© 2014 by Jason L. Riley
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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Riley, Jason (Jason L.)
Please stop helping us: how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed/Jason L. Riley.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59403-726-9 (ebook)
1. African Americans—Government policy. 2. African Americans—Social conditions—21st century. 3. African Americans—Economic conditions—21st century. 4. United States—Social policy. 5. Liberalism—United States. 6. Social mobility—United States. I. Title.
E185.86.R55 2014
305.896’073—dc23
2013046338
To Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, for their inspiration and friendship
CONTENTS
Introduction
01. Black Man in the White House
02. Culture Matters
03. The Enemy Within
04. Mandating Unemployment
05. Educational Freedom
06. Affirmative Discrimination
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
INTRODUCTION
It has been nearly half a century since President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 commencement address at Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, D.C. He had signed the Civil Rights Act a year earlier and would sign the Voting Rights Act just two months later. But Johnson’s speech wasn’t a victory lap, as some anticipated. Instead, it was mainly about what government should do next on behalf of blacks. This was merely the “end of the beginning,” he said, quoting Winston Churchill.
“That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school,” said Johnson. “But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘Now you are free to go where you want and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’
“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
Johnson said that the “next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights” was “not just freedom but opportunity” and “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
The president’s speech “hushed the crowd” of five thousand, wrote historian Taylor Branch. “The June 4 address soon would tear the historical sky like a lightning bolt.” At the time, the country was more focused on the war in Vietnam, but Johnson had launched another war at home. It was a war on poverty and racial inequality, and he was going to win it by redistributing wealth and pushing numbers-based racial remedies.
“An almost bewildering array of Great Society programs was launched, all with the central purpose of transferring tax dollars from the middle- and high-income classes to the low-income class,” wrote Stanford economist Martin Anderson. “Millions of government checks, for tens of billions of dollars, were printed and mailed and cashed. The most ambitious attempt to redistribute income ever undertaken in the United States had begun.”
These were heady days for Democrats, of course. “Johnson had just been elected in a landslide over Barry Goldwater,” noted a 1985 New York Times article commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Great Society. “For the only time in this century except for four years in the late 1930’s, a President’s party had a 2-to-1 majority in both houses of Congress. The economy was strong and growing. And most people not only shared the President’s dream for an end to poverty and racial injustice and a better life for all Americans but also believed with him that it was in the Government’s power to fulfill that dream.”
But what if Johnson was mistaken? What if there are limits to what government can do beyond removing barriers to freedom? What if the best that we can hope for from our elected officials are policies that promote equal opportunity? What if public-policy makers risk creating more barriers to progress when the goal is the ever-elusive “equality as a result”? At what point does the helping start hurting?
This book examines the track record of the political left’s serial altruism over the past half century. Have popular government policies and programs that are aimed at helping blacks worked as intended? And where black advancement has occurred, do these government efforts deserve the credit that they so often receive? The intentions behind welfare programs, for example, may be noble. But in practice they have slowed the self-development that proved necessary for other groups to advance. Minimum-wage laws might lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they also have a long history of pricing blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education was intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates—particularly in the fields of math and science—than we’d have in the absence of racial preferences. And so it goes, with everything from soft-on-crime laws that 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 meant to help. In practice they become barriers to moving forward. Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but time and again the empirical data show that current methods and approaches have come up short. Upward mobility depends on work and family. Social programs that undermine the work ethic and displace fathers keep poor people poor, and perverse incentives put in place by people trying to help are manifested in black attitudes, habits, and skills. Why study hard in school if you will be held to lower academic standards? Why change antisocial behavior when people are willing to reward it, make excuses for it, or even change the law to accommodate it?
Yes, the Obama presidency is evidence that blacks have progressed politically. But if the rise of other groups is any indication, black social and economic problems are less about politics than they are about culture. The persistently high black jobless rate is more a consequence of unemployability than of discrimination in hiring. The black-white learning gap stems from a dearth of education choices for ghetto kids, not biased tests or a shortage of education funding. And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it’s been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior—behavior too often celebrated in black culture.
In April 1865, one hundred years before Johnson addressed Howard University gr
aduates, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke at a Boston gathering of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on a similar theme. “Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What should we do with the Negro?’” said Douglass. “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall.…And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!”
Douglass was stressing the primacy of group self-development, a not uncommon sentiment among black elites in the decades following the Civil War. Booker T. Washington, who like Douglass was born a slave, said that “It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.” Douglass and Washington didn’t downplay the need for the government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were optimistic that it would happen eventually. But both men also understood the limits of government benevolence. Blacks would have to ready themselves to meet the far bigger challenge of being in a position to take advantage of opportunities, once equal rights had been secured. The history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of ignoring this wisdom. There is no question that the civil rights lobby has benefited tremendously from the programs launched by the Great Society. So has a Democratic Party that rewards black constituents with government handouts. The following pages discuss whether the folks whom these groups claim to represent are better off than they otherwise would be.
01
BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE
In the fall of 2011, nearly three years after Barack Obama won the keys to the White House, the president’s job-approval rating had slipped below 50 percent for the first time. No one wondered why. The official unemployment rate stood at 9 percent; economic growth was stagnant; and survey after survey demonstrated that Americans, a normally optimistic bunch, had become increasingly pessimistic about the country’s future. One clear exception was black Americans, who of course had overwhelmingly supported Obama’s historic election. Polls showed that white support for the president fell by 25 percentage points between his inauguration in January 2009 and September 2011, when it rested at just 33 percent. Yet even as the country endured the worst economic downturn in generations, black fealty toward Obama remained largely undiminished.
This exception was notable because the downturn hit blacks especially hard. In September 2011 white unemployment was 8 percent, versus a black unemployment rate of 16 percent. For black men it was 18 percent, and for black teens the jobless rate topped 44 percent. Nor was employment the only area where blacks as a group had regressed economically under Obama. According to the Census Bureau, black homeownership rates in 2011 had fallen to a point where the black-white gap was the widest since 1960, wiping out more than four decades of black gains.
Traditionally, homeownership has been a measure of economic well-being, and home equity is a major source of collateral for people seeking bank loans to start a business. Aside from the financial benefits, studies have shown that the children of homeowners tend to perform better in school and have fewer behavioral problems—outcomes of particular relevance to the disproportionate number of black communities where school completion rates are low and crime rates are high.
Despite this grim economic picture, blacks backed Obama in the third year of his presidency almost as strongly as they had on Election Day. Historically speaking, it fit a pattern. Between 1980 and 2004 black support for the Democratic presidential candidate ranged between 83 and 90 percent. Yet Barack Obama managed to squeeze even more out of this voting bloc. He won 95 percent of the black vote in 2008, a year that also saw a record percentage of eligible black voters turn out to elect the nation’s first black president. The surge was driven mostly by black women and younger voters; white voter turnout in 2008 actually fell from what it had been four years earlier. And while black support for Obama had declined slightly by the fall of 2011, it seemed unlikely that black America would be abandoning the president in significant numbers anytime soon. According to Gallup, Obama’s approval rating among blacks had dipped from an average of 92 percent in 2009 to 86 percent in mid-2011. Separate polling by Pew showed that Obama’s support among blacks remained essentially unchanged at 90 percent over the same period.
If anything, these polls were underestimating black support for the president. In 2012, black turnout would increase from 2008 and 93 percent would pull the lever for Obama, notwithstanding clear evidence that blacks had lost ground on his watch. When Obama took office in January 2009, unemployment was 12.7 percent for blacks and 7.1 percent for whites. On Election Day in November 2012 it was 14.3 percent for blacks and 7 percent for whites, which meant that the black-white unemployment gap had not only persisted, but widened, during Obama’s first term.
It could be that blacks, like so many others who supported his reelection in 2012, were cutting the president slack because the economy was already in bad shape when Obama took office. As one black voter put it to a reporter in August 2011, “No president, not Bush, not Obama, could turn the mess that we are in around in four years.” But in the past, the black approval rating of a president had tended to correlate with the jobless rate. Yet black unemployment was lower under George W. Bush than it had been at any point during the Obama administration. In addition, the black-white income disparity that widened under Obama actually narrowed in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan also inherited a weak economy from his predecessor. The Great Recession that began under George W. Bush in December 2007 had officially ended in June 2009, six months after Obama took office.
Economic historians, citing one hundred and fifty years of U.S. business cycles, generally agree that the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery. Not so under Obama, and not so especially for blacks. A report released by two former Census Bureau officials in August 2013 found that since the end of the recession, median household incomes had fallen 3.6 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks.1 Which means that even when controlling for the effects of the economic slowdown that Obama inherited, under his presidency blacks have been worse off both in absolute terms and relative to whites. When Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked black talk-show host Tavis Smiley in October of 2013 if black Americans were “better off five years into the Obama presidency,” Smiley responded: “Let me answer your question very forthrightly: No, they are not. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”2 Blacks seemed to disagree. According to Gallup, Obama’s job-approval rating among blacks was 85 percent (versus just 43 percent among all groups) when Smiley made those remarks.
Broad racial solidarity is another possible explanation for why blacks have remained so bullish on Obama despite his economic record. A black member of Congress told political scientist Carol Swain that “one of the advantages, and disadvantages, of representing blacks is their shameless loyalty . . . You can almost get away with raping babies and be forgiven. You don’t have any vigilance about your performance.”3
The political left, which has long embraced identity politics, encourages racial and ethnic loyalty. It is manifest in liberal support for multiculturalism, hate-crime laws, racially gerrymandered voting districts, affirmative-action quotas, and other policies. “Stick together, black people,” says popular black radio host Tom Joyner, an Obama booster. “No matter what policies he pursues, the president’s racialized embodiment stands as a symbol of triumphant black achievement,” asserts MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry.4 Black politicians have long played off of the notion that blacks owe allegiance to “their own.” So
me of the group’s most vicious insults—“Uncle Tom,” “Oreo,” “sellout”—are reserved for those deemed race traitors. Supporting Obama regardless of his job performance is therefore seen by many blacks as not only the right thing to do but the “black” thing to do.
The administration itself has stoked this sentiment in hopes of maintaining strong black support. It has pushed to loosen “racist” drug-sentencing laws. It has sued employers who use criminal background checks to screen job applicants. It has unleashed federal housing officials on white suburban residential communities that it considered insufficiently integrated. The goal is to sustain goodwill with the civil rights establishment and black voters, even if these measures are more symbolic than substantive. Black incarceration rates are not driven by drug laws; empirical research shows that employers who check criminal histories are more likely to hire blacks; and polls have long shown that most black people have no interest in living in mostly white neighborhoods. Yet these kinds of measures are used to foster an “us-versus-them” mentality among blacks and then exploit such thinking for partisan political gain.
Liberals like to complain that, the twice-elected President Obama notwithstanding, we are not a “post-racial” society. The reality is that they wouldn’t have it any other way. Race consciousness helps cohere the political left, and black liberalism’s main agenda is keeping race front and center in our national conversations. That’s why, for example, much more common black-on-black crimes take a back seat to much less common white-on-black crimes. The last thing that organizations like the NAACP want is for America to get “beyond” race. In their view, racial discrimination in one form or another remains a significant barrier to black progress, and government action is the best solution.
The White House and its allies played the race card in earnest after the president kicked off his reelection campaign in 2011. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, in speech after speech, claimed that photo-ID voting requirements hurt minorities, even though such requirements are favored by a large majority of all voters, regardless of race.5 “Are we willing to allow this era—our era—to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise was cut short?” said Holder. “Call on all political parties . . . to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes,” he added. “Keep urging policymakers at every level to reevaluate our election systems—and to reform them in ways that encourage, not limit, participation.”6
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