Heather Mac Donald and "the Pursuit of Equity"

Some readers describe Ann Coulter as a flame-thrower, and her columns are always provocative, whether you agree with her or not.  However, at TakiMag she’s just reviewed Heather Mac Donald’s book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. And the review is excellent – and informative:

“No Biggie, Just the End of Civilisation”

. . . It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization — law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine — to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.

Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting black people’s self-esteem.

And her review concludes:

Luckily, learning to identify and treat disease isn’t such a big deal at today’s medical schools, anyway. Instead, the faculty are charged with teaching about “systems of power, privilege and oppression.” More than half of the top 50 medical schools now require students to take courses in systemic racism, Mac Donald notes. I’m sure that will be a huge relief when doctors miss your brain tumor.

In 2021, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced that it would spend $2 billion … to find a cure for brain cancer? Parkinson’s disease? Heart disease? NO!!! The $2 billion would go to promoting “diversity and inclusion in science.”

In 2022, the National Cancer Institute, funded by you, taxpayer, decided to change its mission from conquering cancer — and really, who cares about that? FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS! — to guess what? Yes!!! Promoting diversity! Instead of Outstanding Investigator Awards being granted solely on the basis of merit, the gender and race of the researchers would have to be considered.

All this has done wonders for the morale of doctors. Mac Donald quotes one cancer researcher: “It’s the end of the road for me as a Jewish male doctor.” A UCLA doctor told her that the smartest undergraduates in science labs are saying, “Now that I see what is happening in medicine, I will do something else.”

In response to this dystopic future, Mac Donald asked an oncologist, “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?”

He emailed back: “We value our jobs. We need our jobs. Our peers will turn on us. Speak out, lose job forever, be quickly forgotten and abandoned.”

That’s why, Mac Donald says, it falls to the rest of us to never shut up about the tearing down of standards, to put forth “unapologetic defense(s) of color-blind standards,” and to “relentlessly provide the data that explain the lack of racial proportionality in meritocratic institutions.”

To paraphrase Orwell: If there is hope, it must lie in the uncancelable.

Read the whole column here.

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