When Race Trumps Merit Quotes

“These nonconformists know that Jews, Asians, and other previously discriminated-against groups eventually trounced the rest of America by exceeding standards, not by demanding that standards be lowered on their behalf.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“The idea that blacks are frequently and disproportionately gunned down by the police is an optical illusion created by selective media coverage. If the press chose to ignore police shootings of blacks and focus exclusively on police shootings of whites (which are twice as numerous), Americans would think that they are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of whites.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“If you don’t think that children should have their innocence stripped from them by premature knowledge of sexuality, you are filled with hate. If you think that a country has a right to determine who crosses its border, you are filled with hate. If you think that college admissions and faculty hiring should be based on academic merit, you are filled with hate. If you think parents should have a role in deciding whether their children are castrated, you are filled with hate.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“The elite consensus has been unbroken: the only problem worth paying attention to in the black community is the supposedly lethal effects of white bigotry.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Police departments should work incessantly to minimize the number of times officers feel compelled to use deadly force, but police shootings are not the main problem afflicting urban black communities; criminal violence is.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“The media follow strict rules of concealment: the race of black perpetrators may not be mentioned; the race of white perpetrators is always relevant.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Never mind that black males between the ages of fourteen and seventeen commit lethal gun violence at over ten times the rate of white and Hispanic teen males combined.27”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“It is a virtually inviolate rule that if police crack down on disorder involving black people, the New York Times will accuse the police of racism”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“For decades, research has found that neighborhoods with the highest rates of fatal accidents also have the highest rates of violent crime. In other words, criminals violate traffic laws as routinely as they violate other laws, and those criminals and bad drivers are disproportionately black.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“When other arts companies face phony charges of racism, as most will in the post-Floyd age, they should ponder the examples of Tulsa Opera and Long Beach Opera. The moral of those sagas is: never apologize; never endorse a racial falsehood.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Roumain’s response to the cancellation of “They Still Want to Kill Us” was also predictable: he went immediately to work playing the race card, finding a receptive audience in the classical music press.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Moreover, programming and hiring by race will not bring blacks into the concert hall over the long-term unless those black audiences have an underlying interest in the music.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Williams is scathing about the introduction of identity politics into music. “It will be the death of quality,” he warns. “It will breed resentment from musicians who have worked all their lives to achieve perfection.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Give the Met credit for aiming high. If it can portray abolitionist art as a smoke screen for slavery, it can portray anything in Western history as a pretext for oppression—and it will do so.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“The curators started with their conclusion: the West is unremittingly white supremacist, even (or especially) when it appears to be fighting against white supremacy.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“The Met castigates white artists’ commercial motives as inimical to positive ideological content. Black artists get to hawk the hell out of their works while still claiming moral virtue.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“An artist’s use of live models, the preparation of preliminary sketches, the representation of the nude, and the selling and buying of art—all are revealed by the Met as ploys used by the white European power structure to oppress people of color.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“She was the victim of a “culture of silencing.” Apparently Grey and her fellow students could not provide actual examples of such silencing, but that inability only proves how serious the silencing is.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“The next step in imaginative emasculation is obvious: only elderly actors can play King Lear, only hunchbacks can sing Rigoletto or play King Richard III, only fat people can play or sing Falstaff, since using stage makeup and body suits to transform non-old, non-handicapped, and non-fat actors into those roles represents ageism, fat-shaming, and ableism.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Such an invocation of personal responsibility is—in the revisionist’s mind—a surefire sign of white supremacy.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Under the logic of the current moment, any tradition that comes out of Europe is racist because its contributors will have been overwhelmingly white.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Packing off every opera and orchestra administrator to implicit bias training will not produce a single competitively qualified black musician.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Currently, musicians’ identities are concealed by a screen through most, if not all, stages of an orchestral audition to prevent favoritism or bias (a process known as a “blind audition”). But color blindness is now regarded as discriminatory, since it favors merit over race.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Obstetricians working in inner-city hospitals report that black mothers have higher rates of complications during pregnancy and in delivery because of higher rates of morbid obesity, hypertension, and inattention to prenatal care and prenatal-care appointments. Packing those doctors off to diversity reeducation will not improve black childbirth outcomes.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“It is not easy summarizing how your work on cell signaling in nematodes applies to minorities currently living in your lab’s vicinity,” the researcher says.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“In Baltimore, which is over 60 percent black, only 10 percent of black eighth graders can read proficiently.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“(Prescribing weight loss to black women, for example, is a “racist” way to fight obesity, wrote a sociology professor and a nutritionist.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“Here we encounter the second a priori truth: health disparities are the product of systemic racism; any other explanation is taboo and will be as ruthlessly punished as the questioning of admissions preferences.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“The National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC, declared in the summer of 2020 that rationality, the two-parent family, punctuality, self-control, and being polite were “white” traits.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives

“If a white job applicant is not hired, it is acceptable to assume that he was less qualified than other applicants. If a black job applicant is not hired, it is because of discrimination.”
― Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives