The elites wanted to get ahead of the media wave they knew was coming and say, ‘We understand – America is racist, we’re racist’. This was absurd. It was particularly absurd in universities, where this kind of self-flagellation happened the most. Right now, there is probably not a single university in the US that is discriminating against black people. The opposite is the case, in fact. If you are a black student or a black academic, you have an enormous advantage over your peers. There is not a single faculty that is not desperately trying to find underrepresented minorities or women to hire.
When college presidents get up and say that Yale is racist, it’s all a fantasy. It’s fiction. It is a form of mass neurosis. But it is still extraordinarily consequential, because it impacts on every single institution. Any institution today that has racial disparities in its demographics is considered to be racist per se. That’s the only allowable explanation for racial disparities. What I’m trying to do is provide alternative explanations. As long as racism is the only allowable explanation for why Google’s engineers are not 13 per cent black or why the physics department at Harvard University is not 13 per cent black, then these institutions are under threat.
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