Frequent Fox guest Heather Mac Donald says Black people need to act more like Asians before we know if economic racism exists
Mac Donald: “Behavioral disparities” between Black and Asian people are the source of inequality
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From the October 9 edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show:
HEATHER MAC DONALD: To me this is the challenge of our time, which is to combat the myth of bias. Right now the left owns the explanation for every socio-economic disparity, and that is that it's a result of racism. That is the only allowable explanation. And as long as the left holds a monopoly on that explanation, it wins. What needs to happen is people need to swallow hard and get the guts to start talking about the very significant differences in behavior and culture that I think are the overwhelming reason for the ongoing socio-economic disparities.
When you have an out of wedlock birth rate among Blacks nationally of about 73 percent, and in inner city neighbors it's closer to about 85 percent, when you have such a catastrophic disappearance of the marriage norm. When you have kids that view academic effort as acting white. When truancy is as high as it is. When gang involvement is as high as it is. It is premature to say that the only possible explanation for our socio-economic disparities is racism.
I've proposed a thought experiment in The Diversity Delusion, which is that if Blacks acted like Asians for 10 years in all things related to life success - again in regards to out of wedlock child rearing, a fanatical attention to academic involvement and achievement, a absence of criminal involvement - and we still saw the economic gaps that we do, then I would say it's time to go for the structural racism explanation. But as long as those behavioral disparities are so observable and so large, it's time to work on those.
MICHAEL KNOWLES (GUEST HOST): Of course.