| Summary: |
"America is in crisis, from the campus to the workplace. Toxic ideas--bred in college classrooms and nurtured by politicized scholarship--have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in the larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyrannous. Teachers upholding rigorous standards or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students enter the working world convinced that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American norm. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force. The Diversity Delusion offers a devastating critique of these assumptions and of the worldview they define. It describes a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in academia and the private sector that denounces meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforces quotas, and teaches students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. Tracing an arc from #MeToo mania to implicit-bias training that claims to discover racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance. Ultimately, we are putting our competitive edge at risk. But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author's decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which we can discover a common humanity."--Jacket. |
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