The Diversity Delusion, Heather MacDonald, author
This author has written such a controversial book that I am sure it will not be featured in libraries anywhere, nor in schools or in book discussions. However, it should be required reading. She bucks the crowd, and much like Charles Murray who identified societal problems that went against the Progressive, woke establishment, she was, and will continue to be, rebuffed and vilified. Honestly discussing the ability for some to achieve is not racism. It is simply the reality. Before we train an unqualified person to be a surgeon, that person must have a basic knowledge, at least, of science. However, the way things are going today, that will not be required. All that will be necessary is a particular background in order to create a diverse environment not based on qualifications, but based on irrational regulations and standards.
There are differences in demographic achievement, not necessarily due to demographics, but certainly due to excuses for failure and success. Those that work hard, generally achieve, those that make excuses, generally do not. Mac Donald has carefully laid out the culture today that rewards failure rather than success at the expense of results, which will be mediocre, if anything, rather than excellent.
Offering certain populations of people, a leg up without requiring that leg to move up, inspires that failure. To compensate for failure, the “woke” movement has insisted that failure be considered success and has rewarded those least qualified with easier admission standards and/or an elimination of any standards whatsoever, when their purpose seems better served. Thus, those who could provide the most to society are possibly the least likely to gain admission to schools that offer them the greatest advantage to do so and be successful. Often, appropriate training is substituted for the discussion of subjects better suited to roundtable discussions. Perhaps these schools will eventually lose their reputations, but an entire generation of mediocre achievers will be the result.
To deny reality is to create an alternate reality. Who wants to choose a lawyer to defend them that is unqualified, that passed through the system and received a license to practice law based solely on skin color or immigration status? Who wants a doctor that was at the bottom of their class because they neither did the work nor were able to do it, but were accepted simply because of the policy of “equity”. Creating equity as opposed to equality, based on false standards and substandard requirements, is not common sense and it is destroying the quality of our education, its students and its graduates. Our once great country is becoming a third world country as it “dumbs” down our society by pretending those unable to compete honestly are qualified to perform in their chosen professions. A tall person cannot be made short without surgery, a short person needs lifts in their shoes to become tall, but will not grow taller. A person unwilling to engage in a conversation with opposing opinions, with different ideas, cannot grow. Their only option, to hide their bigotry, is to shut down speech they disagree with entirely. This is what seems to be happening to our society. We no longer have the option to freely speak to each other without fear of cancellation, of a loss of our ability to earn a living and of societal shaming for behavior that is not shameful.
When a person of exceptional intelligence is denied an education because there is someone else who wants it who is not exceptional, who has not succeeded in school, but earns a place based solely on skin color or background, the end result will be an unqualified product. Progressives have decided that the need for diversity requires that a person should have a leg up and be educated over someone more qualified. So, they will be rewarded with the same degree as students who succeed, though that person might fail in the end and take others with him/her, depending on the duties he/she is hired to perform. The end result is the education of fools by fools, the education of the unqualified at the expense of those more qualified who would not only succeed but would benefit society, not detract from it. If these policies persist, we will turn out a future of unfit, poorly educated and unqualified servants of the people.
The book is excellent. It cites every possible abuse of power by the students, universities and those that fund them, as they fight for ideas that make no sense in a place of higher learning. These places should expand the mind, not constrict it so it can only tolerate narrow-minded ideas or its own echo. However, the book tends to be repetitive, so great is the abuse today of those in the marketplace of ideas, who do not agree with the substandard regulations and march to the beat of a different drummer. As one reads, it becomes obvious that the propaganda and brainwashing of our population into believing that social constructs are more important than enlarging our minds with a real education about our history and our achievements in science and music, medicine and law, that it has perhaps gone too far to be reversed. The idea of forcing diversity and inclusion into all areas, regardless of the ability of the prospect, has been embedded in the minds of our students by angry, agitators rather than educators for far too long.
Americans are not victims, they are achievers, or at least they used to be. The influence of America was so far reaching that everyone wanted to come here, and still they do come, but the results of their coming seem to have changed the trajectory of the country from one of success to one training failures. It feels as if the students, uneducated and unprepared, have taken over and reversed the results of years of success. The children are guiding the parents. We need to stress enlightenment and improvement, not equity and inclusion. If one honestly earns their place in society, they will be included! We have to find the adult in the room again, not the elephant. We need to solve the problems not make them worse. ( )

Another good outing from Heather Mac Donald, collecting some of her pieces on the Theory, critical and otherwise, infecting scholarship, not just the humanities, mind you, but even the hard sciences, academe, our universities, and, ultimately, our society. Eye-opening and informative, anger-inducing, et cetera. Read in conjunction with Douglas Murray's The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity, Pluckrose and Lindsay's Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody, and other works that have recently been released. ( )

Another great critique of leftist ideas, especially in the university. Not as good as Douglas Murray's Madness of Crowds.

I think my writing is fascinating; if you’re curious, it’s in the Comments section. But here’s the clipped version. I was at work today, washing dishes, not really listening to the chefs’ banter. Then one of them turns to the other and replies, “Because you’re an asshole, and I’m not.” It was funnier not knowing the context, because when you trash talk like that, it doesn’t really matter who you are or what you’re talking about. (Indeed, sooner or later, you’ll translate it to everybody in your life you’re sufficiently close to.) And so we come to politics. You look at the target, and whatever they do wrong deserves the greatest consideration, and whatever they do right deserves zero consideration. (“Shut up, college students *are* like that! No, they don’t study; they don’t even drink: they just attack people, like animals.”) It’s like listening to a lawyer, or an advertiser, talk. It doesn’t matter what they say, you’re never impressed by their *judgment*. (And being of service is more important than making a name for yourself.)

Executive summary: A superficial-at-best interest in the classics and moral traditions, and an obsession with trashin’ the liberals.

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Maybe I can carefully approach the subject more directly.

The more she struggled and thrashed and lashed out against the idea that there is bias in contemporary society, the deeper she digs herself into the hole. From reading this book I was *more deeply* impressed with the important truth that denied bias is pervasive.

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Beneath the mask of anger, she’s probably a little disoriented. “You mean it’s not easy to live in a world distorted by prejudice? You mean my kids don’t look at the world the way my parents did?”

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I should probably say that many conservatives don’t brood about the whole thing like she does; most of them probably still just don’t want to look bad, you know, and go at it like that. Which isn’t an endorsement of mine, you know.

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Perhaps the center-point of conservatism, at least as it exists for many people, is ‘distrust of the children’; the liberal counterpart should be obvious. It’s just not always as abandoned to rage as it is here.

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What a disaster it would be to have someone like this ‘on your side’.

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On Cornel West’s Twitter he page says he likes the black Church, progressive politics, and jazz. I like the same sort of things: liberal theology and Christian culture. I suppose we’ve all had times when we’ve felt like the bureaucrats are trying to make us follow unnecessary rules. “And it will lead to our bloody downfall!” Well, we don’t all believe *that*, but.

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“And now that I’m done beating you up because after 250 pages my arm is tired, maybe now you’ll finally respect me.”

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I do not see the appeal of this way of thinking.