Why We Walk on Eggshells: How Our Civil Rights Laws Have Made It Hard to Talk Sensibly About Race and Sex

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.

GAIL HERIOT is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a professor emerita at the University of San Diego School of Law. From 2007 to 2025, she was a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights. In 1996, she co-chaired the Yes on Proposition 209 campaign, which amended the California Constitution to prohibit the state from engaging in preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In 2020 she reprised her role as co-chair in the successful campaign to prevent Proposition 209's repeal. She is chairman of the board of the American Civil Rights Project and co-editor (with Maimon Schwarzschild) of the anthology A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education. She blogs at Instapundit.