Who say im cheering you on and you have the detractors, what is he talking about . Left by now to ur. We understand that you sit on the wall street Journal Editorial Board and you are also a contributor at fox news and you are an independent, correct . Where did you get your ideas . How did you start out this way . Did happen all of a sudden or did someone help shape your ideas . Guest i think it was, it happened gradually probably starting in my late teens. I was not very politically aware and as a young teenager didnt live in a particularly political household. We didnt sit around discussing politics and my family either my immediate family or my extended family. But in school through various social studies or courses of that kind you are required to report on Current Events or read the newspaper and i started doing so. But really in college i think i started reading authors like tom ball and Shelby Steele and what they said made a lot of sense. I like the fact that they brought data to the discussion. They were just shooting from the hip. Speaking from experiences in many cases with people like Shelby Steele. That was really it. It was really more selfdiscovery than an individual i would say trying to take me and show me the way or put me in one direction. Host where did you go to college . Guest i attended the State University of new york in buffalo and i was bored and raised in buffalo. Host talk to me about your influences. Your dad and you come from a divorce household. The your mother and your father were nearby. Talk to me about that and as it relates he said something before we started as a relay to present a bomb and how he talks about fathers if he didnt see his father is much. Guest i grew up in not only a home where my father had a huge amount of influence even though he didnt live with us, my parents were divorced when i was very young. My father had visitation rights three, four days a week and most weekends and holidays is addressed. He had a presence in my Life CoachingLittle Little League and that sort of thing but i also have extended family followed strong and tact families. It was quite common. Everywhere i looked whether its my church, my extended family, i saw a black man all around me that word to work just in suits and ties, spoke proper english, didnt swear, didnt drink to excess. It was just the norm. I had too many role models to count but my father was very much part of that. My mother despite the divorce always appreciated that aspect of him that he stood around. He was around for his kids and his grandkids. Host so since you have something that unfortunately many young men, to include president obama, did not have what is the issue that you have with the president when it comes to him talking about black fathers or are you on board with him . Guest i love to hear him speak like that and i wish he would do it more often. The point i was making is the flak he catches on the last from black intellectuals in particular when he says these things. He is accused of talking down, condescending, the uppity sort of phrase comes to mind. Its more about airing dirty laundry. Its the same arguments that racist conservatives make about blacks. Talking about culture and culture as the real culprit in a lot of what ails the black underclass today is quite taboo among blacks. Those are fighting words and i think one of the reasons the president doesnt talk about it more often is because he catches so much flack when he does. But i think he is dead on when it comes to these issues. And in particular father had. The influence of a father when it comes to a child staying out of trouble with the law, staying off drugs, finishing school, getting married before they have children. Host its powerful. Guest its extremely powerful and that is not just shown anecdotally. There is hard social science Empirical Data backing that up so i wish him all the best and i wish he would talk about it a lot more. Host we are talking about a lot of issues and pretty much we are talking about race. Do you believe at this time there is racism in this country . Guest of course there is racism in this country and i expect that i will not live to see a time when there isnt racism in the country but the question isnt whether racism exists but where racism is a barrier to black progress in this country. When i look back to what blacks achieved when racism was much more open and avert an even legal its hard for me to draw a connection between racism and 70 out of wedlock birthrates in the black community. Or doubledigit Unemployment Rates in the black community. Given that in previous times when blacks face more obstacles in this country we have Better Outcomes in both of those categories. Host please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed, jason riley. When you are on fox news or when you are writing your columns for the wall street journal do you include this kind of conversation or dialogue dialogue thats in dialogue thats in the book . Guest sure, i mean i do commentary on television on all types of topics most of them not having to do with race but one race does come out i say this type of thing. Ive written this book and in fact thats where i set them first in on the pages the wall street journal or the publications over the years or on television over the years. Ive been doing Television Commentary for a dozen years now so their opportunities to speak about these matters and i try to take advantage of them. Host what has been a response from civil rights leaders to some of us. You have touched third rails rails on their way and you backed me up with your facts sender and not by what has the response been . Guest theres a lot of namecalling and a lot of that i think childishness. Unfortunately what you dont get is a lot of engagement of the ideas. Instead you are put on the couch. You have seen this happen with clarence thomas. Justice scalia is wrong on a number of issues if you are a liberal but clarence, susan just wrong. He is a sellout. Hes got psychological problems. You get a lot of that. Black conservatives get psychoanalyzed. Host they do. Allen west. Guest thats what the reaction typically has been. Now that is a reaction usually coming from black when i engage average blacks who arent in the business of punditry or journalism or politics i get quite a different reaction. Its just common sense of course. Who thinks differently . So there is this disconnect between your Naacp National urban leg and rankandfile blacks. I think they are wide differences and its unfortunate to me that many in the media continued to run to the Jesse Jacksons and the al sharpton to speak on behalf of black swan over the past decades the interest of the Jesse Jacksons and al sharptons has divert widely from what the black underclass in particular in terms of public policy. Host before we go to break and after a comeback to break we will talk about more of these third rail issues that you dare to touch in this book that doesnt bother you, you are a black man, does it bother you when you hear the black Community Rise up against you for what you say . Guest well i havent seen now. I think i would be a little melodramatic. Host you said they called you names. Guest well i dont like to be called names, no one likes that. I believe these things need to be said. I dont think liberals and the policies they have put forward have helped the black underclass. I think they are not just not helping, think in many cases and when we are talking about affirmative action earlier they are harming. They are doing more harm than good. I think someone needs to point that out and thats what motivates me. And yes there will be some namecalling but if you believe that what you are saying needs to be said and is a positive contribution to the debate and that is an important debate, namecalling is something you can put up with. Host jason l. Oreilly, please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed. We will be back with this hot conversation in a moment. Host jason l. Oreilly please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed. We talked about the third rails. You are touching the third rail in the conclusion of this book when it comes to president obamas address to the nation the surprise announcement of her speech to the nation friday is almost a week later after the George Zimmerman verdict and then saying you touch the third rail. For whatever reason i happen to be in florida that night. I was landing in Orlando Florida tonight that the George Zimmerman verdict came down. Across the airport and across the state of florida and a week later almost president obama came to the Briefing Room to the surprise of us in the press corps and he spoke from the heart. He knew about racial profiling and things of that nature and you taken to task for that. Talk to me about that. Guest in terms of avert itself is in clear to me the jury had his instructions on what it could take into account what occurred in. Namely it didnt matter what the scenario was in terms of who was filing to what the police told the dispatcher told zimmerman to do or not to do. What mattered in terms of what the jury was told to take into consideration was whether he felt his life was in danger when he pulled the trigger. Host guest but what i took to task i took up residence task over where the various debates he wanted to drag into the discussion weather was gun control or racial profiling or the perception of young black men in this country and how he wanted to talk about that. To me, i think we should have a conversation about how young black men are perceived but they cant divorce that conversation from black behavior. These perceptions are coming out of nowhere. I dont think we can talk about racial profiling without talking about black criminality and thats not a conversation many on the left want to do. There was a law professor that wrote the book that i talk about in my book called the new jim crow, where she is at pains really to ever bring up black crime statistics. She complains at length about black incarceration rates that doesnt want to talk about any of the behavior that leads to those higher black incarceration rates. As i pointed out earlier black incarceration rates, the black white gap in 1960 was narrower than it is today. Its wider now and obviously if you think there was or is a racist criminal Justice System out there responding or responsible for these high black incarceration rates it had to be much more racist in 1960 then this today when the head of it is a black man eric holder who reports to another one, president obama. Host since you brought this up you are talking about George Zimmerman and the acquittal. At the end of the day theres a young man who is dead who was wearing a hoodie. In your opinion was he racially profiled . Guest yes, i believe that he was viewed suspiciously because of the color of the skin of the way he was dressed. I dont have any doubt about that really. Host but again the question is why our young black man dressed a certain way perceived that way . Host with all due respect as a woman i have a marketers vineyard goodies so am i wrong . Im a black woman and if i choose to wear my hoodie and no makeup you dont know whether im a man or woman wearing my Marthas Vineyard city. Guest if we have a problem with black men being more perceived to commit crimes we need to do something about black behavior. Host since you are saying that web in your opinion should be done not just by black lawmakers but by the federal government and the state government, universal. What should be done to prevent these things from happening . Guest again to the title of the book to me its more about what we should stop doing. The obama administrations response to this problem is to go easier on criminals. He wants to reduce sentences on drug dependency princess. Host the crackcocaine versus the powder cocaine cocaine. Guest in schools they want black kids suspended at lower rates than they currently are because theres a disparity between the rate of black suspensions and white suspensions. Host lets go back to crack. Lets go back to the powder versus crackcocaine. Many people are not fully aware or may not be about the disparity. At one time it was 100 to one disparity where those who were using crackcocaine got a much larger sentence and those who did powder cocaine. He was the one and what is the group that is thought to do crackcocaine . Africanamericans in the group thought to do powder, white americans so that disparity has been whittled down to the obama administration. There is a racial element there. Guest do you know who put the initial ratio in place . Host is bill clinton. Bill clinton had a chance to pull it down. Guest it was the professional black caucus. Host and e i know but bill clinton had a chance to put it down and he did not. Guest my point is they wanted my enforcement to crack down on this and that is what happened. It was driven by black lawmakers this disparity so to turn around all these years later and say it was racially based that there were some sort of racism behind it is not accurate and its rewriting history. Host what im saying is they have to start from the base is when they did that and i was around at that time so that they had to negotiate with was 100 to one and they started whittling it down. I was in the white house at the time of the cdc when they were working with bill clinton and they kept moving it down but they have to start with a basis to move it down. Guest two points. First, one way to make the sense of sequel is to increase sentencing for powder and then dashes powder offenses. Secondly i think that no one is asking why the administrations sympathies are with the drug dealers and not the victims of their crimes. How does that help these black amenities to have these guys returning back to the neighborhood sooner rather than later . How does that help lawabiding individuals of those communities and of course the majority black people who live in these ghettos are lawabiding and they have to live through this nonsense because of the books that make life a living hill for them. Similarly in schools. How does that help the kids to go to school to learn if you force the schools not to suspend black bullies at the rate they otherwise would but for the federal government leaning on them . I mean where are your sympathies . My sympathy is with the lawabiding residents of the ghetto and my sympathies are are with us kids were at school to learn. I want to see them achieving get ahead and its more difficult for them to do that with some of these policies that are being put in place in the name of helping the black poor. I think they are having the exact opposite effect. Host you talk about several other items in the book, Current Issues to include minimum wage and immigration hotbutton issues right now. We are talking about and this is a hot conversation the authors to do please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed talk to me about your feelings about Immigration Reform is you been writing about that and what you say in your book about Immigration Reform. Guest in this book i dont get much into Immigration Reform in this book. I will say that there have been some conservatives who have wanted to scapegoat immigrants for high black Unemployment Rates. I dont think that the data back that up. If that were the case when we see high levels of immigration we should cede lower levels of black employment and vice versa but thats not but the data really shows. Black unemployment as you know doubles the white rate for decades irrespective of Immigration Trends in this country. So i dont think that this bannock should be scapegoated for the high black Unemployment Rate. On the minimum wage, again another policy that is intended to help the black poor but its a very poor antipoverty tool. Morris most poor people make more than the minimum wage. Most people that make the minimum wage are not poor. Poor households are enough circumstance typically because no one is working in the house, not because there are people working at jobs that dont pay enough. So what they need is a job more than a raise to lift themselves out of poverty that is. And so to the extent that minimum wage laws price less experienced blacks out of the labor market and result in a reduction in jobs overall in the economy they dont help adjust poverty address poverty. Host is a talk about minimum wage in the right in the book about the minimum wage and we talk about other issues that are in this book please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed, what is your commitment that you feel is a black man to the black community . Do you think its leading the charge of saying stop with the cdc and the other groups in the civil rights leaders to help black amenities . Zeiger chargebacks. Guest i think its important not to be cowed into groupthink and its important not to say the right thing for fear that you will be called names. I think its amazing how young such fears can take hold in a black person. I remember going to visit my older sister at home back in buffalo many years ago shortly after i had started at the wall street journal. I was by myself in a conversation with my niece and her daughter and asking her how school was going enough sort of thing. She stopped me in the middle of a sentence and she said why do you talk white uncle jesse . She turned to her little friend sitting there and said doesnt my uncle sound white . Try to sound so smart . And i laughed and they had a chuckle at my expense but it stopped me what she said. He was an 8yearold, a 9yearold linking race to intelligence and knowing that they stick sophisticated enough to avoid certain speech patterns herself and mock them and others. Eight years old. I had forgotten how young this stuff starts. Host you have experience that and Michelle Obamas experience that. Oprah winfrey has experienced that. So many africanamericans have experienced that when you are not necessarily trying to have the lingo, the street lingo you want to work in the business world. Guest might seem that this book has one is that there are limits to government benevolence. Blacks ultimately help blacks. Host you are talking about self responsibility. Guest self responsibility and get in the black culture in order, think those are the things that need to take place. Blacks need to develop the attitudes, habits and behaviors that other groups in america had to develop for them to rise into the extent that a government policy however wellintentioned gets in the way of that black selfdevelopment that does more harm than good. Host so when does the political structure get in the way because right now washington is in gridlock. Ever public in fear, democrats here. They are not coming together and the question is you have groups of people who are in need and there is fighting, not looking at the groups of people but ye yet guest i dont know if theres a political solution to what im talking about other than encouraging the government to get out of the way and stop doing similar things its doing. Raising the minimum wage is pricing blacks out of the labor force. Stop doing it. When you block School Choice you are not helping them and that is what democrats and many liberals continue to do, push policies that side with the teachers unions and the adults in the Education System over the needs of the kids particularly poor kids who oftentimes are black. Host its interesting the Republican Party particularly since george w. Bushs first term they were trying to get more of the black vote and then katrina happened and they knew it wasnt going to happen. The numbers are just far. Guest i dont think this is serious republican offered ever. You ever have republicans here and there who are trying. Paul ryan comes to mind. In the past about people like jack kemp Stephen Goldsmith in minneapolis but those are all exceptions to the rule. I think that republicans still believe that they can win elections without the black vote. I dont think racial animus is necessarily driving it. Its just pragmatic politics. Time spent courting one group is time spent not courting another group. Going to where you will get a better return on investment of time. Right now for instance republicans are starting to think they need more latino voters and to see this big debate going on in the gop over how to do that outreach. Theres no such debate going on in the Republican Party with regard to black outreach. I dont think there will be until republicans decide they need black voters to win elections. I think youll see a concerted effort to go get them both. Host they have gone after the white male in the last president ial election. Do you find that a problem though . They are now realizing that there was a problem. They are gender specific and race specific, white male. Anything else falls along the wayside. They are now trying to play catch up. Do you find that is a pandering move to say you are part of this country and you have to do that or do you think we really need to broaden the umbrella because this is one country not necessarily one country but a country for one. Guest i dont like pandering and i think that the left, i associated more with the left i guess what youd call identity. Host so you think the liberal standard guest appealing to hispanics as hispanics and not as americans. I think theres a pattern that goes on and i hope republicans dont go that route. I dont think its a very unifying message but at times i guess both parties have been guilty. Host push of the Republican Party open up its umbrella more so for more inclusion . Do you feel back . Guest o. Kosher and i think they will have no choice Going Forward giving the change in demographics of the country. The question is how do they go about doing that and we will see. Again right now at least with respect to black voters, i dont think they are make in are make being a serious outreach. His speech to the naacp v. Convention at her for years is not black outreach. Standing up and saying i support School Choice is not i think black outreach. Again when they have done now, when house republicans, those few republicans have done that i think it has paid dividends and i would like to see my dad. Host talk to me me about the independent party and its outreach in this effort if it is won or is not one . Guest one . Guest the independent party . Host will talk to me about the independents. Those people who want into that group thats independent, the ones who are undecided. The independent group i call a party unto themselves. Guest they would like to think they are. They tell you how independent is going to vote if they get one or two more followup questions. People like to call themselves independents back. Host the independent vote can swing an election and so they are an important group. They are the third party. Guest they are, and a lot of these elections are coming down to who can swing the independents. So we will see. But i think both sides probably want a broader tent, bigger tent i should say that but you are right republicans in particular, i think its something on their minds right now but i would say more so with respect to latinos than blacks at this point. Host once again we are talking with jason riley. Please stop helping us. That alone just makes your eyebrows raised. Please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed. He has been giving us his thoughts, very informed thoughts that have footnotes and all facts and figures that he is basing his information on but as we look through this book, i want to go back to the black Unemployment Rate and talking about, you are talking about the households where there are people who dont work in these households. Guest right, what you have among poor households and in most of them there are no workers. Host so where do they get their money . Guest the government and thats the problem but what they need is a job. Thats an Antipoverty Program is a job not an increase in them minimum wage. Host so these people who are not working and rely on the government, sometimes theyre people who fall through the . And they need to Training Programs and things of that nature to bring them up out of where they are to get into society again