Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth Jason Riley 20240713

Succeed, and false black power . A critique of black civil rights leaders. Host jason riley, author, columnist, contributed to the wall street journal and manhattan institute, a foxs contributor and among your books please stop helping us. You say the following,g liberalism has also succeeded tragically in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Guest yes. I believe that is a big part of political strategy. They have been at it for some time and, unfortunately, theyve had a lot of success in painting blacks as primarily victims, as defined by their victimization first and foremost and then the followup is that weic have a Government Program or government solution to help you overcome your victimhood. I think its a logical strategy. Host your book writes about this. Theres been a number of essays and books on Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. Was it a failure or a success . Guest i think if you look at the actual track record of the programs, if you look at the goals that the objectives that were stated at the time, you would have to say its largely a failure, that particularly with regard to t the people that were targeted by many of these programs. By that i mean the black poor. Their lot has not significantly improved to the extent that we were told it would improve at the time. Host another debate i think we have moved beyond separate but equal, but interpol to talk about historically black colleges. In the case of ronald mason here who was he and what is important to understand in terms of trying to merge historically black College Jackson State University forced out because of the concern the impact would have other institutions . Guest i think the issue there was whats become of these institutions since the Civil Rights Act come since weve seen about more integration in the country. The problem that these institutions have are that because black students have options they didnt once have particularly in the first half of the 20th century, they are exercising those options and theyres not intending historically black colleges to the extent that they once did because they have more options nowadays. And so the schools are struggling with how to stay viable, both economically and in terms of what they can contribute to Higher Education here and among some of the plans offer some of the smaller colleges to perhaps merge, defensiveness scale. This is been resisted by some who want the schools remain, maintain their independence. Some who want the schools to maintain their independence and i can understand that but it is often for nonstatic reasons rather than practical reasons so someone pushing for this, a way to save some of these schools and the pushback. Are these schools still relevant or should they merge if they are producing good results yes, they should stay in existence, the problem is a lot of them are not and are being kept afloat merely through federal dollars and my point is if the school board is failing its charges then it should close, doesnt matter if it is an all black school or traditional white school. If it is not meeting its objectives it should close. Where i think the value added in the School Systems of late, in recent decades is where they do an excellent job of educating kids math, science, engineering and so forth and you see a preponderance of blacks to go into these fields, very very vital purpose in Higher Education but not to say all of them are doing that duty at the same level. Host the cover story of the wall street journal sunday magazine visualizing racism and one of the lines calling it americas longest war. Your reaction to that . Guest i think there is a tendency to view black history writ large in america as a history of what whites have done to blacks and there are various reasons why various groups want to keep that narrative alive but in the end black history is about more than that. Racism still exists. I dont know any reasonable person who would argue otherwise, nor do i expect to see america vanquished of racism in my lifetime. But i do think black history is more than that. The more relevant question is what can be done in the face of whatever racism exists . What was done in the past by blacks in the face of racism and that is the relevant story to tell today and that is the message to give to the young people today and my fear is by perpetuating this notion that it is all about victimization, all about racism, we are sending the wrong message to the next generation. Why try in school if the teachers are racist and the tests are racist and police are out to get you and employers are racist. You syndicate out the door with that sort of message i dont think you are helping that child. Have you felt the sting of racism . Certainly. I have experienced racism. I have been called names, followed around department stores, pulled over by police for no reason i can understand. Host you wrote about that in detail. Tell us about that. Guest i was doing an internship in the early 90s in washington dc, interning at usaid today and staying with relatives in the area and i was on the sports desk. So we didnt leave work until the baseball games on the west coast were over so it was usually quite late at night by then and i was driving to and from my own collapse house where i was staying in usa today headquarters and i had my car which had new york plates because i was from new york although i was driving in dc and i was driving home one evening after work probably early the next morning and i hear these sirens blaring in the police pulled me over and order me out of the car and push me to the ground face away from the car and all the rest and said i fit the description of someone they were after without state plates. What were you thinking . I was terrified. I remember getting back into the car after i left because they seemed to be gone as quickly as they came after they realized i wasnt the right person and sitting in my car shaking i remember i had a standard and i couldnt get it out of gear, my hand was shaking so vigorously but it was terrifying. Host a story making national headlines, two black men, 16 years old 36 years ago convicted of murder they did not commit were just released from jail. What does that tell you about americas criminal Justice System . Guest that it is not perfect and i think you will find you will be hardpressed to find a black person of my age who hasnt experienced the things that i have experienced. I think the criminal Justice System is an improvement over what it used to be, what my father or grandfather experienced in this country but it is still not perfect but i would caution against taking these examples and saying they are typical versus exceptions or aberrations or saying that the reason so many blacks are involved in the Justice System is because it is a racist system per se. I dont see a lot of evidence for that and i think often times we have discussions about the racial makeup of prisons and jails but we dont talk about the racial makeup of people who perpetrate crimes and i dont think you can have one discussion without the other. As imperfect as the, Justice System is, has been and continues to be i still think that there are behavioral differences among groups that lead to some being overrepresented in that system and others being underrepresented. The title of three of your books, please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed. What is the message . That was a look at the Great Society program put in place under Lyndon Johnson, expanded under nixon and others and i wanted to say what is the track record . These were programs that were put in place to help the black poor in particular. Welfare programs, housing programs, expansions of minimum wage laws and so forth and i wanted to look back and say what has worked, what hasnt worked, and why and that is what i was attempting to do with that book. Host your other book, false black power . Guest i had a little of this in please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed but the false black power . Book was essentially about the track record of using political power to advance a group economically which is essentially the strategy of the Civil Rights Movement since the time of king. The issue is if we can integrate Political Institutions Everything Else will take care of itself, just get our own people in place. The Civil Rights Movement had quite a bit of success in doing that. By the early 1980s you had major black cities in the us, los angeles, philadelphia, washington dc and so forth that had black mayors. In addition to that you had black Police Chiefs and fire commissioners and School Superintendents and so forth but if you look at the track record of the poor in these cities, Marion Barrys washington dc in the 1980s or newark, new jersey in 1990s or coleman youngs detroit in the 1970s under these black regimes you had the poor becoming more impoverished on their watch so i dont think the track record is a very good one. That is not to say blacks should disengage in the political process because we have seen regression, black regression underweight mayors and white Police Chiefs and so forth. It is to say the connection we were told was essential between black political power and black economic progress is not proven to be as strong as some people hoped it would be. Guest have these Government Programs helped or hurt africanamericans . By and large they have hurt and they have heard in a way, the way i explain it is that what the underprivileged need of any race or ethnicity is selfdevelopment that has to occur. It is not something that lends itself to political solutions. These are cultural changes that need to take place. Economists refer to as Human Capital, certain attitudes and behaviors that need to develop in a group in order to rise and what we see happening to other groups in this country. To the extent that a Government Program interferes with that necessary selfdevelopment is doing more harm than good and what a lot of Great Society programs did was to interfere with that selfdevelopment. A person or groups work ethic is not going to improve if they think the government is going to take care of them. You cant replace the father in the home with a government check and if you have a system in place that if you have an additional child we will send you more money, if we see the father of the child around your house we are going to stop sending you that money. Imagine the perverse incentives put in place under programs like that and that is what we saw going on. We corrected some of this with bill clintons welfare reform in the 1990s but not entirely. There is still a legacy affect. We are new york, august is jason riley, he is a regular contributor to the wall street journal. We welcome your phone calls, 2027488200. In the eastern or central time zones, 2027488201. In the mountain or pacific time zones follow us booktv on twitter, send us a text message to 2027488003. Let them in. Let them in the case for open borders. That was a book written in the late 2000s about immigration. I was working at the wall street journal at the time and the persons i had been covering immigration for the paper, about a new position and asked if i wanted to take over the beat and that is how it fell into my lap. I didnt have a real dog in the fight that im not an immigrant, not a child of immigrants and so forth but i did enjoy studying history and immigrant history is fascinating if only because some of the arguments you realize as you write about are so old and been around for so long. So that book really came out of my writing editorials for the newspaper at that time and sort of expand on a lot of the arguments the wall street journal editorial pages made and it is a very proimmigration editorial page. Which sometimes upsets conservatives in particular, but it is interesting what happened with that debate because the sort of immigration view on the right in the trump era is very different from what it used to be. You always had a sort of isolationist, protectionist strain on the right going back to pat buchanan in the 1990s but that was never the dominant view on the right. Reagan was extremely proimmigrant, put in place amnesty in fact. George w. Bush and his father were both very proimmigrant. Even the republican nominees that lost, mccain or romney were still far more proimmigrant than you had in donald trump. This is a sort of new development on the right although there has always been this more and i immigrant passion on the right it was never the dominant one. We are in a new era here. Host are the rules any different for an immigrant versus a refugee . Yes. They are two different groups that traditionally have been taught, have been considered 2 different groups, these days they are more conflated but people who studied this will generally tell you someone who is forced out of their country who would rather be back home is going to behave differently from someone who willingly leave their country to start a new life in a new place and so what i am writing, primarily economic immigrants and the case that i make is that we would do better to put in place guest worker programs or other types of programs that allow the law of supply and demand to determine a level of immigration. Right now it has been made by politicians and public policymakers were trying to think real hard about the needs of the economy. We will take a little from here or there, pull this demand this demand doesnt work. It is soviet style Central Planning that has left us with document fraud, 12 million Illegal Immigrants in the country, hundreds of dead bodies in the arizona desert. We would do better to put in place Market Mechanisms that would allow us to regulate the flow. Host the current book you are working on . Guest im working on an intellectual biography of the economist thomas soul who thinks the uber institution, someone i have known a little bit over the years and whose books and writings had a huge impact on me in college. It is a project i am really looking forward to. Host how would you define your ideology . Can you put it in a box or is it more disparate then that . Guest i would define myself as a free market individual, freemarket conservative, someone who believes Smaller Government is the way to go and someone that believes in individual freedom. Host you wrote the Civil Rights Movement has, in your words, become an industry. By whom . Guest it has become an industry for everyone from individuals like how sharpton and Jesse Jackson to entire organizations like the naacp. I think they have effectively monetized black victimization. Different groups have done it for different reasons. If you are a Civil Rights Organization like the naacp it is not in your interest to acknowledge that things have improved for black people and what you are trying to do, the civil rights battles have been fought and won and you are trying to stay relevant. If you are an organization like black lives matter you want to raise money so youre going to play out certain aspects of what is going on on the racial front, whether or not they are actually relevant, you are going to play that up because it is in your interests to do so. We were talking about the victimization narrative and that is something democrats and black Democrats Use to get reelected. Different groups have different incentives, but it has very much become an industry. Host an industry with no vested interest in realistic assessment of black path allergy. Guest that doesnt serve their purpose. They want to stay relevant or raise money or get reelected so they are going to keep racial victimization front and center in the National Debate whether or not it is relevant. Host where do you do most of your thinking and writing . Guest at home. I have a home office and that is where i work. Guest you have selfdiscipline to do that . Guest discipline enough. It took some getting used to. I commuted to an office for two decade that the wall street journal so it took a little adjustment, but i find it more productive now to get started right away. Host our guest is jason riley on booktv in depth as we will get your calls in just a moment. You write about your father in the book, your parents had separated when you were young. Your father was in your life as a child. Guest he was. It made a big difference. He was an excellent role model. Not only my father. I grew up my mother is very religious. We attended church 2 or 3 times a week and the congregation was full of black men to carry their families, behave a certain way, i was very fortunate, i grew up along very solid mail role models, and today part of the problems many blacks faces not having that sort of stability, lack of role models in the community or even in the home given the high illegitimacy rate and single parenting in poor black communities, it is a problem. Host born and raised in buffalo. From yonkers, new york, welcome to booktv. Caller the question i want to ask. Good afternoon. The question i want to ask, republicans, especially black republicans, why dont they educate the blacks who fail history as far as that. And voter suppression, it is the ability of 40 million bucks since roe v wade in 1973. They could have been 70 or 80 million blacks and 60 million blacks voted power to the blacks and you should have me on your tv program discussing this and what im asking you to do is go through history and tell the black people, because i did when iran for the house in florida as a republican, i was called a racist. When Jackie Robinson was my hero and my musical Radio Program i honor Martin Luther king and we are being called racist, especially me. That is terrible. Ask what democrat put them to schools in the south. That is what you should be teaching them. We will get a response. Theres a lot of black history, and black politicians, it doesnt serve it doesnt serve their personal interests. What was going on in between the end of slavery and the beginning of the modern day Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s and this progress is remarkable given what is happening, these are the days of jim crow. If you look at the rate at which blacks relieving poverty or educating themselves lose both in absolute terms and relative to whites. The rates they were joining the middleclass professions, appear go of tremendous progress that actually slowed after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s past, many of the used trends. And reversed course. Doesnt get a lot of attention from the Civil Rights Act because it doesnt serve their narrative. You write in please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed that blacks, especially poor blacks performed in the absence of government and affirmative action. Guest we have had affirmative action for half a century. We can see if these programs were affected. In 1996, the university of california system ended racebased affirmative action in admissions policies throughout the entire system. After that man went into place, the number of black graduates from the university of california system increased by 50 . They increased by 50 . A program, the racial preferences that increase, expand the ranks of the black middle class. And architects were social workers with the absence of policy. And look at the track record over the years. Welcome to the conversation. I remember reading you in the new york post. Im a black american and agree with everything you say. It doesnt make a difference. And it is not going to change. A racist or racism, and feelings and emotions, and facts are facts and facts dont care about your feelings. What facts are facts and no matter what you say and i believe im saying. See, my family, no matter what, i didnt vote for trump, didnt vote for him in 2020 and telling you now it doesnt make a difference. Im starting to feel it, but its just not, when youve been told and told and you have a National Party telling you that, its never going to change. And i will look at this, Democratic Party is waiting for you, its a racial incident and thats what theyre banking on. I promise you. You know what im talking about. Police shootings, Something Like that. And then folks will go and get their emotions up and take them for granted like the past i didnt vote for trump, ill vote for him now, like he said, his quote, what have you got to lose. Just look at the facts of unemployment, employment. We are better off, but like i said before, it doesnt make a difference. Sorry for sounding down and out. You know what im going to talk about. The black attitudes are just never going to change. Rob, thanks for the call. Jason riley, your response. Youre smiling. Well, i appreciate the call and i think he makes a lot of excellent points, about the strategy of the democrats, its a tough row to hoe. The democrats have been very, very effective at pushing the victim mentality and pushing Government Programs as a solution. And so, its it is very difficult to change, to change minds out there. But i do im more optimistic than the caller, ill say, but he does make some excellent points. So from the book, let them in, you write this, if as the restrictionists insist, the democrats are coming here not to work, but to take advantage of our magnetic social welfare program. Why then are they flocking disproportionately to states that are so skimpy with benefits for the poor . Thats one question i often ask my friends on the right who see the immigration as a problem or importing poor people who are going to go on the dole. The idea that immigrants are going to are coming here to go on welfare and not work, i think, is just not born out by the facts and on many fronts. But we can just look at the situation we have today. You have, i dont know, pick your number. 10, 12, 15 Million People in the country illegally, yet, you have unemployment rates at a 50year low. The wall street journal reported Something Like 1. 2 million more Jobs Available than there are people looking for work. We have a labor shortage in this country, notwithstanding the fact that we have 15 Million People here illegally. So, again, you can the other argument is that theyre going to put downward pressure on wages. I cant tell you how often ive been told by others that say, jason, as a black person, you should be especially wary of these folks coming because theyre going after jobs that are held by a lot of blacks. And again, what is the situation today with black unemployment . We are at generational lows. And wages have been rising for the people at the low end of the pay scale faster than theyve been rising for management. Again, if immigrants are coming here and theyre stealing jobs and depressing wages,s where is the evidence . From the book by Jesse Jackson, you texted about minutes ago and he was writing for the jim crow laws and now you say hes fighting for his own relevance. Its been fought and run and what you see with civil rights leaders is a search for relevance. Even the activist groups, what theyre pushing for, where they want the emphasis placed on problems that ail the black community, theyre so add odds its hard to know where to begin. And some say the left plays up Police Shootings. Its tragic, any shooting is tragic, happening by police or anyone else, but is it the problem today that these activists have made it out to be . Were here in new york, which is one of the few places that has kept detailed records of Police Shootings going back all the way to the early 1970s and in 1971, police in new york shot more than 300 people. The most recent stats from a couple of years ago, show that thats down to around a dozen. Thats a 90 reduction in Police Shootings, and in Police Shooting fatalities over the past four and a half decades and we have an activist movement out there baseden based on there being some sort of Police Shooting epidemic. New york is not an outlier here and you can look at other cities where Police Shootings make up 1 or 2 in the country. If there are bad cops, lets root them out. If someone breaks the law and hold a position of Authority Like a police officer, they should face the penalty, but the idea that thats what we should be em sizing. The folks responsible for 2 of the shooting instead of people responsible for 98 of the shootings strikes me as completely ridiculous. Lets talk about the crime rates and blacks in jail. We must begin with the facts, your words, blacks are responsible for an astonishing disproportionate number of crimes which have been the case for at least the half past century. Yes, blacks are responsible for more than half of all murders in this country despite making up only 12 or 13 of the population. The black Violent Crime rate is Something Like 7 to 10 times higher than the white Violent Crime rate in this country and thats something we need to speak honestly about. As i said earlier, we want to have debates about the racial makeup of the prison system, but we dont want to talk about the racial makeup of who commits crimes. We pretend at that these two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another, thats ridiculous, they obviously have something to do with one another. If we want to reduce the number of people involved with the criminal Justice System or the number of blacks, we have to do something about the black crime rate. But that entails having an honest conversation about who is committing these crimes so we dont have that. But if you look at the poverty rate, what percentage in your mind are africanamericans, are black americans in poverty . Black poverty rates are around three times higher than white poverty rates in this country, but i will say this, among married blacks, poverty rates are in the Single Digits and have been for 25 years. So the idea, again, that racism is driving the poverty rate versus the family formation, again, is at odds with the facts. You know, no one is going not discriminate against you if youre black because youre married. Theyre not going to make any distinction, racism isnt going to make a distinction, so we have to look at the totality of the situation here. Is poverty a function of racism . Or is poverty a function primarily of family formation and if its the latter, why arent blacks marrying at the rate that other groups marry . Because when they do, they go a long way towards addressing the poverty issue. But again, these are not discussions we typically have. We jump right to a Racial Disparity resulting from racism, full stop, and we dont look at all the other factors that could be driving these outcomes, other than racism and again, to have this conversation you dont need to deny that racism exists in america. The question is to what extent is racism responsible for these outcomes that we see, and so to what extent are other factors responsible for the outcomes. To your point its the cycle of family formation, the proff pov rate in crime . Sure, to what extent have the Government Programs with that program or disincentivized the families, to keep the fathers around and Nuclear Families intact. It hasnt helped the intended beneficiaries at all. What was your own personal experience, again going back to your father who separated from your mom in an early age and want today remain a part of your life in buffalo, new york . And did. My father never you talked to him about it . He never lived more than a couple miles away from us. He coached my Little League teams and my sisters and i spent holidays and weekends with him and usually a couple days a week, doing homework after school. He was very involved in my life. The problem is that, the thats not typical. Thats atypical and thats the problem. I mean, you go back to, as recently as the 60s, you had two out of three black kids being raised by a mother and a father. Now, more than 70 are not. I mean, and i think that statistic alo engoes a long ways towards explaining these the gangrelated violence, the involvement with the criminal Justice System of these kids. Why theyre joining gangs and why theyre shooting each other in cities like chicago. I think theres a lack of male role models. Your father has since passed away, did you ever tell him thank you, what you did. Im sure i didnt thank my father enough when he was alive, but im sure a lot of people could say the same thing. But, yes, i think both of my parents knew how much they meant to me. Well go to michael in riviera beach, florida, and thank you for being here for in depth on book tv. And sitting here listening, questions for the gentleman, number one, how he utilizeses statistics and didnt have statistics, when he cited black families if theyre married, the kids are in a better position at a time when 60 to 70 of all marriages in america end up in divorce. So or when he cites that, for example, by his analogy, if there were 900 rapes of women in new york city in the 60s and now there are only 10 rapes of women in the 60s, not only 10 rapes are we now not to still emphasize how important it is you shouldnt rape women . No, you talk about a systematic you talk about people using the Civil Rights Movement for their advantage. I would guess that you have been in a situation, mr. Riley, just about all of your educational career and professional career where you were either the first or the only black in your area of employment or wherever you were. And so therefore, at the wall street journal they are very happy to have an educated black man like yourself, who espouses theories that generally are not supported of black people. So you have done probably the same thing in your position, your professional life that you are accusing Jesse Jackson and the others of doing. And let me make my final point. Youre talking about a system. The g. I. Bill was affirmative action for white soldiers from world war ii because black people were not allowed to be in the war in the army. The va loan bill was also affirmative action, all you had to do was be a white male, have been in world war ii and you could sign up and go to any college you wanted to and the government would pay for it and then after the economy started to boom and move out west, all the businesses left the urban areas, they raped the cities, left the black people in the cities, all of the people moved to the suburbs, the factories moved to the suburbs, the banks sanctioned by the government, didnt give blacks loans and gave whites loan and refused to hire the blacks redlined the systems where the blacks were with the support of federal government. Ill jump in, a lot on the table and respond to. Yeah, respond to a couple of points. In terms of my personal background, no, i havent accomplished anything this life that other black people didnt accomplish before me, in fact, i was recruited to the wall street journal by a black gentleman who had been a Senior Editor there for a number of years and probably could not have disagreed with me more on my politics at the time. In terms of the g. I. Bill, im not sure what if he has his facts straight there. There are blacks who attended college on the g. I. Bill back in the 50s and 60s. In fact, the gentleman im writing about, thomas full is one of them who attended college on g. I. Bill, many blacks attended and many did. And hes thankful to the g. I. Bill for allowing him. And he as lengthed deindustrialization with the familiar factories in the city. And the factories left and the communities disintegrated. Hes getting the order wrong here. The factories left after the societies had fallen into disrepair. The riots in the 1960s happened first and then the Companies Left these areas. So, you have to get the order right when youre talking about some of these matters and sometimes people dont. Were taking your Text Messages as well. 2027 2027488003. One viewer says that the Police Shootings are down because of the protests and demonstrations. Again, thats not what the record shows. I mentioned new york city earlier. In 1971, i believe there are 314 Police Shootings. 20 years later by 1991 that had fallen by more than half. And it had fallen down to about 100. And then 20 years later again, it had fallen down into the teens. So no, this has been a longstanding trend that pre dates these protests that weve seen in the last few years. This is not something, something new. Police have been use of force has been declining steadily, particularly among minorities. There was a study from harvard roland fryer, he examined a number of Police Shootings in big cities around the countries and said he had expected to find bias. He found no bias. In fact, he found that black suspects and hispanic suspects were less likely than white suspects to be shot at by police. So, no, this is not, i believe, a function of these protests. What has what the protests have done, what they risk doing is forcing police to scale back to stay in their cars and not patrol on foot. To take their time answering these 9 11 calls. If theyre going to have this target on their back, if theyre going to have the politicians and the activists breathing down their neck, its going to affect how they do their job. My fear there is the people harmed the most by this are law abiding blacks in these poor communities, who of course are the majority of the blacks in these poor communities. Theyre the ones who will be harmed because the criminals prey on them first and foremost. Not heading into lilly white suburbs to rob homes. Theyre robbing their neighbors and so to the extent that the police pull back and do less effective policing in these communities, youre hurting the black poor the most and thats what i fear these activists will be doing policing the problem when the problem is criminality. Another text message, mr. Riley, how much criticism do you get from friends and colleagues when they see you on fox news . [laughter] it depends on which friends and colleagues. I have friends of all political persuasions. I have relatives of all political persuasions, but when people see you on tv, theyre more likely to tell you how you look than how you sounded. [laughter] lets go to edward joining us from across the river in jersey city, new jersey. Welcome to in depth on book tv. Good afternoon, thank you very much. Mr. Riley, ill just start off by saying happy holidays to you, rest in peace to your father, that was a very personal story you shared there. Thank you. No problem. I dont have a problem with your view about how the democrats are more than dissatisfying to blacks or theyre like a harmful party in your view to us, but as far as politics go and government, the way forward, i think, for our country and black people specifically, and i am black, i believe in Bernie Sanders, okay . So Bernie Sanders vision for our country, he challenges the Democratic Party so thats me telling you that im 35, im a black male, i live here in new jersey. I am very dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. Theyre not doing enough with wars overseas. Theyre not doing enough with, for instance, why here in new jersey we dont have really any trade schools. Trade schools are private. Why dont we have public trade schools that teach like high schools, welding, trades, electrician, were not doing enough in education. The Democratic Party is not doing enough with getting big money out of our system. I dont like how new jersey, our primaries all the way in june for the president ial election and we also have a cold primary so we have to declare. So thats me giving reasons of my dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and thats fine, but youre not encouraging us to vote for the Republican Party, are you . If you are, then i dont like that, but they dont they dont spend any dollars, mr. Riley, on our communities. Its beneath them, if i can say that one more time, its beneath the Republican Party. The local level states and federal party, they for some reason maybe they dont turn their backs towards us or against us, but they dont even look at us. Lindsey graham doesnt speak to us at all on the federal level. Which one of them who spokes to us. Like i said Bernie Sanders is the way forward. I believe you and owens, your views are very toxic, but youre black and you have the right we all have our right to have our say and suggesting our way forward, but please, the g. O. P. , the g. O. P. s not the answ answer. Well, the fact that that let me respond to this on two levels. Well separate Bernie Sanders for the a second from the rest of this. The caller is right, i think, when he talks about the lack of interest that republicans have shown in the black vote. Now, you could speculate as to why that is, whether its racism or whats driving it. On a very practical level, whats driving it is they dont need this vote to win and politics is about number and time spent going after a constituency you dont have much of a chance of getting is time not spent on people you think you can get. So that could be one explanation right there. Let me stop you on that point. Jack kemp. Thats what i was going to say. And House Speaker paul ryan did try to push. They havent been the only examples. Youve had Steven Goldsmith is another politician who do this. Even Chris Christie when he ran for reelection as governor of new jersey did quite well among black voters, he went into camden and trenton and asked for their vote. The problem with the people we just named is they still remain the exceptions and not the rules. You dont see republican candidates in black neighborhoods at the barbershop or at the gro herb Grocery Store and community center. You dont see them on the black radio or during black television programs. What its allowed is the democr Democratic Candidates to come in and paint them as a complete monster with no pushback. I do think that the republicans ought to do better courting this vote and i certainly blame blacks who have the attitude now, ill vote democrat or ill state home. Two notes on campaign 2020, last month in your column in the wall street journal, black voters have shown little interest in either of the candidates, cory booker of new jersey or Kamala Harris of california. Why . Well, if you had asked me about cory booker and Kamala Harris say, five years ago, i would have had some very positive things to say about both of them. Both of them are democrats, both of them are liberals, but we can start with cory booker. Cory booker was a very educationminded reform mayor before he became a senator. He believed in school choice, he believed in Charter Schools. He was also very tough on crime. He came in with a he hired a very pro, Proactive Police commissioner and was going to model what he was going to do in his city on what giuliani and bloomberg had done in new york. And Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and you can look up youtube videos of her saying theres all yes, there may be racism in the criminal Justice System, but thats not the reason why i have five locks on my door. I mean, she was a very toughminded prosecutor when it came to protecting the rights of those poor black people in those communities, those law abiding black people the targets of many of these criminals. Theyve abandoned theyve abandoned that. Bookers walked back a little bit of the anticharter stuff recently, but by and large they decided they needed to be more progressive to run for president. Thats where the party was so they had to put aside what i would consider very sensible talk and thats my problem with where they are today, versus where they were before. The other thing, the previous speaker mentioned was Bernie Sanders. My essentially my problem with Bernie Sanders is his socialism, which amounts to Wealth Redistribution as a way of helping the poor and helping the black poor in particular. And again, were talking about the Great Society program. If giving if redistributing wealth, passing out checks to poor people solved poverty, we would have solved it a long time ago. It doesnt. What these folks need is the development of Human Capital. They need to learn about Wealth Creation and i think the progressives are too focused on Wealth Redistribution as a focus and its not going to be the solution and bernie is all in on the Wealth Redistribution and thats essentially my problem with his programs. On the campaign, you write about former mayor Michael Bloomberg who apologized for stop and frisk, and you said do we want to create criminals like victims and police like i have problems with Michael Bloomberg, too, and i did when he was mayor of new york city, one of the things i liked about Michael Bloomberg was his stance on policing. He did have the backing of the police. He let them know that. It was basically because he had continued a lot of policies of his predecessor, rudy giuliani, who put a lot more cops on the streets in these communities and by the way. [laughter] people like to talk about the tensions between the police and the black community, but no one calls the police more than black people in this country, which is a funny way of saying you dont like cops. Police are in this community because thats where the 911 calls originate and mayors like bloomberg and giuliani were responding to those calls and i appreciated that. The stop and frisk policy that bloomberg is walking back now or apologizing for, i would argue, saved a lot of lives. If you go back to the early 90s in new york city, you were looking at 2200, 2300 homicides a year in the early 90s, 70 and 80 of them were black people who were being murdered. You fast forward to last year, youre down to a couple hundred. If we had maintained the rate of homicide that we had in the early 1990s, for the next quarter century, do you know how many more dead black people wed have today . I mean, so i was appalled that bloomberg would apologize for a policy that i would argue saved not only black lives, but probably kept a lot of black people out of prison as well and hes walking it back, again, because thats where the party is now and if you want to run in this Democratic Party, you have to talk about policing as the problem and not criminality. Were in our second hour of our in depth conversation with author and columbiaist jason riley, more of your comments and phone calls in a moment. Who is your role model . My role model was my father, first and foremost. You know, no one has really replaced him since then. There are people who have influenced me intellectually throughout the course of my career and among those folks, i would name people like thomas fall, shelby steele, glenn lowery another one, walter williams. These are people i started reading back in college and agreed with what a a lot of what they wrote. And are you at today where you envisioned youd be when you were a student at suny buffalo, dealing with some of the buffalo winters . Thats a good question. I havent had a lot whole lot of jobs since college. I got interested in journalism after joining the school paper. Id read something in the paper, went down to complain and the editor said why dont you join the staff and you can write about this whenever you want. And and thats what got me interested in newspapers. And i did, after id completed that internship, that College Internship at usa today in washington, i knew i wanted to be a journalist, and you know, since months after college, i found myself at the wall street journal and stayed there for more than two decades and continued to write for that paper. I can say that i still look forward to getting out of bed every morning and getting started, whether im going to write a column or work on a book or on a speech or what have you or prepare for interviews on cspan so im still very much enjoying it. Your wife is also a journalist. Who is the toughest editor . [laughter] i dont burd den her with editing it. And going to detroit, michigan, next youre with jason riley. Hello, how are you. I have like three questions, so i guess the first question was, a little while back you said something about i think relative success of black folks during the under jim crow and so all of the i was wondering if you could provide any references or any any comments just to hello . I always had the impression. Sure. Yeah, what i was talking about there is, for instance, between 1940 and 1960 the black poverty rate in america fell by 40 Percentage Points in this country. So youre talking 40 decline before Civil Rights Act of 64, Voting Rights act much of 1965. In those decades alone black households income doubled in this country, thats prior, and credit for the black incomes. If you look 1930 and 1970, you had the number of blacks entering skilled professions, so social workers, teachers, lawyers, and doctors, the number of blacks entering the middle class professions quadrupled during this period. So, again, and the point here is what was going on in the rest of the country during this period. I would argue that the folks that were making those gains were experiencing a great deal more racism in American Society than what we have today. And yet, it was not able to stop them. And the question then begins, what did stop . What happened . Why did we see a slowdown in these gains or reversal in some cases, and what was happening . And i would argue, as i did in please stop helping us that the government intervention, interventionist policies or expansions of the Great Society programs is one thing that got in the way. We started to see the disintegration of that black family and we started to see all kinds of other government efforts to help blacks that sort of interfered with the selfdevelopment that was taking place in this country. And we saw this political shift in the civil rights arena. We saw the shift from a focus on the development of that Human Capital that we saw in the, say, the king era, to a focus on electing black officials and that became the primary focus and i think that, too, proved problematic in the long run. Were taking your emails as well at book tv cspan. Org. You mentioned dr. Martin luther king, would he be satisfied with where we are today 50 years after his assassination . No, i dont think that hed be satisfied. I mean, i think hed be would he say we made progress . Of could,we made progress, we had a black president and could never imagine having a twice elected black president , as well as senators and congressmen and mayors and governors and all the rest. So, on a certain level, certainly, he would be proud of the progress, but in terms of the black poor, theres been theres just still quite a bit of work to do there among the black poor in this country. A situation that has in some ways regressed since the days of king. And its really, its really sad, i think. But that is where we are and i think he would thats where he would be most disappointed. This is an email from pat who is from new jersey, does the voting act requirement for a majority, minority districts need to be kept in place . I dont think so. I think that people have been willing to cross racial lines to vote for some time. But the other problem with keeping it in place, i think it fuels polarization because you get candidates that dont need to make any appeals outside the racial or ethnic group. And i think that only fuels polarization and probably hurt candidates who aspire to run statewide at some point. Of course, with the Congressional District youre just running in that one area, but if you want to be a senator, if you want to be a governor, and youve spent all your time only making these narrow appeals to a Certain Group and then you want to run statewide, thats a much more difficult leap to make. So, i think it puts in place reverse incentives and i think it ignores the fact that weve come a long way in terms of the willingness of whites, say, to vote for black candidates. This is from a viewer in los angeles, saline, with a simple question. Who is responsible for racism in our country and why . I dont think that any one individual is responsible for racism. Racism predates america. Its not about one group being responsible for perpetuating it or one group being able to end it. Like i said, it predates all of us and i believe it will still be here when im long gone. I think its just part of the tragedy of human nature. Well go to ashland, virginia, and hugh, you are next. Welcome to book tv. Hi, thank you so much. I really appreciate mr. Riley stating facts and i just want to check a statement. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. So the callers that like to bash him, when all hes doing is stating facts should really ponder that. Im a whistleblower. I was written up in the front page, wall street Journal Articles back in 1983 which triggered an investigation that eventually led to the resignation of jim wright from speaker of the house and thats all on factual information. The article was authored by a jonathan quitney. Im not aware if hes aware of who he was i dont know, i dont know him. With him to bring forward solutions, thats what we should be focused on. The people of the greatest asset of any country, lets get it together and stop the racial baloney. We have Indigenous People on concentration camp reservations that need help, too. It starts with stopping arguments and bringing forth solutions. Thank you. Thank you for the call. I didnt hear a question in there, but, i thank him for the call as well. From the book let them in, you write about an individual by the time of john panton. Who is he . John panton was he died recently an eye doctor from michigan who also was a political activist. He started out as an environmental activist, places like sierra club. He then moved into reproductive rights and started maybe one of the first, or one of the first, if not the first planned parenthood in michigan and was unsatisfied with and this was part of his environmentali environmentalism, worked in tandem with his concern about population growth in the u. S. He was concerned there were too many people and this was detrimental to nature, to the ecology, to the earth and so forth, which explains his interest in abortion, but also, explains his interest in immigration ultimately, that america was becoming overpopulated with immigrants. And so he started any number of organizations to fight for lower levels of immigration and they expanded quite rapidly and some of them have become pretty popular. Thayer fair is one of them, i think its the federation for immigration reform. Center for Immigration Studies is another one and the reason i wrote about it in the book is because Many Republican restrictionists have joined a common cause with these panton organizations over the years and even though on many but for different reasons. So you had people who got in bed together, even though they came from very different places ideologically, they joined in forces to reduce immigration and what i was trying explain is the history of some of these groups in the book because i think there are Many Republicans who didnt realize who they were, who they were in bed with. Lets talk about the Republican Party in the first two years of the trump administration, donald trump as a candidate used immigration as a key issue in his campaign and brought it up in 2018 when they ultimately lost control of the house of representatives. They had the white house, the house and the senate and two years to get something on an issue that something that republicans ran on. What happened . I think he ran into the same problem that obama ran into when he controlled or his party controlled all three branches for his first two years in office. And its a complicated issue. And even within the party, within each party there are different factions with different beliefs on immigration. Clearly most republicans are not with the president when it comes to some of his more extreme views. More recently, hes weve had the dreamer issue, kids who or people brought here to the country illegally as children and what to do about them. And obama had passed something through executive action. Trump wanted to undo it. A majority of republicans, not just americans, about you large majority of republicans want to give amnesty to the dreamers and not deport them. So, there you have an issue where trump is at odds with the members of his own party. A lot of his members of his party arent on board with expanding the border wall to the extent that trump wants to do it. So, thats the reason. Its a complicated issue and its hard to get even all of one party to act in agreement on something, let alone something bipartisan done. And you took the president to task on that issue . Oh, on a number of issues. I mean, one of the i was not a trump supporter. Mostly on grounds of his temperament and whether he was fit for the job, but also on some of the policy issues and one was immigration and another waun one was trade and those are issues i disagreed with him on. Other issues i agreed with him on, awritten approval, i like his education policies, betsy devos, school of choice, vouchers, Charter Schools and tax credits and the rest and shes spent her professional life supporting those causes and i like the fact that trump appointed her and he, too is for education choice. When people talk about where i see this country going or where i see black america headed Going Forward, i think its all going to come down to getting a decent education for kids in these poor communities. And its going to be at the root, the root of everything, and i have no faith that the tradition l a traditional schools in this country can do that because i dont believe that theyre acting primarily in the interest of the children these days. I think theyre acting primarily in the interest of the adults, that Public Education has become a jobs Program First and foremost, not an Education Program and i think the best way to fix that is it to give it some competition. Whether its alternative public systems like public Charter Schools, or vouchers that allow people to take their kids out of schools and send them to private school or parochial schools. But i think the Public Education system needs competition, its not going to reform from within. So for me, trump has been a mixed bag. I dont reflexively criticize him reflexively praise him. A reminder you can see listen to this and other programs on the cspan radio app. Jim, you are next, good afternoon. Thank you very much for taking my call. Mr. Riley, where i live theres a lot of poverty, rural, primarily overwhelmingly white. A lot of people in Current County are immigration from the dust bowl area in the 1930s. And there seems to me as i look at systemic poverty, its been here for generations now. Is there a fundamental difference, do you think, between what i see in certain communities and black poverty versus white poverty . And i also have seen examples of the police, the sheriffs basically, you know its not so much color, its poverty, thats why people are discriminated against to a very large extent, i think, at least where i live. So as i say, what do you see as a difference, similarities, any fundamentals there, thank you. Jim, thank you. I dont see fundamentally a lot of difference. I think the same Human Capital will lift blacks and whites alike out of poverty. Authors more resent like jd vance have written movingly about the situation in white america. I think its received less attention because the white poor are a smaller percentage of whites than the black poor are of blacks, but at a fundamental level, no, i dont see any difference in how you go about helping these groups or what they need to do to change their situation. In the book, please stop helping us you write that one of the reasons investment has been so meager, black politicians for themselves and not for the that seems like a generallization. Perhaps, but i would argue there are enough examples to make it relatively accurate generallization. Politicians act in the interest of getting reelected, no matter what color they are. So ill give you an example. President obama comes into office and blacks overwhelmingly voted to put him there. One issue that polls very well in the black community and long has, is school of choice. Both Charter Schools and voucher programs have polled very well among blacks, far ahead of where they polled among whites and other groups, in fact. One of the first things obama tries to do as president is shut down the d. C. Voucher program which is disproportionately helping blacks. Why would he do this . Why would the first black president take an issue that is overwhelmingly popular among blacks and try and shut down the d. C. Voucher program . Because now hes president and part of the reason hes president is that the Teachers Unions helped make him president , a special interest group, and they dont like School Vouchers because many of the schools where the vouchers are used are not unionized so they want these kids in traditional Public Schools, not in voucher programs. So obamas got to make a decision, do i act in the interest of the special interest that helped elect me or my fellow blacks . And he made his choice. And i think other politicians have made faced with the sim dilemma have made a similar choice. And thats what i mean about looking to politicians to address some of those basic needs in the black community. The politicians have their own political interests to be preoccupied with and they are not always going to align with the interest of the black poor in the case of black politicians. Our next caller from connecticut. Charles. Good afternoon, welcome to the conversation. Hi, thanks for taking my call. Mr. Riley, did you say that theres a silent majority within the black middle class . And if you think so, how would you describe it . Well, theres an interesting book, an excellent book written by a political scientist at cuny, City University of new york called black silent majority and he makes the argument that the black political elites have not always acted in the interest of the black poor, even the majority of blacks and i think he makes a pretty strong a pretty strong argument. If you take Something Like crime, polls will tell you when pollsters ask people in the black Community Whether the criminal Justice System is too easy on criminals or too hard on them, the black general public tells pollsters that the criminal Justice System goes too easy on criminals. Thats not what you youre going to hear coming out of the mouths of black politicians or black civil Rights Groups or activists. Thats what your average black person on the street is going to tell you. I just mentioned the example of education where the interest of black elites differ from the interests of average blacks and that goes all the way back to the days of buffing when the naacp supported it, but most blacks did not support busing. Theres a long history here of what will advance someones political career versus what the black community actually wants and what a lot of people on the black left are counting on and this is going that an earlier caller mentioned, is that blacks will vote democrats or they will stay home, but they do not hear that this black constituent will go vote for a republican and thats one thing they can count on not happening and thats an example of when which is often said that the democrats take the black vote for granted, thats what theyre talking about there. And you know, one way to fix that would be for the republicans to make a play for this vote and that way blacks could use our twoparty system the way other groups in america use the two party system, to get what they want. But right now, you dont see a lot of that happening in black america. Have you looked at the divorce rate among black men versus poor white men and is it the same, similar, disproportionately different . Do you know where we were maybe in the 1960s and where we are today . I dont know those numbers off the top of my head. If i had to guess, i just i dont know. I dont know the numbers. I would i dont want to speculate on that. But i ask the question because to go back to your earlier point, is that the roots of poverty are those who grew up in single parent homes and i often wonder why the women get the children and not the men . Is that just part of society . Youre smiling a little bit. Yeah, i mean thats the socialologists and others that have looked at this i think say that thats in the welfare, thats in the best interest of the child. But i mean, that would be my guess. But, yes, family breakdown, when you control for family breakdown, you often get very, very different results. Ill give you an example i came across recently. There was a study done by a political scientist at university of virginia that was looking at School Suspension rates broken down by race among kids and he found that when you controlled for broken families, whites were actually suspended at higher rates than blacks in these schools which is a very interesting finding because, again, this is one issue where liberal activists have looked at racial disparaities and School Suspensions and automatically attributed it to racism and here we have someone who looks at it lets control for home environment and you get a different outcome. And with the book, let me put numbers on table. Washington study 2012, citing census data among blacks nearly 5 million children, 54 live with only their mother, just 12 of poor black households have two parents present compared to 41 of poor hispanic households where there are two parents in their families. Yeah, its gets back to attitudes towards marriage, attitudes towards child rearing and again, this is all postGreat Society in terms of trends. This is not what we were seeing prior to that. And it matters, the Nuclear Family matters and its, you know, become almost taboo to say that out loud, that this matters. And when you have a child coming from an intact family, all kinds of life outcomes improve for that child. The chances of them getting involved with criminal Justice System, the chances of them becoming teenage parents, the chances of them graduating from school, all increase, you know, go in the right direction and yet, we dont often have honest discussions about the importance of the Nuclear Family. Well go to norwalk, connecticut, maurice youre next with jason riley, go ahead, please. Yes, good morning. Good afternoon and thank you so much for this dialog that you guys are all having here. This is right up my alley. Im an africanamerican, ill be 40 very soon. I was a socialology student back in like 1998. I grew up myself in the criminal Justice System. I have so much on my mind right now that i want to share with you, be patient with me and let me get this out. So i have christian values, i have christian views and i was raised to believe and respect authority, you know, in the bible it says god put them in the place for a reason and theyre appointed by, you know, god. So were supposed to respect them. I voted for obama, i became interested in politics for the first time after i cleaned up my record and got off probation and parole and started reintegrated back into society and working and just getting back to my beginnings of what i wanted to do when i was a kid, you know, those dreams and visions before i got thrown off and distracted by, you know, everything that black men face out here, young black teenagers, you know, education was really big, but one thing that really sustained me growing up through the Justice System and through gangs and through everything that the black, you know, plight of the black man, is my education. Education my mom, she was an educator and im not from norwalk, connecticut, im norwalk, california, on the west coast, make that correction. My mom was an educator for the long beach district, very, very wellknown and very strict and always came home and instilled that in me with my education and my dad he worked for Mcdonald Douglas in the Aircraft Aerospace industries in the 60s when they were rolling out the md11s and i is a you the work ethic from my father as a black man, you know, but when i went to school, you know i had my own struggles at school. My teachers, you know, it was really hard to get the attention that i needed, you know, in school so i had to figure it out on my own. I was kind after class clown and always want to be seen and want to be heard and do things for attention because i thought i needed it, i a was creative and artistic and an aspiring journalist myself. Fast forward to today i want to say that the black community is very beautiful and we contribute very much to society and weve come so far and ive heard it all and seen it all as far as our past and everything what our ancestors did to get, to pave the way for where we are today and its just a beautiful inning, where we contribute to society and i see poverty, i see crime, but education like you gentlemen mentioned earlier is very key and teachers need to pay more attention to the black students and like the gentleman said earlier trump is a mixed bag. Ive seen him tackle and confront many viable issues in the black community, the white, asian, mexican, every community, every issue that past president s didnt get a chance to get to i see him confront that and ive always been, you know, an underdog, the black community has always been the underdog ourselves, so i believe in trump and like what hes doing and give him props and pat on the back for staying strong through all the adversity with the impeachment inquiries and everything. So my question is, to the gentleman on here is from your perspective as an intellectual black man i really admire and respect the way you speak and how articulate you are, i admire that because we dont get to see that much of that here. So i just want to know from your perspective as a black man, as a black vote for the black community, do you honestly believe that donald trump has our best interests at heart . And do you think that we should, as a black race im a democrat. The table, thank you by the way for sharing your story and joining in on the conversation. How do you answer that . I think donald trump has Donald Trumps interest in mind frankly and i think donald trump always has Donald Trumps best interest in mind. Now the quest the question is whether that matters in terms of black progress in this country. Can a president who doesnt necessarily have the interest of blacks, or is indifferent, facilitate black upward mobility to his policies . And i think theres no doubt that that is true. And i would point to the advances that blacks have made under previous administrations. When the person in the white house was indifferent to what was going on in black america and we saw the gains that i cited earlier in the first half of the 20th century. So blacks can prosper under donald trump, i have no doubt about that, but it doesnt necessarily mean its because he has the best interests in mind. Host vital question, what did you hear from more recent . What was your take away from his story . Guest glad he seems to turn his life around. Thats very hard today. And he seemed to think that education had a lot to do with it, that he didnt take it seriously as heer should have wn he was younger and out he understands how important it is. I would agree with that. Its why its so painful to listen to black Civil Rights Organizations and some of these politicians running for president turn their back on Charter Schools, which have just a tremendous record of success, particularly in helping low income, or, innercity blacks. We have example after example after example of kids in schools that are 90 plus black, all free and reduced lunch in terms of income. Testing, hitting get out of the park, outscoring kids in the lowliest white suburbs. And the idea that we would not be replicating these education models is completely absurd to me. And here you have a Bernie Sanders and naacp and Elizabeth Warren saying they want a moratorium on Charter Schools that are producing these kinds of results in the black inner cities. And its got i think is a testament to how important education is ity certainly was n my case and the idea that, there is a connection in these inner cities between the high dropout rates and the poor test scores and all the other social ills that are going on in these places in these communities. There is a connection. Our jails and prisons are not full of College Graduate or Even High School graduates. It really pains me when i watch people attack School Reform the way i hear some of these attacks to the. Host our next caller from washington state. Norm, you have been patient. Good afternoon. You. A lot of us remember the quote, he talked about leaders appealing to the angels of our Higher Nature and it seems that the current occupant in 1600 pennsylvania avenue right away coming down the escalator talking about immigrants coming down talking about immigrants as criminals and rapists and therefore would not be fair to him, you know, obviously example of blatant racism, so its obvious that some politicians perhaps including the president are not appealing to the angels of our Higher Nature on the issue of immigration among other things. So the question that sort of went through my mind, hes got all of the evangelicals so called, 81 i believe that support him and im wondering, because they have to know the statements of jesus, among others, where its the opposite of a christian viewpoint, so im wondering, jason, have you ever whats your opinion on that about how people claim to be christians can back a political leader that is so blatantly racist and thats my question. Well, i think an evangelical would turn around and point to a reverend Jesse Jackson and reverend a al jackson about abortion, both of them. So both sides play this game and obviously whats going on is that theyre voting on other issues and if you ask people in the evangelical community why they support this this president despite his, all of the personal, all of the baggage that comes along with that, theyll talk about his prolife stance, theyll talk about the judges hes appointed and theyll say, those are the litmus test that ive used and im going to let Everything Else go because ive decided this is this is whats most important to me and all voters do that. Youre not going to get a candidate that likes everything you like to the degree that you like it and youre going to pick and choose your issues and vote on those. Send text message 202 2022008. Recent interview with mike wallace in which he interviewed Morgan Freeman and what can stop racism and Morgan Freeman said stop talking about it. [laughter] your reaction to that . Well, i agree with that to some extentt and its to this extent that that, again, for the the civil rights industry that i mentioned earlier if not racket, keeping race front and center is good for business and it means that it gets dragged into discussions where it doesnt really belong or as best a side issue and maybe thats what Morgan Freedman was getting at that that everything isnt about race and racism and yet that seems to be the direction we are tilting in too often these days. Anthony in york, welcome to the conversation. Hello. Yes, go ahead, please. Hello. Yes. Ive seen mr. Riley several times over the last few years, i can tell hes a conservative. He knows quite well the statistics hes given as he said earlier in his interview pretending to the blacks who have entered professions and professional schools and graduate schools, increased tremendously from late 60s intoe now, has not been expanded as much during the previous period through early 60s and 50s, made progress but nothing compared but whatever statistics hes quoting, conservative racist groups, as it relates to black politicians, im one of them, we dont serve the Community Well but many who do and when you ask them, statement he made, those of us involved in political know hes conservative, what he says about schools, many Teachers Union dont support Charter Schools and they will put unions and most of them dont have the same kind of standard that the Public Schools but i respect conservative views but in reference to affirmative action and increasingly black professional life and graduate school, et cetera, hes totally wrong and he knows thats not true, thank you very much. Anthony in pennsylvania, your response. Well, like i said before, the track record of affirmative action is not something that we need to speculate about, i mentioned the situation in california system on what happened after racial preferences ended but you could point to florida and texas and see the same results after they also passed similar policies were put in place. In terms of the data on what was going on in the first half of the 20th century, thats census data, thats government data, thats notry coming from any quote, unquote, conservative organization, thats looking at data thats widely available to anyone who cares to look. Again, its not very well known and i understand why its not very well known but c that doest mean its not true, the rate at which blacks were increasing levels of education, the rate at which blacks were entering middleclass professions, the rate of which blacks were leaving poverty, all of those rates were far higher in the period prior to the 1960s than they were in the decades immediately following the 1960s. And before affirmative action policies were put in place, but in terms of Higher Education, we have particularly strong data sets to show what is going on here, you know, harvard was recently taken to task by a group of asian students whoec sd because they said that harvard was putting in place quotas on who could enter the school, so we have tons of data on the rakes races of people who have entered and so forth. Affirmative action is harmful in another way as well. I mean, you can you can talk about the equal protection clause and whether it makes sense to be picking and choosing favored groups in increasingly Plural Society or you could say does it work, just does it work asas intended, have we experiend what the proponents said we would experience if we put these policies in place, there was a study done at mit some years ago about blacks who had been admitted to that school, highly selective schools and blacks had been admitted to mit had scored in top 10 on the math portion of the sat of all kids in the country, youre talking about some very smart black kids but they were in the bottom 10 among their peers at mit and as a result more of them were dropping out or switch to go easier majors and so forth. You had taken some extremely smart black kids and set them up to fail, kids who would be hitting it out of the park at less selective institutions were struggling at mit because mit we wanted to make its freshmen class look like america regardless whether kids were going to graduate, harmful, harmful byproducts that nobody foresaw and some didnt and some did. Its an interesting reading to look at articles, by and large its been accepted by universal good, its made blacks better off and so forth but that is just not simply the track record. Well, to that point, one person that you write a lot is daniel patrick, before he became a u. S. Senator from new york, workeded in the nixon and before thatna in the johnson administration, part of the Great Society, whats his legacy . Well, one of his legacies, he wore several different hats, later became a senator is the socalled report that he released in the 1960s about the black family and the trends that he saw in their situation and he was looking at increases and he said this will not bode well in terms of Going Forward with the communities, lower workforce participation and so forth and he came under tremendous amount of attacks for for his conclusions, many of which by the way were based on the work of black associatists in sociologists and was consensus view of more people that looked at this and he became the face of it and he was tacked as a racist and as someone who was blaming the victim, you have to remember at the time the dawn they were trying to pass the Civil Rights Act and he was getting in the way, he was a distraction and what ended up happening is the way he was treated did not go unnoticed by socialists, political scientists, anyone else who wels wanted to look ino the situation, they were scared off for many years, didnt make professional sense to go digging around here called a racist and Everything Else. There was a long period of neglect in the area, more recently youve had sociologists look into it, Orlando Patterson enhave looked at this and they said, you know, we have to talk about this culture stuff, its the elephant in the room, we cant talk about all of the disparities that are going on, all of the Racial Disparity that is we see going on in American Society today without talking about culture and its ridiculous to even try doing this, yes, it plays a role in the outcomes and we need to talk about it but for decades many sociologists pretty much steered clear of this area and i think it was to the detriment of of the people that needed the most help, thats the black poor. The books of jason riley including the following, please stop helping us, how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed, also let them in the case for open borders and false black power. Jim is next, martinez, california, go ahead, please. Yes, sir. Hello, jason, i want to follow up on a comment you made just a little bit earlier, my understanding regarding the dreamers was that President Trump did, in fact, allow about 800,000 to become permanent residents or citizens but he tied it to also them building the wall, to prevent uncontrolled border crossings, he didnt just cancel out president obamas executive order but he actually was trying to make it even more so but also make it a law that go through congress and be more permanent and not temporary, i am just wondering, if you can be easier on President Trump because thats the way i see it and im a im a new citizen here, that means i came and got educated here in college and i got naturalized, so to me as an immigrant i dont see this uncontrolled border crossings, million a year, its actually sort of affecting the culture and so i thought if tieing the wall to allowing dreamers to stay didnt seem unreasonable so why thats not a good thing . Thank you. Jim, thank you. Well, yes, the president was trying to tie the fate of the dreamers to funding for his wall, the democrats considered this a poison pill because they were not going to compromise on funding the wallto and the president knew that that they werent going to budge on that issue or he should have known that they werent going to budge on that issue, whether or not it was a goodfaith proposal, who knows, but that was what he was was attempting to do. The the problem is that President Trump could do this as a standalone issue if he wanted to and i think hed have enough democratic support to get this to get this done. I think it would help him politically as well given that theres such bipartisan support for doing something about the dreamers and taking them taking them out of this limbo. The president brings an interesting mind set to the topic of immigration which is why it was explaining the statistics in terms of economic outcomes in america notwithstanding the fact that we have so many people here illegally. The president has sees this as zerosome game and immigrant taking a job means one fewer job for you and me which is most economists its now how labor markets work in this country but that is the mind set that that President Trump brings to this issue, the caller also mentioned the every new wave of immigrant gets the same reaction, even predates america, Benjamin Franklin was complaining about too many germans coming to pennsylvania in the mid1700s and he said they will never know our language, they are going to germfy us and this is an old, old concern and german immigration, germans were coming in at mucher higher rate than mexicans and much smaller than mexicans would be years later and the same with irish m and my other groups. This is a time honored concern and its very difficult to get things doneon on immigration in this country and you couple that with what you had in the obama years whichit was slow economic growth, he inherited this recession from george w. Bush that he was dealing with through most of his presidency, toxic blame and now that weve come out of the recession, now that we have seen the growth, now that we have seen the increase in wages and so forth without a wall and without the deportation of all of the people illegally it makes you wonder whether they were in fact, the problem to begin with and and but if you bring them the mine set that trump into this, coupled that its a winning issue whether its true, rally after rally railing against illegal immigration he thinks gins up his base and helps at the polls, i dont expect him to change his tune no matter how many facts are put before him. Text message from paul in new jersey saying what will it take for democrats enslaved for black democrats enslaved in the plantation which is upward obbility to move to the 1 , in other words, to get to the wealthy . What will for black democrats to leave the plantation, upward mobility to reach 1 . Well, i think, again, if if if republicans want to want blacks to stop voting in such high percentages for democrats, they need to go make a play for that vote, for whatever reason, you are still something of a republican outlier when you venture into an inner city and and active i will go after the black vote and thats thats got to change if you expect black voting to change. Youre in the case. Mine is more like comments. I can understand why the afro americans made progress from after 1945 because of the programs of, of fdr and everyboy improved. If you look back, i want his opinion on republican ideology versus democrats ideology in regards to all kinds of rights not just, not just civil rights or afro american rights or black rights but womens rights, workers rights, union rights, genderut rights, sexual rights, all the way around, now with lbj that really got a bunch of old white guys to vote for the civil rights law, you have to remember thats what happened and at that point when the south sow that the Democratic Party was going towards civil rights they all went republican because they were segregationists, so i guess my idea that if you look at who has been supporting rights for everybody including afro americans its been the Democratic Party all along and the republicans resign themselves of just trying to buy for the white vote at no matter what cost it does to other people. Now, i dont know if peripheral economics that trump, i have not improved economically and i dont think many other people in middle class have. We are short on time, you begin your book, please stop helping us by remembering what Lyndon Johnson spoke to the class of 1965 at Howard University in washington, d. C. Yes, yes, and he he it was an argument for affirmative action for preferences that he made in that speech, give people equal rights and you have to give them special rights because of whatal blacks had gone throuh in the past and thats what he attempted to do and 50 years of trying to give special rights wo groups and you look at the Racial Disparities that persist and you have to wonder if these efforts had been counter counterproductive. Do i want to correct something the previous caller made about everyone did better in the post war period and post new deal, hes right. Post people did do better but not at the same rates, in other words, black incomes and black education levels rose not only in absolute terms but also relative to white incomes and white education levels and so forth, into other words, blacks were closing the gap, they werent just making gains in absolute terms and thats an important distinction so, yes, when thent economy was doing wel and the post war period all votes didhe rise but some rose highers than others and blacks were made significant progress in catching up or making significant progress and catching up, the trends would later slow down and in some cases reverseow course. Linda, you will get the last word on this conversation joining us from germantown, maryland. Hi, thank you for taking my call, i agree with mr. Riley, we were just talking about the gains that blacks made during the 50s, post world war ii period, i grew up in baltimore in a place called cherry hill, the only planned community that the federal government built and i wrote a book about, cherry hillai successfully raising children in jim crow baltimore, mr. Riley state that is he feels that the johnson, the johnson programs killed our progress but i want him to comment but how did benign neglect and the reagan budget cuts affect our progress. Linda, thank you. Well, im having trouble but she said what what slowed the progress . Benign progress. Benign neglect on the part of i dont think it was benign neglect, i dont think the great societies programs can be called benign neglect, these were huge government expansions, we spent trillions of dollars since 1960s on antipoverty programs, literally trillions of dollars, the war on poverty, housing programs and so forth, i think what this shows is are the limits of government, theres only so much that the government can do and and we also know what it cant do. If you take away good policing and if you take away good schools and if you take away stable homes, theres nothing the government can do to replace those things. So let me take the other side of the title, how can blacks succeed today . I think two things need to happen, one we need to have honest conversations about the problems that weas face, we need to talk about black crime rates, for example, when we are talking about black incarceration rates. Basic things like that need to take place, simply honest conversations of what the studies say and c the importance of outcomes later in life and so forth, secondly what i want from the government is simply to stop doing things we know dont work, affirmative action in terms of Higher Education is not working based on the track record of affirmative action, these antipoverty programs that disincentives work means that a group will not develop work ethic to get out of poverty and to stay out of poverty. Dont keep kids trapped in schools that are failing them, let them attend schools when we know a model has been successful in teaching the kids from the most difficult background, let those models proliferate, dont put a moratorium on them. Its more of what the government should stop doing than what it should startp doing, but in ters of the commentary and the intellectuals and the academics and the rest, lets just have some honest, honest conversations about whats actually happening out there and what are the causes and what are not the causes. We have half minute left, two final questions, what are you reading now, what are your favorite books . I like biographies, the biography by ron of rockefeller comes to mind, titan was the book i really enjoyed because it showed not only what how wealthy rockefeller became but how much he improved American Society in the process whether it was building black schools or or making things look cheap so everyone can enjoy them an not just the rich and you didnt have to stop working when the sun went down at night. Ind really enjoyed the History Lesson i got out of that in addition to learning a lot about rockefeller himself. A lot of the books im reading nowadays are for the research for my intellectual biography of tom sole, thats taking up a lot of my time, but the rockefeller book comes to mind, im also reading a book called the warmth by isabel wilkinson, former new york city reporter who wrote about black migration out of the south, my wife recommended it, i just started that one. Im enjoying it so far. If viewers want to follow you on social media, what can they do so . Im on twitter at jasonriley jasonrileywjs. Jason riley joining us on book tv indepth, we thank you for the conversation. Thank you. You are watching a special edition of booktv airing now green week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus outbreak. Tonight we focus on history. Enjoy booktv now and over the weekend on cspan2. Television has changed since cspan began 41 years ago but our Mission Continues to provide an unfiltered view of government. 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