Host jason riley author, columnist, contributor to the wall street journal and manhattan institute. Among your books please stop helping us. I want to begin where your book concludes because they see the following liberalism convinces blacks to see themselves first and foremosts as victims. Guest i believe that is a big part of a political strate strategy. Theyve been at it for some time and unfortunately they have had a lot of success painting and as victims and then the followup is we have a Government Program or solution to help you overcome your victim so i think it is a political strategy. Guest thereve been books on Lyndon Johnson. Is it a failure or a success . Guest if you look at the programs and the goal the object is overstated at the time you would have to say that its largely a failure to to the extent we are told another debate i think that we of course move beyond a separate but equal but in your book you talkta abot the black colleges and pasted it could case of ronald mason. Who was he . Guest the issue is what has become of these in capuchin since the civilit rights act and the problem that these institutions have is because black students have options they didnt want in the first half of stthe 20th century they are exercising those options and they are not attending the historical black colleges to the extent that they once did a survey are struggling with how to stay viable both economically and what they can contribute. This has been resisted by some who want the schools to maintain their independence and i can understand that but its often for nostalgic reasons rather than practical and he got a lot of pushback. Guest are the schools relevant or should they merge . Through the federal dollars to and my point is then it should close and it doesnt matter if it is an allblack school were traditional white school if it isnt meeting its objectives it should close. Where i think the value added in schools has been of late in recent decades is in the stem fields where they did an excellent job educating kids math and science and engineering and so forth and you see a preponderance of those that come into the field come out of these schools so they do so very vital purpose in Higher Education budget isnt to say all of them are performing at the same level level. Host this is the cover story visualizing the racism and one of the headlines from Jean Robertson calling americas longest war. Your reaction to that . Guest i think there is a tendency to view black history with large as a history of what whites have done to blacks and there are various reasons why the groups want to keep the narrativeto alive. Yes racism still exists and i dont know anyone that would argue otherwise. I do think it is more than that and its a relevant question is what it can be done in the face of whatever racism still exists where what was done in the past in the face of racism, and i think that is the relevant story to tell us today and the message to give to the young people today my fear is by perpetuating the notion its to the next generation. You said a kid outdoor and that is the message i dont think that you are hoping that a child. Host have you felt the sting of racism . Guest certainly. Ive experienced racism, ive been called names, followed accounts department stores, pulled over by police for no reason. I was doing an internship and i was on the sports desk. Its usually quite late that night and. I had my car which had new york plates although i was driving in driving home when a thing after work probably early the next morning sometime after midnight and i hear sirens blaring andnd the police pull me over and ordered me out of the car at gunpoint and face away from the car and all the rest is that i fit the description of someone that they were after outofstate plates and my car model. Host what were you thinking . Guest i was terrified. I remember getting back into the car after i left because they seemed to be gone as quickly as they can when they realized i wasnt the right person just sitting in my car shaking i remembered i had a standard and they couldnt get it out of gear my hand was shaking so vigorously that it was terrifying. Host a story making headlines three black men 36 years ago convicted of a murder they did not commit and they were just released from jail. What does that tell you about americas criminal Justice System . Guest that it is not perfect and i think that they yu would be hardpressed to find a black person of my age who hasnt experienced the things ive experienced. I think the criminal Justice System is an improvement today over what it used to be and what my father and grandfather experienced in this country, but its still not perfect. I would caution against taking these examples into saying they are typical versus exceptions or aberrations were saying the reason so many are involved in the criminal 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 in prisons and jails but a lot of people who perpetrate crimes. I dont think you can really have one discussion without c te other. So as imperfect as the criminal Justice System is, has been and will continue to be, i still think that there are behavioral differences among the groups that lead to some being overrepresented in the system and others are underrepresented. Host lets talk about the titles of three of her books. Guest that was a look back at the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson and expanded under nixon and others. I wanted to see what are the track records of these are the programs that are put in place to help. Welfare programs, housing programs and extensions of minimum wage and so forth. I wanted to look back and say what has worked, what hasnt worked and why, and i was attempting to do that with this book. Host your other books also with power. Guest i had a little bit of this and please stop helping us. It is essentially about the track record of using political power to advance the group economically which essentially has been the strategy since the time of king. If we can integrate Political InstitutionsEverything Else will take care of itself we just need to get our own people in place and there was quite a bit of success doing that if you look by the early 1980s he had major block cities in the u. S. Consulate los angeles, philadelphia, washington, d. C. And so forth. In addition to that you had with police chiefs. If you look at the track record of the poor and the black and a lookout washington and Marion Barrys washington, d. C. Or new jersey in the 1990s were detroit in the 1970s under these regimes you have to poor becoming even more impoverished so i dont think the track record there is a very good one. We have seen black regression under white mayors and congressmen. Its to say that this connection was essential between the black political cover and black economic progress simply isnt proving to be as strong as some people hoped it would be. Host generally speaking, have these programs helped or hurt backs guest they heard in a way hy that i described that there are is a selfdevelopment that has o occur. It isnt something that lends itself to the political solution. These are cultural changes that need to take place. Its the attitudes and behaviors and habits. To the extent the Government Program interferes with that i think it is doing more harm than good and what a load of the programs did is to interfere. The work ethic isnt going to improve if they think that the government is going to take care of them. You cant replace a father in the home with a government check and if you have a system in place that says to a woman if you have an additional child we will send more money. If we see that father around were going to stop sending you that money. You can imagine the sort of progress incentives that are put in place under programs like that and thats what we saw going on. I think that we practiced some of this with the welfare reform in the 1990s but not entirely. Host jason riley in addition to the new both regular contributor his columns are available in the wall street journal and as always we welcome your phone call calls ts 202 7488200 in the eastern or central time zone in 202 7488201 for those in the mountain and pacific. Be sure to follow booktv on twitter. Jason riley let them in, the case for open borders. Guest about immigration, i was working at the wall street journal atwo the time and the persons that i have been covering up the new position and asked if i wanted to take over anda on that is how it fell inty lap. I didnt have a dog in the fig fight. They studied history if only some of the arguments as you write about it are so old and have been around for so long team out of my writing editorial into intake expand on what overe decade and it is a very pro immigration editorial page which sometimes upsets conservatives in particular but its interesting what happened in that debate because the view on the right is 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 there was never the dominant view. Ronald reagan was extremely pro immigrant putting in place amnesty in fact. George w. Bush and his father werepr both pro immigrant and even a republican nominees have lost like mccain or romney were still far more pro immigrant and you had in Donald Trumps this is a new development on the right although theres always been this faction its never been the dominant one. Host are the rules different for an immigranter versus a refugee . Guest they have been considered two different groups. The people that have studied this will generally tell you that someone was forced out of their country that would rather be back home in the coming to the u. S. Is going to behave differently from someone who willingly leave their country to start a new life in a new place. What im writing about or primarily economic immigrants and the case that i make is we would do better to put in place guestworker programs or other types of programs that allow blood supply and demand to determine the level of immigration. Right now it is made by politicians of Public Policy makers who are trying to think hard about the economy to take a look at it from here and a little bit from there and we will sell this demand an demandt but it just doesnt work. It is a Central Planning that is left us with documents, fraud, 12 million plus Illegal Immigrants in the country, hundreds of dead bodies in the arizona desert. I think we woulde do better to put in place Market Mechanisms that would allow us to regulate the flow. Im working on a biography based at the Hoover Institution and someone ive known a little bit over the years whose books and writings had a huge impact on me when i discovered them in college so its a project i am looking forwardrd to. Can you put it in a box or is it more than adequate . Guest i define myself as a freemarket conservative, someone that believes that Smaller Government is the way to go int if someone that believesn individual freedom. Host the Civil Rights Movement in your words has become an industry by whom . Guest its become an everyone from individuals like your own sharpton, Jesse Jackson to an entire organizationwh like the naacp is. Theyd effectively monetized black victimization into different groups have done it for a different reason. It is not in your interest to acknowledge and what you are trying to do, the battle that has been if you are an organization like the clicks matter,ma like black lives matter, you want to play off certain aspects of what is going on out there. Whether or not they are actually relevant, you are going to play that out because it is in your interest to do so. We were talking about the narrative and thats something democrats used to get elected so different groups have different incentives. They have become an industry. In they have no interest in the assessments of black pathology. Guest that doesnt serve their purpose. They want to stay relevant or raise money or get elected so they will keep the victimization front and center in the National Debate whether or not it is opened. Host where do you do most of your thinking and writing . Guest at home i have a home office. Guest host and you find yourself disciplined enough to do that . Guest it took a little adjustment but its more. Host jason riley on cspan2 book tv in depth. In depth. We wilpeople get two calls in ja moment. You write about your father and your parents separated when you were young but your father is in your life as a child. Guest it made a big difference. He was an excellent role model not only my father but i grew up my mother was very religious and we attended church two or three times a week and the congregation was full of black men who took care of their families, dressed a certain way and spoke a certain way and behave a certain way so i was very fortunate and i grew up around a lot of solid male role models. Part of the problems they dont have the stability they give the high legitimacy rate. Host born and raised in buffalo . Welcome to booktv. Coco y. Dont they educate those that failed history why dont they educate those of history that you hear democrats talk about Voter Suppression is since roe v. Wade in 1973 and could have been 70 or 80 million or 60 million but we dont have power to the blacks. You could have me on your program discussing this. When i ran for the house in florida as a republican, i was called a racist and when jackie robinson, who is my hero, we were called racist especially me. I asked what democrat opened up the schools in the south. It appears the democratic governors wallace, and i could go on and that is what you should be teaching them. Host thank you for the call and we will get a response. Caller there is a lot of black history that doesnt get a lot of attention from civil rights organizations and plucked for petitions particularly liberal politicians because it doesnt serve their personal interest. A lot of it has to do with what was going on in the black community and between the end of slavery and the beginning of the modernday Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s. There was quite a bit of progress being made given that it was happening with widespread racism in this country di it was open and legal. If you look at the rate that they were educating themselves both absolute terms and relative which they were joining the joddmiddleclass professions ine period of tremendous progress that actually flew after the legislation of the 1960s and the decades that followed. Of course it doesnt serve their narrative. Host this goes back to something you said they performed better in the absence of government in schemes like affirmative action. Guest we have a lot of experiments that have been if we can go back on it. It ended to be affirmative action and admissions policies throughout the entire system and what we saw after that then went in to place is the number of graduates from the university of california system increased by more than 50 , again by more than 50 . So a program that had been put in place with racial preferences to increase,rc expand the black middle class had in practice than resulting in fewer lawyers or architects or social workers then we would have had the absence of the policy so again, we dont have to guess or speculate. We can simply look at the track record of the programs that weve had in place and whether or not theyve been effective. Host welcome to the conversation. Coco good afternoon. Im a good fan of yours and remember readingm in the new york post. I am a black american. I agree with everything you say but r it doesnt make a differ difference. It isnt going to change and the Democratic Party does. Its about feelings and emotions and that is what the Democratic Party is banking on. And then to keep those feelings and emotions at. And said what if you got to lose. Look at the facts of unemployment and it really doesnt make a difference. I appreciate the call and he makes a lot of points about the strategy ofin democrats. And he is right for go its a tough road to hoe. Democrats have been very very effective at pushing mentality ambushing Government Programs as a solution. So it is very difficult to change minds. I am more optimistic on the caller but he does make excellent points. That immigrants are coming here not to take advantage of our social Welfare Program then why are they going to stays that are so skimpy for benefits for the poor quick. And often a question askedmy my friends on the right who see immigration as a problem of them going on the dole, the idea and on the fax. Look at the situation we have today. I dont know pick your number ten or 12 or 15 Million People illegally at an employment is a 50 year low. The wall street journal reported s recently one. 2 million more jobs than people looking for work. We have a labor shortage in this country. And then to put downward pressure on wages. That we should be especially wary. Going after jobs that are held by a lot of blacks and the situation today is black unemployment we are at generationalha lows and wages have been rising faster than management. So they are coming here and stealing jobs that wheres the evidence corrects. You basically say 50 years ago he was fighting jim crow laws. Absolutely i think that was fought and won. Even among the activist groups, what they are pushing for or where they want the emphasis placed in terms of the problems that ale the black community its hard to know where to begin one of the previous callers mentioned the Police Shootings which is tragic. Any shooting is tragic by police or anyone else. But is that the problem today that they made it out to be quicks we are here in new york one of the few places that keep detailed records of lee shooting