Uncomfortable Topics with Heather MacDonald: Race, Skills Gap, Disparate Impact & the Role of Women, John Stossel, with Heather MacDonald, February 17, 2026.
8:09 You say disparate impact is destroying America. Most people don't even know what it is.
8:13 It is a concept that was one of the greatest success stories of the Civil Rights that was running out of cases to prosecute and wanted to expand its jurisdiction indefinitely into the future and massively across society. The history of it, we had civil rights statutes that were passed in the 1960s necessarily, belatedly, long overdue, that said as employers you may not discriminate against applicants based on the color of their skin. And you may disagree with those. You may think that that's . . . For now we will give that a pass that you couldn't intentionally discriminate and that was seen as the way to dismantle America's long Legacy of racism got their act together and stop discriminating intentionally so the courts and activists came up with a new definition of what would be illegal discrimination and it gets rid of the idea of intention and intentional discrimination completely. Disparate impact is the conceit that if there's a standard that blacks do more poorly at is discriminatory so if you have a certain expectation of reading level or math skills to be a firefighter a police officer and an employer administers a test and blacks do more poorly on that, that's a racist test. Instead of meeting the standard, our response is to throw out the standard. And the employer is not racist. You don't have to show that the employer wants to discriminate against blacks. The employer just wants to qualified workforce. But if he has used some kind of standard that means that there are fewer blacks qualifying that then becomes something that violates civil rights.
10:43. I'll give you an example right out of the fight Administration. The Maryland State Police wanted to make sure that the state troopers could read at a very basic level because as a police officer you're going to need to write police reports you're going to need to understand the patrol guide you're going to need some level of dealing with written language and being able to read and write. Very minimal level. So the Maryland State Police had a written exam and this is the type of question. Four very simple paragraphs written at like maybe a third grade level that discussed theft from libraries in the United States. And then followed up a true or false question. Is theft a problem in US libraries? Just reading comprehension. Have you been able to understand this four-paragraph passage? Well this test and the questions, were all at that level of simplicity, had what's known as a disparate impact on black applicants to be Maryland state troopers. Black applicants failed the test at higher rates then whites. The Maryland state troopers didn't intend to exclude black state troopers racism had nothing to do with it it was a color blind neutral test of skills but because it had a pretty impact on black applicants and disqualified more black applicants the Biden justice department brought a suit against the Maryland State Police for having a discriminatory test.
Hiring tests that unfairly and unlawfully excluded them from employment. --Kristen Clarke
12:33. This is ridiculous taxpayers should not be on the hook for this it was not a racist Department desperate impact means that an institution can be completely color blind it can want to have as many different races as possible but if it has a standard that is color blind meritocratic but that blacks do poorly on you've got to throw out the standard and it's not just sort of Public Service jobs like policing
"Black, Hispanic NYers who failed teacher's test strike $1.8 billion in NYC settlement," New York Post, July 15, 2023.
Our taxpayers in New York recently paid out $2 billion dollars in damages because the exam for licensing teachers in New York State, which I can tell you went through decades of being dumbed down to proleptically avoid disparate impact. Blacks still didn't do as well on it and so a court decided even though you've spent decades throwing out every question on this exam that has too wide a racial Divergence it's still you still didn't have the same proportion of black applicants passing as white applicants we're going to throw out the exam and you New York taxpayers are liable for $2 billion dollars. Disparate impact is our greatest weapon against Merit. It is their greatest weapon against excellence and it is an abuse of the spirit of our civil rights laws, which was to say "we're going to allow everybody to reach their highest potential. We ban discrimination but we do not ban excellence. We do not ban high expectations. We want all people to reach the same level of competence. We're not going to have two standards of achievement: one for a particular race, another for another race. One for a particular sex, another for a different sex. We are going to have a single level of excellence in the society, and that is how we're going to move forward.
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