Heather Mac Donald - Positions

Positions

Mac Donald has advocated a variety of political positions, including the following:

  • Victimization. She criticized the notion of treating boys as a new victim group, and criticized universities for seeking to hire "diversity consultants" to "help boys succeed".



  • Racism. Mac Donald argued that the high rates of African-American young males in America's jails was not a result of a racist policy by police and that "study after study has shown that the criminal justice system responds to the crime and the criminal history of the offender, not to his race". She criticized the thinking of African-American Jeremiah Wright for making racist statements when Wright said that "blacks have inherently different learning styles". Wright was a pastor at the church where presidential candidate Barack Obama attended, and Obama's connections to Wright became controversial during the campaign for the presidency in 2008. She sided with police when the New York City department was accused of racism in a lawsuit and wrote a book exploring the issue of racism in the police force.


  • Torture. Mac Donald argued in 2006, in The Torture Debate, that the Abu Ghraib fallout was overblown and that opponents of President Bush used it to construct an exaggerated "master narrative" and asserted that the torture at Abu Ghraib was "torture lite" compared with more brutal atrocities such as those of Pol Pot. She defended rough coercive interrogation techniques as necessary in some circumstances.


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