Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American power,

politics and society. On each episode, I will talk to an American expert or an expert on America

about something that's going on in America in

2023. I'm delighted to be joined today by Heather MacDonald, who is a fellow at the Manhattan

Institute and the author of a new book when race trumps merit, which is available for pre-order

on Amazon now. Heather, congratulations on this book.

It's an extremely interesting read, and I'm very glad to have you with us to discuss it.

And this book really takes what's happened to what used to be, and still is sometimes called,

affirmative action, and what's happened to it since the death of George Floyd,

because it's quite obvious that America was moving since the 60s, has been moving towards

affirmative action and this ideology of disparate impact, which perhaps you could explain for

our listeners. But since the death of Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, that has become a

sort of mania that has taken over large parts of American life, society, the arts, science,

everything. So let's start with disparate impact and what that is.

Well, first of all, I want to backtrack further where you talk about affirmative action,

which still is the phrase used by the establishment elites.

And it's a useful phrase because it has some ambiguity in it.

As initially presented in the civil rights legislation, legislation that was

desperately needed to try to finally put an end to what really was white supremacy at that

point in the South, but had been ubiquitous before, affirmative action was presented as well.

We're just going to ask employers to do some

extra outreach and make sure that they're drawing on a large pool of applicants and not

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