Whatever you had planned to do for the rest of the day, please drop it and read this right now: Heather Mac Donald’s new book, “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

     It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd’s death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization — law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine — to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.

Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting black people’s self-esteem.

To consider just one arena, I don’t think you’re going to like the medical care you’ll be getting under the new regime. Just like in the wildly successful Soviet Union, science must be subordinated to politics, specifically “racial justice.”

The American Medical Association, the American Association of Medical Colleges and the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) have all agreed that medicine is racist.

The New England Journal of Medicine “presents a nonstop stream of articles on such topics as the ‘Pathology of Racism,’ ‘Toward Antiracist Allyship in Medicine,’ and ‘How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities,’” Mac Donald writes.

And “Scientific American produced a ‘special collector’s edition’ on ‘The Science of Overcoming Racism.’”

(It’s fantastic that scientific organizations are finally dedicating themselves to something important like racism, and not something boring, like cancer or Alzheimer’s disease — Unpack your privilege!)

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) aired a podcast in 2021 in which the deputy editor, Edward Livingston, suggested that inequities in medical care be addressed without accusing doctors of “racism.” Both he and JAMA’s editor in chief were promptly denounced and fired, the editor replaced with a black woman.

Black leaders now head the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center, the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center, the University of Pittsburgh Division of Medical Hematology/Oncology, the Wake Forest School of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Pharmacy, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the Massey Cancer Center at VCU, the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the Department of Medicine at UCLA’s medical school.

What could go wrong? Most of America’s largest cities have black mayors, and everything is fine.