Instead, as a consequence of racial g... - Jason L. Riley - Quotes.Pub

Instead, as a consequence of racial gerrymandering, “elections nationwide have become more or less permanently structured to discourage politically adventuresome African American candidates who aspire to win political office in majority-white settings.

Jason L. Riley Quotes

History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility.

The political left, which has long embraced identity politics, encourages racial and ethnic loyalty. It is manifest in liberal support for multiculturalism, hate-crime laws, racially gerrymandered voting districts, affirmative-action quotas, and other policies. “Stick together, black people,” says popular black radio host Tom Joyner, an Obama booster.

So while multiculturalists are busy complaining about teaching methods and civil rights leaders are busy complaining about standardized tests, the Asian kids are busy studying.

The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the United States today are run by blacks.

Supporting Obama regardless of his job performance is therefore seen by many blacks as not only the right thing to do but the “black” thing to do.

High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans – and of African American control of city governments.”15.

But any candid debate on race and criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has been the case for at least the past half a century.

Even allowing for the existence of discrimination in the criminal justice system, the higher rates of crime among black Americans cannot be denied,” wrote James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in their classic 1985 study, Crime and Human Nature. “Every study of crime using official data shows blacks to be overrepresented among persons arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for street crimes.” This was true decades before the authors put it to paper, and it remains the case decades later.

Yet between 1972 and 2011 – that is, after major civil rights gains, as well as the implementation of Great Society programs – it barely declined, from 32 percent to 28 percent, and remained three times the white rate, which is about what it was in 1972.20.

When Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked black talk-show host Tavis Smiley in October of 2013 if black Americans were “better off five years into the Obama presidency,” Smiley responded: “Let me answer your question very forthrightly: No, they are not. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”2.

To his credit, Don Lemon, the black host of a program on CNN, applauded O’Reilly’s remarks, and then added that O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough.” Lemon went on to make five simple suggestions for black self-improvement: pull up your pants, finish high school, stop using the n-word, take better care of your communities, and stop having children out of wedlock.

In addition, the black-white income disparity that widened under Obama actually narrowed in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan also inherited a weak economy from his predecessor.

Today’s civil rights leaders encourage blacks to see themselves as victims. The overriding message from the NAACP, the National Urban League, and most black politicians is that white racism explains black pathology.

But in the past, the black approval rating of a president had tended to correlate with the jobless rate. Yet black unemployment was lower under George W. Bush than it had been at any point during the Obama administration.

Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement,” wrote Sowell. “Nor has eager political participation or outstanding success in politics been translated into faster group achievement.”21.

There have been a handful of prominent Asian American politicians, like Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, but Asians have tended to avoid politics, compared with other groups.

The spectacle of a black president’s black attorney general pretending that the black franchise is in jeopardy in twenty-first-century America struck many people as intellectually dishonest political pandering.

The economist Thomas Sowell has spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups in the United States and internationally. And his findings show that political activity generally has not been a factor in the rise of groups from poverty to prosperity.

The stark racial differences in crime rates undoubtedly impact black-white relations in America. So long as they persist, young black men will make people nervous. Discussions about the problem can be useful if they are honest, which is rare. Liberals don’t help matters by making excuses for counterproductive behavior. Nor does the media by shying away from reporting the truth.

Yet liberal policy makers and their allies in the press and the academy consistently downplay the empirical data on black criminal behavior, when they bother to discuss it at all. Stories about the racial makeup of prisons are commonplace; stories about the excessive amount of black criminality are much harder to come by.

In theory these efforts are meant to help. In practice they become barriers to moving forward. Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but time and again the empirical data show that current methods and approaches have come up short.

We are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and a black man has twice been elected president in a country where blacks are only 13 percent of the population. Yet liberals continue to pretend that it’s still 1965, and that voters must be segregated in order for blacks to win office.

Liberals want to blame the “legacy” of slavery and racism for the breakdown of the black family and subsequent social pathologies. But the empirical data support Bill Cosby.

Today Asian Americans are the nation’s best-educated and highest-earning racial group. A 2013 Pew study reported that 49 percent of Asians age 25 and older hold bachelor’s degrees, versus 31 percent of whites and 18 percent of blacks. The median household income for Asians is $66,000, which is $12,000 more than white households and double that of black households. Yet Asians have little political clout in the United States.

And he concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books. “A kind of norm of minimum effort appeared to exist among Black students,” wrote Ogbu.

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