The Post-George Floyd Revolution, by F. Roger Devlin

You have to chop down the tall trees to make a forest “equal.” From F. Roger Devlin at unz.com:

Credit: Mike Shaheen, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, DW Books, 2023, 319 pp, $28.99 hardcover, $9.99 kindle.

Heather Mac Donald’s seventh book is an account of the latest stage in America’s racial madness, reached since the death of George Floyd in May 2020. Insofar as current thinking has any principled basis, it lies in “disparate impact theory,” something that has been in place since the Supreme Court’s Griggs v. Duke Power Co. decision of 1971. That theory holds that whenever blacks are underrepresented in employment, housing, etc. in comparison with their numbers in the population, the only possible explanation is discrimination.

At present it is still possible, although dangerous, to challenge this fallacious idea by citing data on racial gaps in skills and behavior. But such data themselves are increasingly being attacked or hidden. This is the reason standardized test scores are being dropped from school admissions, for example. Such tests have never impeded the practice of racial preferences — different standards have simply been set for the different races. But they have continued to provide evidence of actual skill gaps. For that reason, nearly 2,000 colleges, including the entire University of California system, have now either banned the use of test scores or made them optional.

The next frontier is the rejection of the concept of accomplishment itself, since it leads inevitably to the realization that some people and groups accomplish more than others. The behavioral standards that make accomplishment possible cannot be left intact either. In the summer of 2020, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, declared that rationality, planning for the future, punctuality, delayed gratification, and being polite were aspects of white culture that “people of color” might not wish to internalize. We are sacrificing civilization itself to maintain the illusion of racial equality.

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