Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast.

I am your host, Rafael Mangual, and I am so delighted to be joined again by one of my favorite colleagues, Heather McDonald.

Welcome back, Heather.

It's an honor to be with you, Raphael. Thank you for having me.

I'm so excited to have you. Last time you were here, we talked a lot about criminal justice issues, policing. But I want to talk to you about your most recent book, when race Trump's merit. For those of you who don't know, it's right there in the background. It's an incredible read. You should absolutely get it. And you really dive into the problems with the kind of

obsession with diversity and all of the problems that that leads to. And so I want to dive into that.

And I want to start with the topic of affirmative action, which is one that's always interested

me. It kind of helped bring me into some of these modern political debates when I was coming up as a teenager, exploring some of these issues. And it got me to thinking about an interaction I had a couple years ago. I was sitting for a public conversation semi-debat with the former president of NYU John Sexton. And we were discussing affirmative action. And he was taking the pro side.

I was taking the con side.

And his rationale was that there are distinct experiences that certain members of certain

racial groups will have that they want to bring into the campus to enrich life on campus

for everyone else who might not otherwise get exposed to people with those experiences.

And that sounds really reasonable to a lot of people as a rationale for elevating race or ethnicity above, say, test scores when making decisions about who to admit into a university or a college. And so I asked him, I said, well, just looking at me, knowing that I check these boxes, right? I'm, you know, Caribbean, Latino of African descent. What can you tell me about my life experiences from having that? And, of course, you know, he couldn't really answer the question. He waffled and, you know, sort of sidestepped. And I guess that's where I want to start. I mean,

what is it that the sort of race-obsessed get wrong in the context of affirmative action

with respect to what they attach to race? Well, first of all, I would, I try with myself to

completely reject the term affirmative action

because it is a misnomer. It deliberately sets up a misunderstanding. It aroused in the 1960s when

you really had the start of what were racial preferences. So it's really about racial preferences.

But affirmative action included such relatively innocuous practices as doing more outreach,

making sure that you're advertising for a job in a broader range of publications.

And you're not just recruiting at Andover and Exeter, you know, great, you know, white, predominantly white prep schools for college or for jobs. And so I think there's probably a few people that are still misguided and hoodwinked by that term, what we're really talking about is lowering standards

and giving preferences to one race or another. It is not just about making extra effort to recruit.

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