Host jason riley, author, columnist, contributed to the wall street journal, Fox News Contributor and among your books, please stop helping us how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed. I want to begin where your book concludes, quote, liberalism has succeeded tragically in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Guest i believe that is a big part of a political strategy actually and they have been at it for some time. Unfortunately they have had a lot of success painting blacks is primarily victims, defined by their victimization first and foremost and the followup that we have a Government Program or government solution to help you overcome your victimhood so it is a political strategy. Guest there have been a number of books about lending johnsons Great Society. Was a failure or success . Guest if you look at the track record of the program, the goals, the objective stated at the time you would have to say it was largely a failure particularly with regard to the people that were targeted by many of these programs, i mean the black poor. There a lot has not significantly improved to the extent that we were told it would improve at the time. Another debate we have moved beyond, separate but equal but in your book you talk about historically black colleges. In the case of president ronald mason. Who was he and why is he important in terms of trying to Jackson State University forced out because of concern of the impact on other institutions . Guest the issue there was what has become of these institutions since the Civil Rights Act, since weve seen a lot more integration in the country and the problem these institutions have are that because black students have options they didnt want have in the first half of the 20th century they are exercising those options and are not attending a historically black college to the extent they once did because they have more options so these schools are struggling with how to stay viable both economically and in terms of what they can contribute to Higher Education and among some of the plans for smaller colleges to perhaps emerge, take advantage of scale and this has been resisted by 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 InstitutionsEverything 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. Th