Why We Walk on Eggshells (How Our Civil Rights Laws Stifle Our Civic Discourse)

Why We Walk on Eggshells is an incisive look at the wrong turns judges, legislators, and other officials have taken in shaping American civil rights law and policy, and how those choices have led the country in disastrous directions. It is essential reading for anyone interested in restoring the nation’s commitment to equal opportunity for all and moving beyond failed policies of preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, or sex.

—Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow, Manhattan Institute

What happens when left-of-center ideas on matters of race or sex can’t be challenged in polite company? Free from criticism, they slowly grow increasingly extreme, eventually losing touch with reality. This is how we find ourselves in the Woke Era.

In Why We Walk on Eggshells, Gail Heriot sketches out the practical incentives created by our civil rights law and policies that caused the woke ideology to develop and flourish.

One of the most important of those incentives was the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which for the first time made employment-discrimination lawsuits—including those based on harassment—lucrative for plaintiffs. Employers understandably panicked and started requiring what came to be called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training to ensure that employees would never say anything, no matter how trivial or even how true, that might be considered offensive. Employees were urged to walk on eggshells. Even statements like “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” were often forbidden.

Slowly workplace culture (and eventually American culture in general) evolved to resemble the culture that had taken hold on college campuses more than a decade earlier as a result of another of the many wrong turns in civil rights law—the Supreme Court’s fateful decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).

Why We Walk on Eggshells is a masterful treatment of the legislation and judicial decisions that helped give birth to the Woke Era. It is for anyone who wants to grapple with how we arrived at our present woke crisis and discover a way out of it.