Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, has made a career of painstakingly going into the police departments and town meetings and impacted urban neighborhoods to research the facts on the ground about how police practices actually affect lives.
On July 21, 2015, MacDonald appeard on the Harvard Lunch Club Political podcast, hosted by radio talk show host Todd Feinberg and me. The full 35-minute podcast segment is at the bottom of this post.
MacDonald spoke out against the crippling influence that the “Black Lives Matter” movement is having on the quality of life in the very neighborhoods where the protests are taking place:
I think this is an even more extreme example of the way this country deals with race and policing, which is to talk fanatically about police in order not to talk about the far more difficult problem of black crime.
Proactive policing practices have been the target of protests against “police racism.” Speaking about this so-called “broken windows” method of policing, where police detain perpetrators for minor, quality of life violations like turnstile jumping or loitering and smoking weed, MacDonald notes:
This type of policing that pays attention to public order is demanded by the residents of poor communities. They want the police to get the drug dealers off the corner, they want them to get the kids off their stoop who are hanging out there loitering and smoking weed and so that sort of policing is in fact a moral imperative.
and that, far from being a threat to Black lives and Black communities:
the one government agency that is the most dedicated to the proposition that Black lives matter is the police.
In a second topic of the podcast – which is also the subject of MacDonald’s recent City Journal article: Microaggression, Macro Crazy – MacDonald talks about an initiative by University of California President Janet Napolitano, asking all deans and department chairs in the university’s ten campuses to undergo training in overcoming their “implicit biases” toward women and minorities.
The objective is to thereupon instruct faculty members in how to avoid committing microaggressions, those acts of alleged racism that are invisible to the naked eye.
Says MacDonald:
The idea that faculty members at the University of California or any American campus are discriminating against the most qualified faculty candidate for a position whether it’s in a physics department, an engineering department, or a literature department because that candidate is female or a so-called “under-represented minority” which is Blacks and Hispanics, i.e. not Asian, is ludicrous.As both of you know, every faculty search, far from being an effort to discriminate against women and minorities is a desperate, fear-driven effort to find remotely qualified females and under-represented minority candidates to interview and ultimately hire.And yet Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of California, like all of the diversity clones underneath her are trying to put out the opposite idea that their own faculty, and of course they never name names – who are these bigots? who are these sexists? – need to undergo diversity training and watch preposterous little skits about racist hiring committees in order to purge themselves of racism and sexism. This is absurd.
Listen to it all and join the fun at the Harvard Lunch Club Political Podcast.
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Todd Feinburg is a radio talk host and mobile radio entrepreneur with about 25 years in broadcasting. He had a ten year stint at WRKO in Boston where he hosted several different programs, the last of which was the morning show, which he co-hosted for 5 years ending in 2012.
Mike Stopa teaches graduate chemistry at MIT, consults for the National Science Foundation and is working with a start-up that has developed a new type of computer memory. Mike is also a lifelong Republican who has run for Congress in Massachusetts.
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