked at the fact that traditionally America's anti-discrimination law says you employer may not intentionally discriminate against blacks. You can't say I'm not going to hire people because I don't like the color of their skin. that intentional discrimination violates now belatedly finally at long last what were our and should be our founding ideals of equal treatment for all. So we had the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. We said it's about time we're going to start treating people equally.

1:22 By the 70s most of that overt discrimination had disappeared. employers were really living up to their obligations under the law. And yet you didn't yet have workplaces that were proportionally black and white. You know, blacks are 13% of the population. And so the expectation was if you were a Google uh tech lab, if you were doing artificial intelligence, you should have 13% black nanotechnologists or AI researchers.

1:58 that wasn't happening. And so the courts said, "Well, there's we we want to kind of expand the scope of the civil rights laws and we're going to get rid of intention as something that is legally impermissible." Now, if an employer has a perfectly colorblind neutral standard that he never intended to use to discriminate, but it has a disperate impact on blacks. So for instance, if a uh this was a a power company, Griggs power company, it said it wanted its employees to be able to read to a certain level in order to be able to read power manuals and you know how to how to work an a utility plant. That neutral basic standard meant that more blacks were being disqualified for employment. They weren't meeting the standard. And so the court said, "If you have a neutral standard, but it negatively affects blacks, we're going to call that discrimination even though that's not your intent." So now we have this idea that a standard that is not intended to discriminate. It can be colorblind, objective, but it means that you're disqualifying more blacks. That's bad. And we've taken that concept and we've gone around to every meritocratic institution again to law schools to medical schools. If the LSATs, the law school admissions test, if blacks do more poorly at those, we're going to throw those out. If blacks do more poorly at the medical college admissions tests, we're going to throw those out.

3:39 At medical licensing, we're going to throw those out because they have a disperate impact on blacks. This is a concept that destroys excellence, it destroys achievement. We see it in the arts where expectations of a certain proficiency of of for instruments if that has a disperate impact, we're going to throw that out. We're throwing out literature. Um and and we're seeing it in the law, too. I'm sorry. In criminal law, right? That's why we're getting rid of prosecution. That's why we're getting rid of incarceration because those laws also have a disperate impact on black criminals. One example of this change that I've heard about is um I think it is in the symphony the way that there was um blind uh rehearsal or um tryyouts that in order to take away racial or identity preference in the decision-making, you would have the people try out and you just hear their music and you'd not see them. You wouldn't know anything about them.

4:44 And so that seems like definitionally the like all right perfect. It's literally like a blind test on the basis of the output alone. And I as I understand it this mentality you're talking about has led to the reverse. So now we're going to actively make sure that we put your race and your identity at the foreground of our decision-m. How would that not just Well, I guess I Kendi says that we need to have active discrimination to counter past discrimination, right? That's his anti-racism model. No, we need to actually actively say less of you, more of you, right? Because that happened in the past, right? And that kind of forever like we're always going to be doing that, right? Is that is that a fair articulation of the other side's perspective? Yes, this was uh George Floyd race riots resulted in mass psychosis across the country. Every elite institution declared itself racist. You had art museums saying we are racist. 5,000 years of Western civilization is racist. Our new mission per the Met Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is anti-racism. You had restaurants saying we're racist. You had law firms saying we're racist. You had the mathematical association saying math is racist. Um, and it was all this idea that uh a standard has a disperate impact is racist. And Anthony Thomasini, who was the lead classical music critic of the New York Times, he called for what's called deblinding orchestral auditions that were they were blind. You wouldn't know the identity. He said, "I can't stand."

6:28 And and Alex Ross of the New Yorker, his they're their their lead music critic. This breaks my heart. These people, these classical music critics who are presiding over a dying tradition that they should know contain some of the most profound expressions of human aeros, sorrow, longing, joy that's ever been created. they should be selling this art. And here was Thomasi, here was Alex Ross, here was the BBC music magazine after the George Floyd during the his the summer of 2020, the summer of mass psychosis saying, "I can't stand going to a concert hall and listening to white male composers and having whites in the audience. This is giving young people an excuse to avoid this beauty." So Thomasini said deblind orchestral auditions so that we can make sure that we can racially engineer the um the the composition of orchestras. Composer conductors are not discriminating.

7:34 Nobody is discriminating. Even if you didn't have blind auditions, all that a conductor cares about is he doesn't want the first horn in a Strauss tone poem to blow his solo. He's looking for excellence. He's looking for perfection. If it was an all black orchestra and they were the best, that's what he would choose. The idea that conductors or music managers are discriminating against the most qualified classical musicians is absurd. Here's how absurd it gets, John. Again, you would think, how can a blind audition where you don't know the identity, how can that be racist? Here's what else is racist under a disperate impact standard. Speeding cameras. It turns out speeding cameras are racist. If they tell us, which they do, that blacks speed at higher rates, they're racist cameras. The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, waged a war against a technology called Shot Spotter. And I don't know whether you know our your our libertarian, non-libertarian differences will show up here. We'll see. Shot Spotter is an audio technology that picks up the sound of of shootings of driveby shootings. Okay, which is important because it turns out in the inner city, which is where almost all driveby shootings occur at a at an absolute barbaric rate, 80% are never called in for various reasons. And so Shot Spotter picks it up and alerts the police and at the very least allows first responders to get there quickly where they may never get there at all without this technology.

9:19 Well, Shot Spotter tells us again that most shootings are occurring in a very small portion of Chicago on the south and west sides in sort of known hotspot corners in overwhelmingly in black neighborhoods. So, it turns out that this audio sensor is racist because it tells us a message we don't want to know. So, Brandon Johnson said, "I want to get rid of Shot Spotter except for the DNC." He want shot spotter said, "Okay, you don't like us. We're out of here." They were gonna pull out in February of 2024. Brandon Johnson said, "Not so fast. Leave in September, but stick around for the convention." And sadly, Shot Spotter agreed with this annoying and incredibly insulting conditions. But that's where we've gotten to is that a camera, a computer, a nonscentient being is racist. So, I want to explore some term setting.

10:20 Um, there is a tiny part of me that feels like shot spider sounds like the surveillance state. I knew it. I knew it. Good. Excellent disagreement. Part of me that's like, oh, I don't know about this. I don't know about the robots or the drones going to just start becoming Judge Dread. Um, but we'll set that aside for now. I'm going to come back. I want to parse this a little bit between the the race and equity things.

10:41 They're deeply connected and and the police issues which are the two areas where you've spent so much of your time. Yeah. But first I want to um I want to pose a question and help which is is this all overblown make the case that this sort of woke DEI desperate impact explicit racism as the replacement for colorblindness Yeah. ideology. make the case that this is broad-based and happening in places beyond Columbia University's campus and a couple of whack jobs at Disney. Like, how how much of a problem has this actually been in the broad institutions of America for real? Make make your argument for that. Well, broad institutions of America, I would say in every professional school, your your viewers, if they have white male sons and they've applied for graduate school, I would bet a very large proportion of those white males, if they're not in some LGBTQ category, have not gotten into their first choice or second choice or third choice for medical school or law school because they are the bottom of the totem pole. There is no more uh reviled creature in an academic environment today than a straight white male. Um and that occurs as well in the professions uh in law firms. Black law school graduates are catapulted way ahead of their GPA ranking uh into associate positions way ahead of their white and Asian colleagues. The press uh hires on the basis of race publishing good luck publishing a book if you're a white male non-LGBTQ author. uh the media, we've seen that government, the Oscars is a good example in the media space, which is they've now made explicit race quotas for your crew.

12:53 Like if there aren't if there isn't sufficient diversity in the people behind the camera, you're not qualified to get an Oscar now now as of like I think this year, right? It's it's unbelievable. and and Broadway after again during the George Floyd race, there was this movement called I see you, white American theater that had the most hilariously uh hysterical hyperbolic manifesto basically blaming theater for having the gall to ever mount a a play written by a white male. And they've just this group has aren't most of them.

13:28 No, I mean seriously, aren't like most of the historical plays, musicals, cancel it. So the after George Floyd like every new play on Broadway that year was by a black author. So and and you have I I wrote about in the book the um amazing institute at Giuliard, which is one of the premier arts conservatories in the country for classical music, but also for theater and dance. and the black students there just had this incredibly self-involved, narcissistic meltdown uh when they were asked to listen to a Zoom uh reenactment of the African slave trade in order to increase the empathy of all students towards what blacks went through. and and and out of out of that centuriesl long experience of sorrow and oppression came black music and black theater. But the black Giuliard students said, "How dare you subject us to this?" And and they had a complete meltdown. And they too demanded we should Wait, what were they melting down about? This was black. This was historically black music that they were melting down about listening to. This was a 3day workshop that Giuliard had brought in run by a black theater professional at NYU that was going to be an immersion in black art in above all musical theater, spirituals, jazz. And the on the opening day, this black theater professional, Michael Mccelroy, had the students watch by Zoom because we were all socially distanced at that point. Um, a reenactment of the African slave trade that whose dialogue came out of the the TV series and book Roots by Alex Haley, black author. And during this reenactment, the black students were all texting each other about how this was just too oppressive and how dare they appropriate our history. I it's it's impossible to understand. Do not ask me to explain this, John. Okay? It's it can't be explained.

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