Category Archives: Race, Equity and Diversity

February is Black History Month, and to celebrate, UVA Health has organized  activities around the theme, “Racial Healing: The Heart of Racial Equity.”

Racial healing activities include:

• Kultivate Connection. An emotional wellness break and space facilitating racial healing through a connection with colleagues, shared experiences, and cultivation of authenticity and kinship.
• DEI Book of the Month Discussion. “The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing.”
• Guest speaker: Jodie Geddes, co-author of “The Little Book of Racial Healing: Coming to the Table for Truthtelling, Liberation, and Transformation.”
• Guest speaker: Dr. Michael McCreary, president of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, on “Trauma and Race: a Path to Wellbeing.” The topic covers “trauma-informed counseling for racially traumatized African (Black), Latino/a/x, Asian, and Native (Indigenous) Americans (ALANAs).”
• Guest speaker. “My Story, My Voice,” featuring Gene Cash, executive director of the Counseling Alliance of Virginia, on racial awareness and sensitivity.

To do his bit to bring about racial healing, Mr. Cash addressed the topic of White Supremacy. In the clip atop this post, he asks participants if they can name the tenets of White Supremacy. He draws mostly blanks, although one lady hesitantly suggests that “perfectionism” is such a tenet. Cash agrees, describing perfectionism as a tool for White control, rule, and the disregarding of “Black and Brown spaces, transactions and interactions.” He goes on to discuss the horrors of slavery and lynching.

— JAB

Heather Mac Donald

by James A. Bacon

Statistical disparities between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are at the root of the debate about race in America today. Other than a few powerless voices on the fringe of society, no one questions that racism is evil. With no one admitting to being racist, leftists have redefined racism. One strain of thought asserts that many White Americans are unconsciously biased, which affects their behavior in subtle yet malign ways. Another strand insists that America’s institutions are racist, which means that racism supposedly abounds even in the absence of discernible bias. The evidence for such propositions supposedly can be found in the wide differences between Whites and Blacks in income, education, health and other metrics of wellbeing. The existence of such disparities is proffered as proof of systemic bias and/or ineradicable flaws in our institutions.

The effect of this line of thinking is pernicious in so many ways. Perhaps the most devastating to American society and to allegedly marginalized minorities themselves is the corrosive impact it has on standards of merit and excellence.

Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute fellow, is perhaps best known for her takedown of racialist thinking on crime. But she has written extensively about the perils of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion as well. And in her most recent book, “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives,” she explores how a monomaniacal focus on statistical disparities corrupts science, the arts, and public policy.

In an event co-sponsored by The Jefferson Council, Mac Donald will address the University of Virginia community 7:00 p.m. Nov. 9 in Charlottesville on the topic, “DEI and the Death of Merit.” You can register here. Continue reading →