The Glenn Show: When Race Trumps Merit

My guest this week will no doubt be familiar to many of you. Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of many books, including the recently published When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. The book reflects Heather’s wide-ranging expertise on race, inequality, policing, art, music, literature, and a host of other matters. Her impressive portfolio gave us an opportunity to stretch out in this conversation.

One of the things I like about having Heather on the show is her ability to draw connections between such seemingly disparate concerns as medical school admissions data, the policing crisis, and Beethoven. Her critique of diversity-obsessed institutions and policies is that powerful, and perhaps a phenomenon as ubiquitous as the one she analyzes requires that kind of capacious analysis. Heather suggests that we haven’t yet achieved “peak woke.” And yet, somehow this conversation doesn’t leave me in despair. Neither Heather nor I are even close to throwing in the towel, and there’s something galvanizing about sitting down with a fellow traveler to think things through, no matter how bad things may look at present.

Follow Glenn Loury at The Glenn's Show on Spotify

Subscribe for more at glennloury.substack.com