NYC Gazette

A Manhattan Institute fellow acknowledges that the enslavement of Black Americans was an atrocity, but said it is no excuse to emphasize race over merit.

“The disparate impact issue arises out of America’s completely understandable sense of collective guilt about race that comes from the centuries-long betrayal of our founding ideals, from our centuries-long, cruel, heartlessly and gratuitously nasty treatment of Blacks,” said Heather Mac Donald, author of "When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives."

Mac Donald, who was promoting her book to a crowd of attorneys at the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) policy conference on May 12, said that everything that has been going on in the criminal justice system since the George Floyd race riots are driven by disparate impact.

“Blacks are a far greater threat to whites than whites are to blacks," she said. "Blacks commit 87% of all non-lethal interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks. Yet the national narrative insists on the opposite idea that whites are a constant risk to blacks, and we all dutifully play along.”

The Yale and Stanford University Law School graduate told the audience that she would like to see disparate impact regulations eliminated.

The Department of Justice website defines disparate impact regulations as "ensuring that programs accepting federal money are not administered in a way that perpetuates the repercussions of past discrimination."

“Over half of black law students are in the bottom 10th of their law school class,” Mac Donald said. “After their first year of school, two-thirds of black law students are in the bottom fifth of their class. These twin constraints make a decline in our jurisprudence in a diversity regime almost inevitable.”

However, one audience member questioned the legitimacy of Mac Donald’s statistics and her definition of merit.

“Someone is worthy or meritorious for law school if they're willing to commit to learning the law,” said Brandon Tate, RNLA member, and a law student at Loyola University New Orleans. “Competition is one form of merit but there’s also worthiness. Ms. Mac Donald contrasts race with worthiness and I don't think there's a real competing contrast there.”

Mac Donald also touched upon the transgender movement. 

“The trans issue is certainly the weirdest thing that has ever hit humanity in its entire history,” she said. “There's just nothing like it and I struggle on a daily basis to understand what this represents at its root as a philosophical challenge.”

Among transgender adults, 54.7% are white, 13% are Black, 5.8% are Asian, 1.1% are Native American or Alaska Native (AIAN), 21.7% are Latinx and 3.8% are mixed race, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

“I certainly wouldn't say that Blacks, women, or trans people are dumb or unintelligent but I do know that until you get into law school or medical school, no one has the skills they need to succeed," Tate argued. 

"Law schools and medical schools are supposed to teach you those skills," he added. "You can't really say that someone who doesn't have certain test scores or skills shouldn't be there.”