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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24 Sep 2023

The United Nations alarmist-in-chief António Guterres called for “drastic steps” Friday to eliminate all fossil fuels in order to curb global warming.

“Climate change is not just a change in the weather. It is changing life on our planet,” Guterres asserted in a Twitter (X) post. “It is killing people and devastating communities.”

The U.N. chief did not share data on who exactly has died from “climate change” or which communities have been “devastated” by it, in accord with his usual practice of rhetoric-heavy, fact-light discourse.

Instead, he cut right to the chase: “To limit global temperature rise, we must phase out coal, oil & gas in a fair & equitable way – and massively boost renewables.”

In a video he embedded in his post, Guterres makes the remarkable claim that “every continent, every region, and every country is feeling the heat.”

That may be true in his native Portugal, but in Greenland, where the average yearly temperature is just over 1°F (-17°C), feeling the heat is a luxury.

Russia, spanning the continents of Asia and Europe, has a still colder annual average of -5.2ºF (-20.7ºC), meaning that below freezing is the norm.

Even in Canada, where the annual average sits at a balmy 20.6°F (-6.4°C), one supposes that an added 1.5ºC would be a welcome (if insufficient) change for the better.

One must assume that Mr. Guterres is also unaware that far more people die each year from cold weather than from heat.

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