Is America trading excellence for ideology? In this episode, Rafael Mangual sits down with Heather Mac Donald—author of When Race Trumps Merit—for a frank conversation about affirmative action, diversity mandates, and what happens when institutions prioritize identity over ability. They dig into the real-world consequences of diversity-driven policies in education and the workplace, the growing skills gap, and the cultural factors that shape outcomes. It’s a provocative and engaging discussion of issues many people try to avoid talking about.

Audio Transcript

Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. I am your host, Raphael Mingual, and I am so delighted to be joined again by one of my favorite colleagues, Heather McDonald. Welcome back, Heather.

Heather Mac Donald: It’s an honor to be with you, Raphael. Thank you for having me.

Rafael Mangual: I’m so excited to have you. Last time you were here, we talked a lot about criminal justice issues, policing, but I want to talk to you about your most recent book, When Race Trump’s Merit. For those of you who don’t know, it’s right there in the background. It’s an incredible read. You should absolutely get it. And you really dive into the problems with the kind of obsession with diversity and all of the problems that that leads to. And so I want to dive into that and I want to start with the topic of affirmative action, which is one that’s always interested me. It kind of helped bring me into some of these modern political debates when I was coming up as a teenager exploring some of these issues. And it got me to thinking about an interaction I had a couple years ago. I was sitting for a public conversation, semi-debate with the former president of NYU, John Sexton, and we were discussing affirmative action.

And he was taking the pro side, I was taking the con side, and his rationale was that there are distinct experiences that certain members of certain racial groups will have that they want to bring into the campus to enrich life on campus for everyone else who might not otherwise get exposed to people with those experiences. And that sounds really reasonable to a lot of people as a rationale for elevating race or ethnicity above, say, test scores when making decisions about who to admit into a university or a college. And so I asked him, I said, “Well, just looking at me, knowing that I check these boxes, I’m a Caribbean Latino of African descent. What can you tell me about my life experiences from having that? “ And of course, he couldn’t really answer the question. He waffled and sort of sidestepped. And I guess that’s where I want to start. I mean, what is it that the sort of race obsessed get wrong in the context of affirmative action with respect to what they attach to race?

Heather Mac Donald: Well, first of all, I try with myself to completely reject the term “affirmative action” because it is a misnomer. It deliberately sets up a misunderstanding. It arose in the 1960s when you really had the start of what were racial preferences. So it’s really about racial preferences. But affirmative action included such relatively innocuous practices as doing more outreach, making sure that you’re advertising for a job in a broader range of publications. And you’re not just recruiting at Andover and Exeter, predominantly white prep schools for college or for jobs. And so I think there’s probably a few people that are still misguided and hoodwinked by that term. What we’re really talking about is lowering standards and giving preferences to one race or another. It is not just about making extra effort to recruit. So that having been said, the other aspect that is always underplayed in these debates is how great the skills gap is. You’re right that there’s a huge amount of stereotyping that’s gone into the diversity rationale, which was developed by the Supreme Court in the Bakke decision, where Justice Powell wrote the only decision that sort of got enough people sort of going on. Yeah. Saying, “Well, actually you can’t have a compensatory rationale for preferring Blacks in racial admissions. That’s not valid.” And most people would’ve thought, “Well, I thought that’s what this is all about is compensating for discrimination, for Jim Crow, for slavery.” What he said is, “No, the only valid rationale is diversity of the class. Exactly what Sexton said is this makes a more vibrant educational community. And in fact, it’s more about helping whites than it is about helping blacks.” But that does involve extraordinary group stereotyping. And yes, I know conservative blacks, I know liberal blacks, I know conservative whites, liberal whites, you can’t necessarily predict.

The real problem in theory, if everything else was equal, okay, we’ll have a thumb on the scale in favor of one group or another. We’re not against diversity per se. What we’re against is lowering standards. And the skills gap is so vast that in any institution to create anything resembling proportional representation of the so- called underrepresented minorities, which is blacks, Hispanics, and there’s a very small percentage of Native Americans, entails a dangerous, dangerous diminution of academic expectations. I’ll just throw out one number or a few, because again, I think most of the public has been kept in complete ignorance about what we’re talking about here. The average Black combined SAT score on a 1600 point scale, which is 800 is the perfect score on reading and verbal skills, 800 is the perfect score on math. So if you’re perfect, you get 1600, the average is around 1000. Black’s combined score is 907. So on math, they’re less than 450 out of 800. That is really, really low. The Asian combined score is over 1,200; 66 percent of blacks in high school and 12th grade don’t possess even basic 12th grade math skills defined as doing arithmetic or being able to read a graph. And the number of blacks in the 12th grade who are actually advanced in math is so small, it doesn’t even show up statistically on a national sample. So the problem is, not only are you stereotyping, but worse, in any institution, you’re bringing in people under a diversity rationale who are not competitively qualified, and that gets into the whole problem of mismatch. And in educational institutions, you’re setting them up to fail, which is not doing them a favor.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I want to talk about the sort of potential sources of those gaps, but before we do that, I want to just... You mentioned something that caught my attention, which was that people are upset about this disproportionality and the representation in certain spaces, whether it be a college or a university or a certain sector of employment. And my reaction to that is always, well, there’s a great tension there to complain about a lack of proportional representation while at the same time claiming that diversity brings with it exposure to certain worldviews and life experiences, those two ideas are in tension in the following way, which is that the diversity rationale acknowledges the differences between and among different racial groups, ethnic groups. If those differences are real, then why on earth would you ever expect proportionality in terms of the outcomes? I mean, if we are taking the idea of racial or ethnic identity seriously and the idea that those identities come with a different set of life experiences, which lead people to make very different choices, why on earth would the outcomes be the same?

Heather Mac Donald: Well, let’s be honest, and this is very difficult and charged. I think that an academic proponent of diversity would say, “I can have it both ways.” The thing that really is involved is lowering the academic skill level. And so you can have different life experiences, but they would insist that everybody has similar academic skills, and that’s just not the case. I would also add this whole diversity rationale for education, which is, “Oh, we all have different life experiences.” So what? College education is about cramming as much knowledge into students’ empty noggins as you can in a mere four years, which is not enough. They come not knowing anything about history, not knowing anything about geography, about science, math. It’s about a transmission model of education. Sorry, ed schools. I don’t give a damn. The transmission model is totally taboo. It is about the student learning from the professor and the idea of, well, they’re all going to be just relating to each other.That’s a side issue. It’s not what this is about. And frankly, I would not care.

I would love to go to purely numerical based admissions in order to get rid of these damn admissions officers who are among the most pretentious people in history that think of themselves as these artists that craft these little utopian communities and making these judgments about people that are incredible. You got in the wonderful 2023 Supreme Court case purporting to knock down racial preferences and admissions. It was challenged to Harvard and University of North Carolina, their racial preference programs. The plaintiffs got their hands on transcripts from these admissions officers and it was just nauseating. They were saying things like, “Well, our little brown person, if only they’d done better on their scores, we could have given them a merit scholarship, but let’s come up with a way to help this brown person in other ways.” So I would get rid of all these people and at Harvard, they’re making judgments about 16-year-olds, 18-year-olds, “Are you courageous? Have you shown character in your life?” Who are you to make that judgment and what about you? So I don’t care if a university is entirely Asian, if those are the people who are most qualified at the level of teaching that’s being offered there to absorb what is necessary to understand and carry on Western civilization. So the whole thing is just based in part on a misunderstanding of what I think college education should be.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s supposed to be about exposure to ideas. It’s supposed to be about challenging the students. And the whole dynamic is supposed to assume that the person in the front of the classroom knows more than the people seated at the back of the classroom. Exactly. And yet that whole idea seems to be subverted, which kind of gets at something interesting, which is there’s been sort of a shift in the university space into this sort of consumer-driven model where university officials are terrified of the students. They need to please them at every ... And I guess it makes sense. They’re paying 70 grand a year, 80 grand a year, 100 grand a year at some schools, depending on whether they’re also paying for room and board. And it’s kind of become the opposite of what it was intended to be, which was you were given the privilege of being able to learn at the feet of brilliant people.

Heather Mac Donald: It’s purely transactional. You hear stories about students just bitching about getting a B+ on an exam in the rare case when a professor tiptoes up to some kind of actual academic standard and saying, “You can’t do this. That’s going to hurt my opportunity to get a job at Goldman Sachs.” And sadly, I think that Republicans are guilty in

Creating or keeping that mindset going in that now a universal, and it may also be the Manhattan Institute City Journal Academic Ranking Index, but it’s part of our rankings is to rate colleges based on how much they increase somebody’s earning potential. And Betsy DeVos, who’s our chairman, who I otherwise adore, but when she was the education secretary under Trump in his first administration, they got so micro that they were evaluating different majors. And I guess I have the luxury and had the luxury of pursuing education as an end in itself. And I understand that for people that don’t have maybe the same resources, you are really thinking of this as vocational training, but if you are parents of a child and it’s not life or death to get a job immediately, please convey the idea that this is a magical space, as you say, that you’re entering, and we want you to wallow in beauty and greatness. And it doesn’t matter if a classics major does not show up on the statistics as massively increasing your value as a business consultant. This is your one opportunity, perhaps your last, to really understand where we came from and why we should be down on our knees in gratitude for the people who came before us.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s a beautiful view of what education is supposed to be about at the higher level. And yet, as you kind of alluded to, the universities moved away from that idea. In fact, a lot of the reading that you would’ve done in a classical training module, say 30 years ago, 40 years ago, is now viewed as perpetuating exactly the kinds of problems and lack of diversity that led to affirmative action. I mean, you hear people, “How many more dead white men do we need to read?” Which gets me to another issue that I think is worth discussing, which is that it’s not just that this idea has sort of infected the admissions process. It’s also infected the educational endeavor itself, which is now elevating majors like Black studies and fat studies. And at some schools like NYU, you can make your own major by ... You see these videos of these people at graduation say, “Well, I’m a queer studies, power and privilege, and the radical politics of short hair major.” And it’s like, “Well, what does that mean?” But that, I think, devalues the whole thing. I think that’s actually what the Trump administration was responding to, was that, well, you’re selling people this product at $100,000 a year when they’re not getting any value, not just later return on the investment, but they’re not actually receiving an education in the first place.

Heather Mac Donald: Right. Well, it’s pure narcissism. Identity politics is about the glorification of the self, based on the most trivial, irrelevant traits. Being Black is not an accomplishment. Being female is not an accomplishment. Being gay is not an accomplishment. And yet, you are teaching people to think of themselves as special, privileged, and self-sufficient based on a completely phony victim identity. I mean, if ever there’s a place where nobody has any right to claim victim with status, it’s on a college campus, which is the most tolerant liberal environment in human history, with the exception, of course, of conservatives and straight white males. But the idea that anybody in a privileged victim group is at risk of harm there is so ridiculous because these colleges are twisting themselves into knots to hire, admit, promote as many underrepresented minorities and females in the STEM fields as possible. So it’s telling students that, again, they’re sort of self-sufficient and should only be interested in studying themselves as far as the faculty goes. This has been going on. Sorry, Raphael, you’re too young.

Rafael Mangual: I’m happy to hear that. I’m turning 40 this year and it’s breaking my heart.

Heather Mac Donald: No, I’m sorry. There’s been people talking about this since the ‘60s and ‘70s, sort of myself included. And frankly, I’m weary. I really am because nothing much has changed. And the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is the way the dominant attitude of today’s academics towards classic texts, hermeneutics refers to the science of interpretation. It came out of religious, scholarly, biblical interpretation and clerical interpretation. How do you approach a text? How do you interpret its meaning? The predominant attitude of today’s academics, as Paul Ricœur, a French philosopher said, is the hermeneutics of suspicion. That is, it approaches the text as an adversary. The reader, the faculty member, is not there to serve as a transmitter, as a porte-parole to young people who don’t know anything about it of, let me bring you into this work of which you should be so in awe, but rather, let me unmask it. And everything is…

Rafael Mangual: Or deconstruct.

Heather Mac Donald: Right? It is remarkable. It is very hard to find a humanities or social science course, which doesn’t start out with that suspicion towards anything Western and to reduce it all further to issues of race and sex is just to give license to ignorance. It’s these professors by now, we’ve gone through enough generations of the sort of post-deconstructionist, as you say, post-structuralist world that ended up devaluing history, devaluing scholarly knowledge, that the faculty don’t know history, and coming up with this simple, simple, trivial template of race and sex is a way to keep the academic discourse going without actually understanding your field.

Rafael Mangual: And there’s a perfect illustration of this that I wanted to get your reaction to. A few years ago now, a group of scholars had decided to undertake an experiment to expose just how shallow this whole set of ideas is. And what they did was they submitted fake papers to all of these journals that were critical of the Western canon and elevated identity and racial attributes. And in, I think it was almost a dozen cases, they got the papers through peer review, completely fake with fake citations, with incredibly bogus claims that on their face are just insane. And yet these papers were actually published as real academic work in some of these subfields that are driven by people who have this sort of critical view of the Western canon. And I think that tells you all you need to know about what is going wrong in the university.

Heather Mac Donald: Yeah. It’s purely rhetoric. It’s a language. It’s a code that you learn. I learned it. I was at Yale in the 1970s. Yale was the American seat of deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, who was the French progenitor of this, would come every year and give a lecture, and the graduate students in comparative literature would flock in absolute awe and adoration. His counterpart on campus was Paul de Man. These de Man at least, de Man was an actual scholar of European literature. He ended up having a very perverse and ignorant approach to text, but he knew that literature. And I was fascinated by this. I was interested in the language and it seemed like this was the hottest thing going. If you were interested in problems of interpretation, this is where you should be. And so I learned to speak that rhetoric, and now I see it everywhere that it’s very mannered.

It’s a set of fake, the narratives and constructivity and whatnot. And you can join the club of this extremely now narrowing group of people because there’s so few jobs available, but all you need to do is learn to generate the rhetoric. And this set of hoaxes that you mentioned that was led in part by Peter Boghossian was preceded by the even famouser, if that’s a word, more famous, Alan Sokol hox, who was a physicist at NYU, I believe, that did a similar spoof of writing a paper in very flawless academic jargon, claiming that physics and the law of relativity were really just texts and had nothing to do with reality. And it too was accepted into the premiere journal of academic theory called Social Text. And of course, after these hoaxes happen, all of the editors and the faculty in the circumambient disciplines all say, this is unethical, unethical. What’s unethical is charging $100,000 and purporting to be an education when all you’re doing is narrowing students’ minds, not opening them up and giving them a view of what came before us.

Rafael Mangual: That’s exactly right. It’s exactly right. I want to talk a little bit about the sort of practical implications about the subordination of merit to the diversity rationale. And I think a lot of people will, especially who are politically ambivalent about some of this stuff, will say, “Well, why do you care? What does it matter? Who are you hurting really?” And I’m always tempted to say, “Well, these people are going to go out into the world and do things.” And some of those things are going to be important things. And that credential needs to mean what it meant 20, 30 years ago if we are to expect them to perform those jobs well. And I’m thinking here of doctors because medical schools have not been sort of immune from this sickness, which is what I would call it, but you see this in other professions like becoming a firefighter, becoming a police officer, where anytime the objective standard is not met by a sufficient proportion of whatever disfavored group you want to talk about, rather than do something to raise the performance of the disfavored group, we lower the standard. And that has real consequences if you’re talking about people who are going to become surgeons or doctors or pilots or firefighters.

Heather Mac Donald: I know. I mean, how can we really believe that merit doesn’t matter that academic skills don’t matter? You were understating the case with medical schools. They have completely different standards of admission. The curves don’t even overlap. Whites and Asians are being rejected with medical college admissions tests, the MCATs that would be an automatic admit if those scores were presented by blacks and Hispanics. And what happens is you admit students that are not competitively qualified into an academic environment for which they’re not prepared. They should have gone to one for which they are prepared. Nobody’s saying that Blacks and Hispanics shouldn’t go to college. They’re saying go under the same conditions as every other group, which is into a school for which you’re academically prepared so that you have the same skills as your peers. But what happens is to their .. Should be dismayed. They’re catapulted into academic environments that they can’t keep up in. They fall behind. And then the next step is, well, we’ve got to lower further standards, which is what’s happened with the part one of the medical licensing exam. And as you say, police and firemen, they need to be able to read instructions on chemicals as a firefighter or read the patrol guide, make certain cognitive judgments. And every single test for testing firefighters or policemen, if it has any kind of reading or writing or math component, will have a disparate impact, sadly, because of this huge skills gap. And so the response is always, get rid of the test or lower the standards. And it does matter. Of course, it matters. Everything matters. Same with bridge building, air traffic control. There’s rarely a field where we have the luxury of being able to say that we don’t need to get the best possible minds there.

Rafael Mangual: Right. Yeah. As you were talking about medical schools, I was reminded of this episode a few years ago. There’s an actress, a comedian, Mindy Kaling. She’s Indian American. Her brother, Vijay, had applied and gotten into medical school, but he had to lie about his race. He was South Asian, but he decided, “Well, if I shave my head, I can pass as Black.” And he checked Black on his admissions application. And of course, that came out and he had to apologize. It was a big deal, but I think it just goes to show you how upended the incentives have become in these spaces. I mean, people seem to know what’s going on. Now, if that’s the case, if it’s that open, a secret, I mean, is there any coming back from that?

Heather Mac Donald: Well, and I remember in the 1990s when there were a few people that were breaking open the vast disparity in admissions credentials, there was a study that came out with a Princeton professor, and because the colleges have done everything they can to just absolutely bury the facts. And that’s why one of the most important things that the Second Trump administration has done is demand that schools hand over their admissions data as a condition for federal funding, and they’re fighting it tooth and nail, but that’s all you need to know. If you can get your hands on the objective test data, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt if they’re still exercising preferences, because what you will see is the average Black score is way below whites and Asians. But so in the ‘90s, everybody knew this, but it was finally sort of dribbling out what the actual numbers were.

And I remember the New York Times wrote an article talking to students about this, and there was a Black girl at a school in, I think, Westchester County, New York, who said, “Well, I don’t need to work as hard because I’ll get admitted anyway.” So it is very bizarre. It’s such an overused term, but it is kind of Orwellian where we’re all living a lie because the students all know high school seniors all know what everybody else’s SATs are, so they know the double standards and the game, and yet you get to the colleges and they’re all saying, “Oh, we’re not doing this,” and we’re all supposed to pretend that it’s not going on. But it leads to a huge amount of cynicism. Will it end? I don’t know. I go back and forth. I sometimes think that even just four years of having a president who doesn’t give a damn about the race hustle, and he is not cowed and terrorized by being called a racist, he just doesn’t care, that that will encourage, embolden, give some spine to the people that have been on the deficit demerit line of racial preferences to say, “We’re not taking this any longer.” The parents and grandparents should know that if they have a straight white male son or grandson, he’s going to be the last admitted to medical schools, law schools, engineering schools, regardless of how well he’s done in college, maybe it will embolden people to say, “Sorry, the game is over. The race hustle is over.” On the other hand, in my more traditional pessimist mode, I do feel like the advocates of identity politics, those who scorn our civilization, those who do not believe in the reality of objective standards are just waiting in the wings. They’re waiting us out. The faculty are still there, the administrators are still there. A lot of these ridiculous diversity bureaucracies in colleges have simply rebranded themselves with the same people that are committed to the idea of systemic racism. Corporations, maybe a different matter. They took up Trump’s invitation to get rid of diversity bureaucracies with such alacrity that one realizes they weren’t true believers. After all, they were just hypocrites and cowards. Maybe they’ll hold the line, but I don’t know. It’s hard to know whether we’re ready to say, “At this point, we’re going to go forward on a neutral principled basis and we’re not going to lower standards.” As you say, the solution is don’t ask that standards be torn down on your behalf, meet the damn standards. Become so valuable that they can’t keep you out. That’s what Jews did. They were kept out of law firms, they were kept out of banks, and they made themselves so qualified that that antisemitism broke down.

Rafael Mangual: Raise the transaction cost of discrimination for the people engaging it. I mean, make it hurt them. And look, I think that’s exactly the right approach. And if I were to take the pessimistic view of this, I would say, “Well, look, you have these massive gaps in performance that explain why people have found it necessary or at least easier to lower standards and to engage in racial preferences.” Well, sure, we can try and close those gaps, but that’s really hard to do, Heather.

Heather Mac Donald: They’ve been trying for 60 years. It’s not as if there’s been no effort made. Basically, all social policy is about the achievement gap and the gap in every, whether it’s crime, achievement or whatnot, it’s all about the race problem.

Rafael Mangual: And so the question, I guess, becomes, is this something that we can do something about through public policy, or is this something that we have to just wait and see if people on their own through their own community efforts solve?

Heather Mac Donald: That’s a really, really difficult question. And I would also say before I address it, that it’s a real question too, whether if the most selective educational institutions and science labs go to pure colorblind merit hiring, the fact of the matter is they’re going to be all white and Asian. You will not be having blacks in the Harvard Law School anymore and you’re not going to get them in the lower-tiered scores schools because even there, they don’t match. Does the country have the stomach for that or does it want to continue with this fake patina of academic equality, which is just not the case? So I don’t know about that. And again, that sort of depends on, will Trump influence people to say no, there are more important things than obedience to the race hustle. As far as what you do, you get asked this, I get asked this in public speaking all the time, “Well, what can we do to raise the skills level and close the gaps?” And I’ve become, I’m afraid, exhausted and cynical.

And my response now these days is there’s nothing more that so-called we can do. We, the we that you’re referring to, let’s be honest, has been trying for the last 60 years with billions of dollars of transfer payments, every public policy. I mean, that’s the whole debate about vouchers, school funding. It’s all about this. It’s not as if we have not been paying attention. And as I say, the key is to stop demanding to lower standards on your behalf and instead meet the standards. And I do think policy is up against its limits here. It has got to come from the culture itself to say we’re not going to demand excuses. We’re not going to make excuses any longer. We’re all going to try and imitate those Asian tiger moms. If every parent paid the same fanatical attention to his child’s academic involvement and performance as the paradigmatic Chinese, Asian, Korean family. And it’s not like it’s an average that is leveling a whole bunch of range of parenting behaviors. It’s pretty consistent. They actually are riding their students. Are they doing their homework? In a lot of, I’m going to be very honest here, and you know this too, in a lot of black homes, the kids are out running the streets. Some of the infamous shootings of police officers in Chicago, what was the 13-year-old that was shot?

Rafael Mangual: Adam Toledo.

Heather Mac Donald: Toledo.He wouldn’t have been shot if he wasn’t running with another gang banger at 2 AM and…

Rafael Mangual: On a school night.

Heather Mac Donald: Exactly. Jumping over a fence and wheeling on the officer and make him think he had a gun. But in any case, he shouldn’t have been out there in the first place. If kids were at home studying for their exam, you’d solve a lot of problems, not just academic problems, but policing problems as well. We’re now in wilding seasons. Some are starting, and we’ve got the flash mobs that have already taken over parts of D.C., Baltimore.

Rafael Mangual: Even here in New York.

Heather Mac Donald: In New York. And again, these are kids that are being allowed to run the streets by their parents. So I think that the most important changes are cultural. And we are a policy think tank, and so we still have to believe in the efficacy of policy, but there’s nothing new under the sun that has not been suggested. Yes, there’s great innovations one can make in charter schools, high expectations. But those two, the no excuses schools fell to the problem of disparate impact and they weren’t able to withstand the charge that they were imposing bourgeois white values in saying, “We expect you to obey your teacher.”

Rafael Mangual: o many of these great charter networks have gone woke.

Heather Mac Donald: It’s unbelievable. KIPP is the most tragic example. It really is. They thought that their motto, work hard, be nice or something, was a product of white supremacy.

Rafael Mangual: Right. I mean, you have all these schools like Noble, Charter Networks out in Chicago. I mean, completely upending their school discipline policies, enabling bad behavior, which is what makes the classroom insufferable to begin with and makes it impossible for those who want to learn to actually learn. I mean, it really does, because those are things that could help at the margins. If you allow these environments to persist and you allow them to flourish. Exactly. And yet even there, there’s this kind of discomfort, which is, I think what’s gotten me to, I think, where you are, which is I have to shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, there’s not much more that society can do. There’s not much more money that we can spend. This has to come from the culture.” And the intervention window’s pretty small too. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you’re talking about early childhood exposure to the concept of reading. I mean, there are these studies showing with the number of books in a house matters. It’s really not the number of books, right? You don’t just magically...

Heather Mac Donald: Fake.

Rafael Mangual: Right. The number of books reflects the attitudes and values of the parents. And that’s really what it comes down to. And when you have a society with a massive racial disparity in family formation, when you have very distinct cultural norms that de-emphasize academic performance and emphasize sort of bad behavior and violence as means of respect, acquisition, and status building. Yeah, the outcomes are not going to be great. And no, I don’t think that there’s a lot that public policy has to say about that.

Heather Mac Donald: The oppositional culture, which has rose in the ‘60s in Black culture was completely self-defeating. It was a sort of last degenerative black power, but it was not good. And the fact of the matter is, maybe ideally, again, we somehow purge the idea that a equal opportunity society will have, this is where we began the conversation, proportional representation in certain fields. Maybe we’d give up that idea, but what the bare minimum that anybody can hope for is a culture that is respect for bourgeois norms is widely shown. And that’s where, again, the behavioral aspects of charter schools matter. Just please respect the law. Don’t have crime rates that are 10, 20 times higher than other groups. That’s the problem. Be a worker that shows up on time. And there’s obviously, we’re speaking about averages here one needs to put in the little rider that, of course, there’s individuals who are way overperforming the overperforming groups and are absolutely dedicated to the law. You talk to them. I talk to them in inner city areas, the hardworking business owners and the senior citizens that are desperate for more police and that understand and that have patriotism. I mean, I’m frankly awed by black conservatives because I can understand why one would not, like Frederick Douglass say, “We’re not celebrating this 4th of July holiday. Why are you asking us to do this?” I can well understand that that attitude would persist much, much longer than that. So it is, I am in awe of black conservatives who can say, “I am so proud of this country. I’m glad to be here.” But that is really what one has to hope for and move towards.

Rafael Mangual:  Well, I guess that is a great place to end the conversation. Again, thank you so much, Heather, for joining us on the show. Thank you all for watching. I hope that you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Please do not forget to like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, do all the things for the algorithm, let us know what you thought, leave us a review and tune in for next week’s episode. See soon.