America is being transformed, as toxic ideas first spread by higher education undermine humanistic values, fuel intolerance, and widen cultural divisions. Students enter the working world believing that people are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.

In The Diversity Delusion, MI senior fellow Heather Mac Donald argues that the root of this problem is a belief in America's endemic racism and sexism—a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Mac Donald argues that the U.S. is becoming a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and one that is losing its competitive edge.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. A 2005 recipient of the Bradley Prize and author of the 2016 bestseller, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, she holds a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Cambridge University, and a J.D. from Stanford University.

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