From Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason L. Riley, a contrarian argument that racial preferences have done more harm than good for black Americans
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the use of race in college admissions was unconstitutional, many predicted that the black middle class was doomed. One byproduct of a half century of affirmative action is that it has given people the impression that blacks can't advance without special treatment. In The Affirmative Action Myth, Jason L. Riley details the neglected history of black achievement without government intervention. Using empirical data, Riley shows how black families lifted themselves out of poverty prior to the racial preference policies of the 1960s and 1970s.
Black employment, incomes, homeownership, and educational attainment all were on the rise in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and began to stagnate only after affirmative action became the law of the land, tainting black achievement with suspicions of unfair advantage. Countering thinkers who blame white supremacy and systemic racism for today's racial gaps, Riley offers a more optimistic story of black success without racial favoritism.
Economic inequality continues to be one of the most hotly debated topics in America, but there has been relatively little discussion of the fact that black-white gaps in joblessness, income, poverty, and other measures were shrinking prior to the pandemic. Why was it happening, and why did this phenomenon go unacknowledged by so much of the media?
In The Black Boom, Jason L. Riley-acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute-digs into the data and concludes that the economic lives of black people improved significantly under policies put into place during the Trump administration.
Less inequality is something that everyone wants, but disapproval of Trump's personality and methods too often skewed the media's appraisal of effective policies advocated by his administration. If we want to make real progress in improving the lives of low-income minorities, says Riley, we must look beyond our partisan differences at what works and keep doing it. Unfortunately, many press outlets were unable or unwilling to do that.
A biography of Thomas Sowell, one of America's most influential conservative thinkers. Thomas Sowell is one of the great social theorists of our age. In a career spanning more than a half century, he has written over thirty books, covering topics from economic history and social inequality to political theory, race, and culture. His bold and unsentimental assaults on liberal orthodoxy have endeared him to many readers but have also enraged fellow intellectuals, the civil-rights establishment, and much of the mainstream media. The result has been a lack of acknowledgment of his scholarship among critics who prioritize political correctness. In the first-ever biography of Sowell, Jason L. Riley gives this iconic thinker his due and responds to the detractors. Maverick showcases Sowell's most significant writings and traces the life events that shaped his ideas and resulted in a Black orphan from the Jim Crow South becoming one of our foremost public intellectuals.
In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend. In theory these efforts are intended to help the poor—and poor minorities in particular. In practice they become massive barriers to moving forward. Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but in too many instances the current methods and approaches aren’t working. Acknowledging this is an important first step.
