Where does the *New* Anti-Racism Get You?
Book Review "Where Race Trumps Merit" Heather MacDonald
Today The Scottish Union for Education published another issue on race. In this new hyper racialised world we have to wonder what real benefit, or rather who benefits from these policies. Following is an earlier review I did for SUE on Heather MacDonald’s excellent book ‘When Race Trumps Merit’, an excellent (if terrible in what it is reporting) and necessary read.
Review
Heather Mac Donald, DW Books (2023)
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Where does ‘anti-racism’ get you? Decades ago, I worked in North Philadelphia in an area nicknamed ‘the badlands’ and populated by predominantly black and Latino residents. Pre-Internet, the neighbourhood was plagued by a raft of issues, including drug dens and gang drive-by shootings, but none of it made the news. The purpose-built community centre was a concrete bunker without windows (to protect its inhabitants from stray bullets). And the city was pumping millions of dollars into programmes in the area (one of which I was part of) to offset the endemic issues. I did – successfully – create an island in the storm for kids by developing theatre and performance programmes that I was proud of. The kids would come into the centre with stories of child pregnancy, shootings they had witnessed (maybe their friends had been caught; a particular time resonates when a group of them were cackling about a kid’s eye being shot out – the ricochet was particularly comedic I guess), family abuse and general dysfunction. Many did not have stable or even permanent homes.
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Decades on and millions if not billions of pounds later, has there been an extraordinary transformation within these communities? Is it amazing? Is it safe? Turns out it’s worse. The good intentions, funds and government programmes have not provided the magic bullet as was intended, as was hoped. I hoped it would be so; certainly from within my concrete room, we at least had a pause.
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Many of us grew up with resonances of Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Because I, as most, care and want to live in a world free of racism where people are not judged by the colour of their skin but the content of their character.
And when here in Scotland I saw the new so-called ‘anti-racist’ policies being implemented post George Floyd, with no sense of criticality, I paused. First, I did not see how adopting an American system here would be relevant. Second, having lived, worked and implemented many successful projects in the most culturally diverse area of Scotland (Pollokshields), it made no practical sense.
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I have a quiet ‘dis-ease’ with the new mantra coming from the likes of Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and ‘anti-racism’ emitting from every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) department not because I have some secret identity as a white supremacist but because, inherently, I know it does not make sense. With no widespread critical thinking to this approach to their efficacy and goals, what does one do?
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Enter Heather Mac Donald to make some sense of it all. A pre-eminent scholar on the effects of the new cult of anti-racism in America (with one chapter dedicated to Scottish Opera), her book tackles this issue in great detail. She makes the case that this superficial reckoning along racial lines is systemically bringing greater destruction in the fields of medicine, arts, crime and policing, academia, schools and government, where skin colour is treated as a scientific qualification, and is undermining the very bedrock of what makes societies stable. And in the aftermath we witness utter destruction to the very people we were purporting to ‘elevate’.
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The theory on which current anti-racism theory sits is called ‘disparate impact theory’. Simply put, if a population is 10% black and 90% white then all jobs must represent this racial breakdown. If the workplace or institution does not have this particular racial profile, the only reason it does not ... is racism. There is no agency or personal accountability in this belief system. And there is no agency given to those who do achieve success in their field even with a particular racial profile. Heather Mac Donald shows with countless examples how this regressive, nihilistic and dystopian theory is destroying our world, elevating mediocrity and further destabilising communities. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.
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Mac Donald’s examples include the following.
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In medical schools, where:
Pure science courses are being replaced with credit-bearing advocacy training wherein doctors must be able to articulate their own ‘identities, power and privileges’.
‘Diversity in medical research’ becomes the main concern of philanthropic funders.
academic victim studies are elevated to such a degree that a doctor is unable to suggest that a black person could be responsible for his or her own health, because the only possible reason for ill health is racism.
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In arts and music:
A costly diversity bureaucracy at the cost of not funding artists themselves, as seen by the Met Opera hire of a Chief Diversity Officer who was brought in with a six-figure salary and with no background in opera, let alone music.
Minority applications to music schools have increased but admissions stayed low because of lack of qualification. Mac Donald points to the fact that over the past 60 years two of the three main sources for exposing a child to classical music – a music promoting culture and music education – have dried up. Without exposure to music at home, children are unlikely to become musicians or even develop an interest in music.
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In combatting crime:
Decades of successful crime fighting has been forgotten, allowing violence and predation to go unchecked. The idea of ‘systemic racism’ is so accepted, without question, that one might be surprised to find the reason the term was coined was because when they were looking for actual individuals in positions of power who were discriminating on the basis of race, they could not find any.
Mac Donald does a very thorough analysis of crime statistics, considering that it is not racism which is keeping these communities in states of violence and chaos but the culture within the communities themselves. As one example, she points to (as I had witnessed) the lack of family stability leading to higher rates of gang culture.
Black-on-black crime is something society does not want to address, although the repercussions are massive. Mac Donald shows how the inordinate attention given to mass shootings by white perpetrators is not representative statistically in any way of the behaviour of citizens.
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She exposes, via facts and examples, the utterly feckless activism which is polluting our schools, cultural institutions and communities and which provides a salve to those in power – the illusion they are actually doing something but without making any change on the ground. Does this make black people healthier? Does this help the children from neighbourhoods like North Philadelphia, where I worked, to become doctors, opera singers, scientists? Does it make their communities safer? Does it make their education better?
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In the end, she makes a case – a plea – for us to reclaim culture, reward achievement and hard work, and value beauty. This is a book for anyone who needs to make sense of the failures of our new ‘anti-racism’ frameworks with data and facts. For anyone who is actually interested in addressing inequality, read this:
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‘Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds. I have always kept an open mind, a flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of the intelligent search for truth.’
Malcolm X
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