The recent Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina that struck down affirmative-action admission policies in higher education will do a lot of good in other areas of American society as well. By restoring the principle of color-blindness to the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, we at least seem to be heading in the right direction as a country. The ruling alone, however, will not uproot the imperious attitude of those implementing and benefiting from race-conscious practices, from students and university presidents to foundations, corporate boards, and museums. Nearly 45 years of picking winners and losers based upon race has disfigured the body politic in unnatural ways.

Very few public intellectuals have rigorously analyzed and understood the sheer distortion wrought by the racial-spoils regime as well as Heather Mac Donald has. In her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit, Mac Donald argues that the racial-entitlement mind-set fostered by decades of affirmative-action policies, coupled with the response to recent events such as the death of George Floyd, has effectively destroyed the notion of merit in America today. The book consists of three parts, each with several chapters: on medicine and race; on culture, arts, and race; and on law enforcement and race. All three parts, or case studies, advance the thesis that the legal concept of disparate impact has had negative, revolutionary consequences for standards of excellence and for race relations. Disparate impact, a civil-rights-era tool that was amplified in the 1971 Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power Company, presumes that without discrimination racial proportionality would exist. Mac Donald goes to great lengths to show that this doctrine corrodes any notion of objectivity, merit, and color-blindness. As she puts it:

Under this ideology, any standard or behavioral norm which negatively affects blacks is presumed to be a tool of white supremacy. . . . Absent some form of unfairness, it is assumed that the racial demographics of every institution would match that of the population at large. If blacks are underrepresented in science research labs or overrepresented among arrested felons, the only allowable explanation is racism.

As Mac Donald knows, politics follows culture, not the other way around. The domains of music, art, and literature, broadly construed, are where culture wars are fought. Accordingly, her most penetrating analysis is found in part 2. There she brings together all the interpretive insights scattered throughout the book and applies them to the topic of culture and the arts. In her chapter “The Crusade against Classical Music,” Mac Donald highlights the complete abdication of artistic standards among the cultural elite when it comes to race. As she tells it, there has always been a race-based critique of classical music, but with George Floyd’s death, that critique was taken to heart by the institutions themselves, so much that classical music “deemed itself implicated in the death” of Floyd.

Her point is illustrated with several telling examples. In June of 2020, the League of American Orchestras stated that it had “tolerated and perpetuated systemic discrimination against Black people, discrimination mirrored in the practices of orchestras and throughout our country.” During the same period, the Hartford Symphony Orchestra apologized for its “history of inaction to effectively confront the racist systems and structures that have long oppressed and marginalized Black musicians, composers, and communities.” The Juilliard School, too, made public pronouncements confessing its complicity in promoting systemic racism. The school’s president, Damian Woetzel, reiterated Juilliard’s commitment to becoming a “community that not only rejects racism, but that is actively anti-racist, working to tear down systemic racism and injustice.” As might have been expected, some musicians of color, especially black musicians, exploited the contrition expressed by their white peers. Mac Donald recounts an instance in which black musicians from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra delivered manifestos decrying their mistreatment by white conductors and administrators. Often the authors of the manifestos were awarded various sinecures.

The sentiments expressed by the classical-music community in response to Floyd’s death were the tip of the iceberg. Mac Donald covers many other instances of genuflection to black artists and musicians. What all these instances have in common is the belief that because black artists and musicians aren’t reflected in the right percentages in orchestras and in elite positions within artistic communities, there must be, ipso facto, racial discrimination or implicit bias against blacks. Of course, this belief is nonsense, but it continues to wreak havoc in many sectors of American society.

In a way similar to the racial reckoning taking place in classical music, museums have been commandeered by forces intent on correcting for past discrimination against blacks by discriminating today, mostly against white Americans. In her chapter “The Demise of the Docent,” Mac Donald recounts a shameful story that took place at the Art Institute of Chicago. The docent program there had been around since the 1950s, having grown out of the civic associations established during that time. Docents act as guides, typically on a voluntary basis, in museums, art galleries, or zoos. In the case of the Art Institute of Chicago, the docents were relieved of their duties en masse in September of 2021. The cause of their involuntary departure was that most of them were white. Never mind that they provided a much-needed service that benefited the community, white and black. The museum gave in to the forces of racial chauvinism. As Mac Donald puts it: “The Institute’s docent saga is a case study in what happens when museums and other cultural organizations declare their mission to be anti-racism. The final result, if left unchecked, will be the cancellation of a civilization.”

There are many other examples detailed in Mac Donald’s book of the minimizing of merit and the embrace of cultural barbarism brought about by current race-conscious policies and procedures, all in the name of correcting disparate impact. Despite her keen insight and exhaustive treatment of the topic, the book has two shortcomings. The first is that it’s a bit too detailed in its case studies. Thoroughness is often a benefit to the reader, but when it requires too much stamina, tedium can set in. Secondly, Mac Donald’s discussion would have benefited from a chapter on the cultural and familial circumstances affecting blacks, and how such factors as absent fathers in the home impede a sizeable number of blacks from realizing their potential. This latter emphasis would have strengthened her argument against the systemic-racism and disparate-impact canard by highlighting the very real cultural and skills deficiencies that account for much of black underachievement.

Nonetheless, Mac Donald’s book is a comprehensive defense of merit that shows why the principle of color-blindness is indispensable in a country as diverse as America.