Disparate Impact Thinking Is Destroying Our Civilization

Heather Mac Donald

Manhattan Institute

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She earned a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. in English from Cambridge University, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She writes for several newspapers and periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Criterion, and is the author of several books, including The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe and When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on February 15, 2024, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Naples, Florida.

The most consequential falsehood in American public policy today is the idea that any racial disparity in any institution is by definition the result of racial discrimination.

If a cancer research lab, for example, does not have 13 percent black oncologists—the black share of the national population—it is by definition a racist lab that discriminates against competitively qualified black oncologists; if an airline company doesn’t have 13 percent black pilots, it is by definition a racist airline company that discriminates against competitively qualified black pilots; and if a prison population contains more than 13 percent black prisoners, our law enforcement system is racist.

The claim that racial disparities are proof of racial discrimination has been percolating in academia and the media for a long time. After the George Floyd race riots of 2020, however, it was adopted by America’s most elite institutions, from big law and big business to big finance. Even museums and orchestras took up the cry.

Many thought that STEM—the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—would escape the diversity sledgehammer. They were wrong. The American Medical Association today insists that medicine is characterized by white supremacy. Nature magazine declares that science manifests one of “humankind’s worst excesses”: racism. The Smithsonian Institution announces that “emphasis on the scientific method” and an interest in “cause and effect relationships” are part of totalitarian whiteness.

As a result of this falsehood, we are eviscerating meritocratic and behavioral standards in accordance with what is known as “disparate impact analysis.”

Consider medicine. Step One of the medical licensing exam, taken during or after the second year of medical school, tests medical students’ knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and pathology. On average, black students score lower on the grading curve, making it harder for them to land their preferred residencies. Step One, in other words, has a “disparate impact” on black medical students. The solution, implemented last year, was to eliminate the Step One grading disparity by instituting a pass–fail system. Hospitals choosing residents can no longer distinguish between high and low achieving students—and that is precisely the point!

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Presented by author/journalist: Roy Beck – Numbers USA www.NumbersUSA.org …Global humanitarian reasons for current U.S. immigration are tested in this updated version of Roy Beck’s colorful presentation of data from the World Bank and U.S. Census Bureau. The 1996 version has been one of the most viewed policy presentations on the internet. From 2000 to 2009, the United States granted on average 1,003,741 green cards per year, according to DHS. Statistics. From 2000 to 2013, the U.S. granted an average of 1,008,404 green cards per year. Using the World Bank’s measure of poverty, in 2010 the Population Reference Bureau estimated the percentage of each country’s population who lived on less than $2 a day. The United States tends to bring in immigrants from the better off poor of the world instead of those living in extreme poverty, as measured by per capita GDP data from the World Bank. Academic works on international migration trends demonstrate that the “poorest of the poor” cannot afford to migrate and poorer countries tend to lose their better educated and more prosperous citizens to the developed world. According to DHS, the largest share of people living in the United States in 2009 who had been born in another country was from Mexico, 29.3 percent of the total foreign-born population. The second largest group was from China, 5.5% In 2009, the number of people living in countries with average incomes below Mexico’s was approximately 5.6 billion, according to the World Bank measure of per capita GDP. According to the Population Reference Bureau, 80.8 million births in 2009 were in “less developed regions.”