When Race Trumps Merit | Heather Mac Donald & Peter Boghossian ("Mr. Lefty")
When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives is the latest book by bestselling author Heather Mac Donald. Mac Donald sounds an alarm about the erosion of meritocracy through “disparate-impact” ideology in science, medicine, jurisprudence, and art. While concerns about civilizational decline are not a laughing matter, Peter Boghossian injects a playful element to this interview by taking on the role of a progressive and challenging Mac Donald to defend her claims. Mac Donald shares her research and views on equity, the scientific method, credentials in medicine and law, colorblind meritocracy, classical music, crime, and the skills gap, all while affably referring to Peter as “Mr. Lefty.”
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and The New Criterion. Her numerous honors include the Integrity in Journalism Award, the Eugene Katz Award, and the 2005 Bradley Prize.
Anti-woke people like to define "equity" as "proportional representation" but I'd like to quibble with that. I teach at a community college in California, and therefore get to hear about equity constantly. Though rarely defined, what I've gathered from looking at our policies and talking with coworkers is that equity is better defined as a verb, or maybe a process with a specific goal.
Equity is THE PURSUIT of policies, processes, changes in outlook, and so on with the GOAL of proportional representation. This is what makes it so difficult to combat, because if you question its outcomes, you'll be accused of questioning its intent, regardless of whether the policies being pushed lead to the intended outcomes. I would argue, however, that even the PURSUIT is wrong, for reasons similar to was mentioned in the video.
Different organizations have different missions. As mentioned in the video, the purpose of medicine is to heal the sick. But no, now the purpose should be Social Justice. What about education? The purpose of education is the pursuit of knowledge/truth. No, no, the purpose of education is now Social Justice. Take any organization or discipline, and the woke are trying to shift its purpose to Social Justice. What is VERY often overlooked on the left in general (not just the woke left) is an assessment of the competence of people to carry out whatever grand vision they have in mind. Is there any reason to believe that a chemist, such as myself, would be a competent social worker? No? Then why am I diverting my time from what I'm good at (teaching chemistry) to something I have no training in?
Even if the pursuit is right, however, it should be noted that one cannot effectively pursue a goal without having checks along the way that they can use to assess whether they're reaching that goal. In my experience, there are only certain allowed ways to think about the pursuit of proportional representation, and those are the ways that are to be tried. If we try accepted strategy X and it doesn't give the desired results, we're never allowed to question whether X was a good strategy. Instead, the response is, "If we did X longer and harder then it would have worked", or "things would have been so much worse if we weren't pushing X". Either way, the follow-up is, "there is yet undiscovered unfairness that is keeping us from achieving the results X was meant to achieve". Under no circumstances can one wonder, "maybe X wasn't a good strategy?".
Most Americans don't understand how the woke are using the word "equity." They think it means "fairness" as in the dictionary. But the woke are using equity to mean the current discrimination of some groups of people based on the past discrimination of other groups of people. And this does not stop since historically marginalized people are historically marginalized forever. Peter Boghossian has produced an excellent video defining the woke use of equity. The video has the best definition of equity I've seen. I have provided the Boghossian equity video and discussed it in my Substack titled "Woke Word Games" at https://2026.substack.com/p/woke-word-games