Jason L. Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and one of the most incisive voices in today’s debates over race and public policy, joins Rafael Mangual to discuss how the Left frames racial disparities to advance a victimhood mentality, rather than solutions rooted in responsibility, opportunity, and community empowerment.

Audio Transcript

---

Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another special episode of the City Journal Podcast. I am so delighted to be joined by one of my most brilliant colleagues, Jason L. Riley. Welcome to the show.

Jason Riley: Glad to be here, Ralph.

Rafael Mangual: So you are one of the scholars at the Manhattan Institute that I have been reading for a long time, since long before I joined the Manhattan Institute. And it’s always been refreshing to read your work and in part because of what you’ve had to say on an issue that I think is embedded throughout the entirety of the public policy discourse, and that is race. For as long as I can remember, things like racial disparities have informed how we talk about everything from healthcare reform to criminal justice reform to immigration and welfare. And it just seems like getting a proper understanding of what the role of race and society is, is actually really key to developing the ability to navigate public policy debates in an effective way. And when I was kind of coming up as a young man and thinking through my own politics, race was the issue that really kind of introduced me to the ideas of the American right, in part because it seemed to me from where I was at the time, my late teenage years, that really what distinguished left and right on race was the following. On the right, you were kind of racial conservative if you believed that life outcomes were largely determined by personal actions, by personal choices. Whereas if you were on the left on race, life outcomes were largely explained by this broader phenomenon of racism or racial discrimination. Do you think that’s an accurate way to frame this thing? And how did you come to this issue?

Jason Riley: I do think that’s one way to do it. And I think it is fairly accurate, this idea of agency, that racial and ethnic minority groups are somewhat helpless in the face of society and society’s impact on them, that they don’t have the freedom to sort of chart their own course the way racial and ethnic majorities do in the same fashion. And so they are somehow victims of society writ large. I do think that’s a big dividing line in the way the left and the right think about racial issues. I came at this through some authors that I began reading in mostly late high school, but certainly more so in college. People like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury were people who had thought and written a great deal about race. And I found myself agreeing with them. It wasn’t as if I read them and formed a new opinion about these issues. I had somehow found some soulmates.

Rafael Mangual: Right. They were almost confirming where you were at the time.

Jason Riley: And also taught me how to articulate what my gut was telling. Yeah, that gave me the vocabulary.

Rafael Mangual: That’s exactly right. That’s how I was going to put it.

Jason Riley: Which was interesting. And it was something that interested me certainly thinking about these issues and writing about these issues, but it wasn’t really the focus of what I wanted to do professionally as a journalist. I knew I wanted to be a journalist coming out of college, but I didn’t particularly think I’d be focusing on racial issues, partly because I thought that those guys had covered it and covered it so well. And there was nothing to improve on here. It was, who writes better than Shelby Steele? Almost no one. Who’s a deeper and more rigorous thinker than Tom Sowell? And then you had Walter Williams out there. And I just thought these guys had said it. They’d said it very well. And thankfully they’d done that so I can go off and write about other stuff. But what I learned is that I think each new generation needs to relearn a lot of the things they had been saying.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s right.

Jason Riley: And as I progressed in my career as a journalist, that came to be my realization that it wasn’t enough that it had all been said before. You needed to reintroduce these ideas or reintroduce these arguments to the next generation of readers. And I don’t think it’s just true of race. I mean, you could say, Bill Friedman had said, oh, there is about monetary policy or free trade issues and so forth. So you can’t improve on it. He’s covered it. But no, another generation needs to relearn these same lessons. And so it’s incumbent upon a new generation of public intellectuals and journalists and writers to make the argument. I think that’s exactly right. And so that’s one of the reasons I joined the Manhattan Institute, I think it’s been about 11 years now, was to spend more time focused on these issues. And so race is an issue that brought me to the think tank role from the world of journalism where I was writing on just more topics generally and was now able to focus on these issues. And even though race is a topic that obviously still receives a lot of attention, I still thought there was some value added and me putting in my two cents because of my perspective on race. That’s where I think my value added is. I’m coming at it from a perspective that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, particularly in the mainstream media.

You have a lot of writing on race coming out of the left, where they have a certain victimhood mentality regarding how race and racism affects blacks in society in particular and other racial and ethnic minorities as well. And I have a sort of different view that pushes back on that. And I think I have a case to make that more people ought to hear because the left is so dominant when it comes to these discussions of race and how they want to approach it.

Rafael Mangual: No, I think that’s exactly right. And you make a few good points there. I mean, I recently had Heather on the show and Heather McDonald, our Manhattan Institute colleague, and we were talking about how a lot of the debates that we’re currently having with respect to criminal justice have been going on since the early 20th century. I mean, people like James Q. Wilson and George Kelling had been making a lot of the same arguments that I find myself making today, but I think you’re exactly right to say that there is a necessity to carry that tradition on and to continue that work and to keep it alive for future generations. I want to just pull on a couple of threads from your comments there. And you mentioned this idea of victimhood kind of animating how the left approaches the issue of race. And that always resonated with me because as a young man, I’d be surrounded by quote unquote progressives in school and guidance counselors and professors, et cetera, who seemed to believe that I needed help in order to get to wherever it is that I wanted to go.

The assumption was that either I was inadequate as I was, or that somebody somewhere was going to beat me back when I knocked on the door of whatever opportunity it was that I wanted to pursue. And that never really sat well with me. That was almost a kind of insulting character to it. At least that’s how I took it. It was like, “What is it about me that you believe is inferior that explains why you think I need a leg up in order to compete with my peers who don’t share my melanin count?” What was that like for you growing up? I mean, was there a moment or a series of moments that kind of made you realize that you stood apart from the pack? Because I do think it’s fair to say that the perspective that you bring to these debates is not the mainstream, at least not in places like New York.

Jason Riley: Well, it wasn’t something I think that came from my peer group growing up. I grew up in a very religious household. We went to a church two, three times a week. I had a very large extended family, also a very religious family. Most of my spare time was spent in the company of relatives, cousins, and aunts and uncles. It was a world full of black men who served as role models for the younger generation, went to work every day, dressed a certain way, spoke a certain way, no smoking, no cursing, no drinking to excess. And there wasn’t a lot of talk about oppression from the white world holding us back. It was a world in which we were raised as the kids to go out there and take advantage of the opportunities out there. And there wasn’t a lot of excuse making going on. And I think that is still largely the case in sort of black religious communities. If you go to a black church on any given Sunday and sit in the pulpit and listen to what’s coming out of the preacher’s sermon, it’s a lot about self-responsibility and self-respect and stay in school, get a job, take care of your kids, personal responsibility. That is still a message, I think a core message coming out of pockets of the black community.

You have to distinguish between that world, however, and the world of politics and activism and racial spokesmen. They are pushing an entirely different agenda. That is divorced from the world I just described. And in that alternative universe where the activists live and the politicians live, personal responsibility and personal behavior are not something you talk about. You talk about what the white world and what the white man is doing to black people. And they do that because they have an agenda out there. And their agenda is to keep racial oppression front and center in all of our debates, whether it’s relevant or not, because it serves a purpose, helps them raise money, it helps them stay relevant, their politician helps them get elected. So that’s what they talk about. And often the media just takes it as a given that your activist groups are speaking by and large for the broader black community when in fact, as many pollsters will tell you, these are two very different agendas simultaneously.

Rafael Mangual: One of the great recent examples of how the pollsters have kind of revealed that disconnect came in the wake of the BLM protests after George Floyd’s death and the custody of Minneapolis police where you had this massive movement saying in the media amplifying this, that what black American wanted was less policing. And yet Gallup had done a poll and found that 81 percent of black Americans either wanted as much or more policing than they were currently getting. And that seemed to really blow a lot of people’s minds. I mean, I watched some of the coverage after that poll came out. There was a lot of disbelief. How is it that you think the media and political activist community gets away with allowing that narrative to prevail when it’s, as you say, disconnected from what you see on the ground in a lot of the communities that they’re talking about?

Jason Riley: Well, and again, it’s not just policing. There has long been a big disconnect between the issues that the activists want to highlight and the issues that the black community, they speak on behalf of want to highlight. So you mentioned policing and crime control, those that long before the BLM movement, you can go back to the ‘60s and ‘70s and find polling showing strong support for more crime control in black communities than the spokesmen want to acknowledge. You go back to the Rockefeller drugs laws…

Rafael Mangual:  Perfect example.

Jason Riley: ... another example of something initiated by black leaders in the community who saw what drugs were doing in these communities, what drug dealers were doing in these communities. You can go back and read editorials that ran in black newspapers in the Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, Washington D.C., just all over the country calling for more crime control. So crime is another issue.

School choice is another issue where you have the NAACP types, the Black Lives Matter types, opposing school choice, but it has overwhelming support in the black community. Voter ID laws is another example. The black left out there thinks this is a tool of disenfranchisement. You go and poll black people. They have no problem with producing voter ID, polls off the charts in that community. So just down the line, issue after, affirmative action is another issue. You ask the NAACP about affirmative action, they’re all for it. You ask black people themselves if they want racial preferences. No, they do not. So again, on issue after issue, and I go back to again, understanding the agenda of the activists. If you are a political activist, this is how you raise money. You pretend that all of the problems that black people face are being caused by someone else, and that there’s a government solution out there for all of these problems that black people face. And that’s how you raise money. That’s how you stay relevant. Again, with the black politicians, you say, “We have a plan out of Washington or out of the state capitol or out of city council, the mayor’s office that will fix your problems, but they’re not your fault. And by the way, the other side is trying to do this and that to you. They’re evil. They’re not just wrong. They’re evil. They’re trying to disenfranchise you and so forth.” So you have to look at the agenda of the person making the argument and then it makes perfect sense. I give an example of when Barack Obama was first elected back in 2008 and one of the first things he did in office is try to shut down a school choice program in Washington D.C. that had been set up by George W. Bush.

Rafael Mangual: While his children went to private schools.

Jason Riley: And he said to yourself, why would Barack Obama want to do it? Barack Obama is not a dumb man. He knows that school choice is very popular in the black community. He knows that blacks disproportionately benefit from these programs because they’re stuck in the worst performing traditional public schools. Why would he spend so much time and energy trying to shut down this federal program in Washington D.C. set up for poor kids? Excuse me. And the reason, of course, is that Barack Obama owed his election in part to special interest groups like the teachers unions, and the teachers unions are opposed to school choice because they see it as a threat to their membership and their control of traditional public schools. And Barack Obama had to pay his dues to special interest groups that helped him get elected. So showing that once these politicians do get in office, regardless of what color they are, they are going to have to pay some attention to who helped them get there. And so even a black president was not someone who was able to stand up to the forces of big labor when it came to the harm that some of these policies were doing to blacks. And again, that gets you to looking at what the agenda is, whose ox is being gored, so to speak, when it comes to what policies are being pushed by these politicians and these activists.

Rafael Mangual: So I think that’s great analysis. And when you look at the agenda, it becomes clear what the politicians are after, what the activists are after, but that doesn’t entirely explain why it is that they think, and they clearly seem to think this, that race is the most effective way to sell that agenda. Do you have a working theory as to why race has proven to be an effective political cudgel?

Jason Riley: Oh, well, it’s something that’s easy to exploit, that’s for sure. We do have an ugly history of racism in this country. There was slavery, there was Jim Crow, there was discrimination, there is still racism today. It hasn’t gone away entirely. I don’t think it ever will. And so it’s something that’s easy to exploit, I guess, is one way to explain why people continue to use it. We also today have what I’d call a racial grievance industry. It’s a very lucrative industry. I mean, I think if you or I decided to spend our time blaming all the problems of racial minorities on white people or white supremacy or systemic racism, we could probably triple our speaking fees and book advances. I mean, there’s a huge market out there

Rafael Mangual: With two kids getting ready for college and I may have to consider that.

Jason Riley: There’s a huge market out there for that type of thinking. And as long as it pays as well as it does, I think you’re going to have people who are going to play in the sandbox. I mean, look at how much money the Black Lives Matter activists were able to raise over a short period of time. Look at how many people in this country lost their heads after the George Floyd killing in 2020. I mean, people were throwing billions of dollars at some of these racial activists, people like Ibram Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones. This is extremely, I mean, literally billions of dollars. And so there’s money to be had in playing to racial grievances and exploiting racial tensions in this country. And so long as that is the case, I think you’re going to have people out there that are willing to do it. And the reason, however, I think that you need to push back at that agenda is not just because I think it’s unseemly. I think it’s harmful. It’s harmful because the narrative that they’re pushing doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny. I mean, one of the big differences between the left’s thinking about racism and the right’s thinking about racism is that the left assumes that racism is the main driver of racial disparities in society, full stop and that all of our focus therefore needs to be on eliminating racism. And moreover, until racism has been eliminated, we can’t expect any more narrowing of racial gaps. And that is sort of how they go about their agenda where they see racial differences, they assume racism is the cause full stop. And there are a lot of problems with that narrative.

One thing we know is that racial gaps over the decades have widened, have narrowed, have widened again, have narrowed again. There’s been a lot of variance there. Racism has been the constant here. We’ve always had it, yet the racial gaps have not always been what they have been. They’ve narrowed at times, they’ve widened at times. So that’s one of the problems with the narrative that they’re pushing. Moreover, in many areas, we have wider gaps today than we used to have, even though it would be very hard to prove that there’s more racism today than there used to be. So there are a number of problems with the narrative that they’re pushing and it’s why it’s important to push back at that narrative.

Rafael Mangual: This is one of, you just made one of the points that stood out to me from your work when I first encountered it. Your book, Please Stop Helping Us, was one that I read with great enthusiasm when it came out. And much in the way that you had described earlier when you read Shelby Steele and Thomas Soul and Glenn Loury, it confirmed for me my sort of already existing sense that it was very difficult to make the case that a lot of the racial disparities that existed today were a result of racism, in part because as you so effectively argued in the book, those disparities had gotten worse as society had become significantly more tolerant on almost every measure. Intermarriage rates were going up. You had multiple decades of affirmative action already under our belt. You had the elimination of Jim Crow, and yet in the 1940s and 1950s, the gap between blacks and whites with respect to all manner of things like wealth, homeownership rates, employment rates in the managerial professions were all closing much faster than they closed. And in some cases, those trends even reversed. Tell me more about that case. I mean, what is it that you think Americans really need to understand about that history, about the temporal proximity to our kind of more racist history versus what we see today?

Jason Riley: Sure. Well, you made several of the points. I can expand on some of them, but if you look at several indices of progress writ large among groups. So you can look at homeownership rates, you can look at crime rates, you can look at income, you can look at people entering skilled professions, you can look at educational attainment. All of these things were narrowing the first two thirds of the 20th century. So coming out of slavery through the Jim Crow period, it was incremental. There would be some retrogression in there. It wasn’t a smooth line of upward mobility, but it was happening and it was real. And the gains were tremendous, particularly in the 1930s and ‘40s and ‘50s and early ‘60s, you saw, for instance, the poverty rate for black families falling by 40 percentage points from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960. You saw black incomes as a percentage of white incomes narrowing and narrowing and narrowing and narrowing. Homeownership rates, black home ownership rates, the percentage of homeownership rates, and so educational attainment and so forth. And all these things start to peak right around the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then things start to stall, flatten out, and in some cases, reverse course. And then the problem with the left’s narrative or explanation for this is that there’s sort of all-purpose racism as an all-purpose explanation just simply doesn’t hold up because no one could plausibly argue that since the 1980s and 1990s, America’s become a lot more racist than it used to be. And yet, if you look at black household incomes as a percentage of white household incomes in 2018, they were right about where they were in 1968. If you look at black college completion as a percentage of white college completion, in 2020, it was right about where it was in 1970.

So what explains ... And again, this is after 50 years of affirmative action, Ralph. This is after 50 years of racial preferences. Still, you see these gaps stalling to where they were before these policies were put in place. This is 50 years after the great society programs of Lyndon Johnson that were supposed to close all these gaps in income, in home ownership rates, and so forth, in educational attainment. So what happened? And the idea that what happened was America became more racist, just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Rafael Mangual: If I were to put my leftist hat on for a second and try to make the counter argument, I can hear somebody saying, “Well, that’s because Reagan gets elected in 1980 and Republicans go tough on crime and do all of these things to reverse that progress.” And then my instinct would be to counter that point to look at what was happening in the cities and jurisdictions that have always been governed by progressives. Have they fared any better?

Jason Riley: Well, I think a couple things happened. One of the things about Reagan is interesting that you mentioned Reagan. In the 1980s, the racial inequality gap in terms of income narrowed under Reagan in the 1980s. I didn’t know that. A lot of people don’t know that, but that happened. It also happened during the first term of President Trump as well before-

Rafael Mangual: That I knew. Someone wrote a book about it

Jason Riley: Before COVID. It happened then too. Didn’t get a lot of attention. But I think a couple things happened in the beginning in the second half of the 1960s that contributed to the stall in progress that we had seen in terms of racial inequality.

One thing was you saw a breakdown of a black nuclear family become much more acute. Up until the early 1960s, about two in three black kids are still being raised in a home with a mother and a father. That starts to slide significantly to the point where by the 1990s, three in four are not being raised in a home with a mother and father. And that’s huge right there. Just in terms of income, it’s huge. So you see black, white gaps in income narrowing in the ‘30s and the ‘40s and the ‘50s and into the early 60s. And then you see a reversal of this trend. Well, if you’re going to have a bunch of single-headed black families competing with intact white families, there’s not going to be much competition there.

Rafael Mangual: Right.

Jason Riley: And that’s what you see happen, a proliferation of single parent black homes. And so that’s going to have tremendous income effects right there. But then there’s a whole literature out there on all the other negative things associated with absent fathers, whether it’s involvement with the criminal justice system, teen pregnancy, not finishing school, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, substance abuse in general. All of these negative outcomes are associated with absent fathers. And that’s what you see starting in particularly the 1960s, the late 1960s and early ‘70s, proliferation of absent fathers. And so things start to go sideways very quickly in the black community to the point that we’ve never really recovered. The other thing you start to see in the late 1960s is an abandonment of the strategy of the civil rights movement of the ‘40s and ‘50s, which was a focus on colorblindness and a focus on equal treatment under the law.

That starts to shift toward a focus on racial preferences and a focus on special treatment under the law, which causes all kinds of friction on its own in terms of allies of the black community, particularly Jewish Americans who had been strong allies of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. But when you see the shift to more militancy and to special treatment and quotas and set asides for blacks, they start to lose a lot of those allies, including Jews, as a result of that. And then what you see after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is a focus on achieving Black political power. And the thinking there is that if we can just get more of our own elected, everything else will take care of itself. We just need to get our own in power in office. Now, on its own terms, that strategy turned out to be quite successful. Starting in the late 1960s and through the ‘70s and ‘80s, you get this proliferation of black mayors of large cities, large black population, your Clevelands, your Detroits, your Baltimores, your Philadelphias, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, not only black mayors, black school superintendents, black police chiefs, black city councilmen, you get a congressional black ... Black political clout grows tremendously beginning in the late 1960s. The problem is that all the economic benefit that was supposed to come with that never materializes.

If you look at Sharpe James’s, Newark, New Jersey, if you look at Marion Barry’s, Washington D.C. in the ‘80s, you don’t see ... The black poor became poorer. This is not an argument that black people should not engage politically because during this era, progress didn’t take place under white mayors and white school superintendents either. That’s not the point. The point is that the strategy, the shift in strategy that occurred in the late ‘60s among the black leadership towards achieving more political power did not pay off the way we were told it was going to pay off. The problem was not a lack of political clout. The problem was deeper than that. And I think the problem was taking their eye off the ball in terms of building the human capital. That is much more important than the political capital. So what was going on in the ‘40s and ‘50s and early ‘60s when you had that black intact family was a focus on education, was a focus on personal responsibility. And that, I think, is something that transcends political power so that you can continue to achieve and progress no matter who is elected. And I think what happened was the shift towards not just equal treatment, but special treatment. And that was taking their eye off the ball. And I think that, again, is something that the black underclass in particular has never really recovered from.

Rafael Mangual: I think there’s so much there. It actually reminds me of an interaction that I wonder if my parents would remember. I came home one day in high school. There was this group called, I think it was a World of Difference, if I remember correctly. And it was like this anti-racism group before anti-racism was a word. And they would come and they would do these assembly style presentations. And I remember being confronted with this idea of representation, that it mattered for minorities to be able to see people like them in high places. And I came home and I remember telling my parents, “Why is it that we never see any ... Don’t you feel weird about the fact that there aren’t any Latinos that are super prominent?” And I remember my dad saying, “What makes you think you need that?” He asked me, “Are there any Asian kids that you go to school with who are really smart, who are going to get into Harvard and do all these things?” And I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “You think they’re worrying about who’s quote unquote representing them?” No, that’s not what makes the difference. What makes the difference is whether or not you do the work. If you do that, you’ll be fine. And I remember thinking, “Oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.” It seemed uncontroversial to me in that moment, but I think it’s proven to be a…

Jason Riley: And historically, it’s been true. Other groups, other ethnic minority groups in this country that have arisen from poverty to prosperity typically have not taken the political route. They’ve established themselves economically first and worried about politics later and political representation later. The one exception to that are the Irish who did focus on politics first. You had this Irish-run political machine. Tammany Hall. New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago. And it turns out, however, that during the heyday of these Irish political machines, there was really no Irish middle class to speak of. They were patronage machines, but unless you were connected to some Irish elected official, you probably weren’t doing very well. And it wasn’t until the decline of these Irish political machines that you saw the rise of the Irish middle class. And in fact, of all the European immigrants, the Irish were the slowest to rise economically in this country, despite all this political clout that they had for many decades because they were so successful at politics.

So it’s not as if blacks were trying something that hadn’t been tried before. It’s just that history shows it’s not the most efficient way to lift a group, political power and political clout. And I think there is some more realization of this now because the culmination of this civil rights strategy was, of course, the election of Barack Obama. And I think many people learned after eight years of Obama that even a black president is not going to be a silver bullet for the problems that the black underclass faces, socioeconomic problems. But that was something that the black leadership turned to in the late ‘60s. And I think they really did take their eye off the ball.

And it’s also important to note it’s not just an issue you can point to domestically. Ethnic and racial minority groups all over the world have not necessarily needed political power in order to rise economically. There are many, many examples of oppressed racial minority groups outperforming their oppressor, both economically and educationally, or both. If you look at the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, that would be one excellent example if you look at sort of the ethnic Chinese in Malaysia outperforming the Malays economically-

Rafael Mangual: Who are not very nicely, by the way.

Jason Riley: I’m sorry?

Rafael Mangual: Who are not very nice to the ethnic Chinese.

Jason Riley: And the laws are right there on the books, limiting what the ethnic Chinese, what professions they can enter, what schools they can attend and so forth, and yet they are outperformed. The perennial example, of course, are Jews throughout Eastern Europe. They’ve long faced awful odds, been oppressed, been persecuted, and yet outperformed their oppressors academically and economically. Here in the US, you mentioned Asians.

Asians were lynched, they were forced to attend separate schools- The Chinese Exclusion Act. They were interned. They were limited in terms of land ownership in places like California, yet today Asians outperform white Americans both academically and economically and have for decades. So this idea that racism is the end all be all in terms of oppressing a group, again, is something that has not held true both here in the US and the world over. There are many, many examples all over the globe of an oppressed group outperforming their oppression.

Rafael Mangual: You’re, I think, channeling the man whose biography you wrote so eloquently, Thomas Sowell. And the first book of his that I read was The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective, which I think makes a lot of these arguments with two things stood out to me from that book in terms of arguments. One was this idea that inequality was a problem that was created as opposed to the rule. And this is something I want to pick your brain on because I’ve heard Glenn Loury make this argument as well. If we are to take the concept of race seriously, meaning that it identifies some distinction between and among the groups that fall into the various racial categories, if they are different, why would we expect them to be equal on every measure? I mean, that is the whole premise of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s this idea that you need these different groups to make a complete whole. So how do we get past that…

Jason Riley: Well, the left can’t get past it. I mean, one of the problems with the premise of diversity, equity, and inclusion thinking when it comes to social inequality is that it’s premised on racially equal outcomes or racially balanced outcomes being the norm, and where we don’t find that something must be amiss, something fishy must be going on. But the reality is that people who have studied civilizations down through history have never found this equal balance and outcome. Show me where they are taking as the starting point for something being off. You just don’t find it anywhere you look, where you’re going to have, particularly multi-ethnic or multiracial societies, equal numbers of people pursuing medicine or law, or scoring on this, or income levels, or joining the military, or being incarcerated. You don’t see that anywhere. And so that is one of the major, major problems that I have with the whole DEI agenda is that it’s set up on this false notion of racial balance that has never been demonstrated anywhere in any society down through history. And so you have to start there and they really can’t get over that hurdle.

Rafael Mangual: So the other aspect of Dr. Sowell’s work that always stood out to me was how he argued about the history of disparities, tracing it back to everything from, including geographical factors. I mean, so one of the things that he talks about in that book is the fact that people who were native to mountain valleys tended to advance much more slowly as societies than people who were native to coastal areas with natural ports. And the reason for that, or at least the theory behind the argument here is that, well, the people who were native to areas along the coast with natural ports were interacting with other societies through trade, and so could identify positive attributes and then copy them to advance. Whereas it was much more difficult to traverse mountain ranges. And so the interaction was limited. And that brings me to the following question, which is, if that’s true, then I think it’s perfectly reasonable to make the argument that to the extent there is desire within the black community, the Latino community, whatever minority group you’re talking about, to achieve a certain level of either wealth or educational attainment or status. Part of what needs to be done is that they need to sort of engage in that process of cultural diffusion and identify and try to assimilate to the character attributes and attitudes and approaches that have proven successful for other groups.

Jason Riley: Absolutely. Those are the building blocks of civilizational progress.

Rafael Mangual: And yet there seems to be embedded in at least some minority cultures, this idea that doing that represents a betrayal of sorts. And this is where we kind of get into this idea of “acting white.” And I wonder if you can kind of talk a little bit about that idea, that notion.

Jason Riley: Well, even before you get to the level of acting white, what you’re describing has been dismissed today as cultural appropriation or civil ... These are dirty words, but again, these are how civilizations have progressed. You look at what’s been tried and has worked, and you steal that, and you adopt it, and you assimilate to it, and that’s how you advance. And yes, people who met in cities could more easily do this than people who had isolated themselves in mountainous regions and so forth. People who lived inland versus people on the coast. One of the examples that Sowell has used, and Jared Diamond also talks about this in Gun, Germs, and Steel, is when the Europeans, or during the age of exploration, the Europeans arrived on the shores of the Americas, they encountered groups of people that had been isolated for thousands of years, and they were bringing with them the advances of civilizations that had been interacting with each other. So they were there one civilization had built the ships, one civilization has built the gunpowder, one civilization has built the compasses that they used to navigate. The natives didn’t stand a chance against this accumulation of wisdom, of knowledge that the explorers brought with them to the shores, to the fight.

And so yes, this has just been the idea that we’ve turned this into a dirty word that we should isolate ourselves and hang on to this or that no matter the consequences is ridiculous. It makes no sense and it’s made no sense historically. It’s been done to the detriment of civilizations historically. I mean, there was a time when China was the most advanced society in the world, they consciously decided to seal themselves off and they subsequently fell from being the leaders of the world in terms of advancement because of doing that. So the lessons are there for people who want to study them. The acting white phenomenon is a very real one.

Rafael Mangual: Do you see it as separate or apart from that notion?

Jason Riley: It’s of a piece with this discussion, I think. And it’s been extremely detrimental. And one of the problems is the failure by a lot of liberal intellectuals to even acknowledge that it’s a problem. We’ve gotten to a point today, I mean, it’s almost reached absurd proportion today. I mean, you have people calling math racist. You have people calling punctuality white supremacy. I mean, that’s how absurd this has gotten. So it is a problem. I think the pendulum has probably swung a little bit now, and it’s starting to come back. But yes, the acting white phenomenon is certainly of a piece with this.

Rafael Mangual: When I think about that, I’m just going back to something that you mentioned earlier about this sort of switch in time with respect to the progress that was being made in the black community in the United States. You talked about the late 1960s, particularly the rise of militancy in that era. And I’ve seen research, for example, on Black given first names during that period and how they started to change in the late 1960s where you had these more kind of Pan-African sounding names as opposed to Benjamin or Michael. Do you think that that had kind of more cultural relevance than maybe we’re giving you credit for, which is to say that do you think that that switch to a kind of more militancy came with a kind of sealing off of the black community from the broader American society that has…

Jason Riley: It was very much a separatist movement and as well, a cultural separatism.

Rafael Mangual: My kind of working theory is that kind of raised the transaction costs of the sort of assimilation and cultural diffusion that would have proven beneficial.

Jason Riley: It was a step backwards. And it was unfortunate because I think King had it right. King wanted blacks to assimilate to the mainstream of American society and he was fighting a group, a thinking at that time by a lot of Americans that did not want blacks part of the mainstream, was white separatist. And the black militants come along and say, “We’re going to counter the white separatism with black separatism.” That wasn’t King’s approach. And I think King had it right, that we all had something to gain with the assimilation approach in this country, at least. And so I think that the idea that you had these black militants that were more interested in mirroring the white separatist was exactly the wrong way to go at the time. And there’s still some remnants of that, I think. Yes, definitely.

Rafael Mangual: So I think for a lot of people who spend too much time following political discourse, it would be easy for them to be pessimistic about the direction of where America’s going on the race issue. But I think, especially over the last couple years, we have seen some pretty big strides made. We have the Supreme Court getting rid of affirmative action in higher education. You have the Department of Justice explicitly walking away from the disparate impact analysis and civil rights litigation. Are we at a point in our history where you think we are finally going to get past race as the sort of main avenue of analysis for public policy problems?

Jason Riley: Wow. I don’t know that I’m that optimistic. I do agree with you that we’ve made some important strides. Although to me, and this gets back to something I said earlier about the disconnect between what a lot of these activists are saying or even the political class or the intellectual classes saying versus rank and file Americans. And so you mentioned the Supreme Court decision being a measure of progress we’ve made. Ralph, after the Supreme Court decision, you had many people on the left running around with their hair on fire, your cable news commentators, your liberal politicians, your liberal intellectuals and so forth. Oh my goodness, huge step backwards. Ralph, that decision was supported. Ending affirmative action in college admissions was supported by a majority of Americans, around 70 percent, including an absolute majority of blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics. I mean, your rank and file Americans were already there. They’ve never supported these efforts to divvy us up and play favorites according to race. I mean, the American public has been past that for a long time. We have an intellectual class that hangs on to these beliefs because they have a separate agenda. And so when you say progress, I guess I believe your rank and file Americans have progressed. Sure. Right past this stuff.

It sort of reminds me, I remember listening to Rush Limbaugh once one time after the Academy Awards had been on and I forget the year who the individual was, but a black actor or actress had won an award and for the first time, first time in a million years, and the academy and Hollywood cells on the back for, oh my goodness, look at the progress we’ve made in society now that so- and-so won an Academy Award. And Rush said something like, “The only people stopping black people from winning the Academy Award was the academy.”

Rafael Mangual: The Academy. That’s right. That’s right.

Jason Riley: The black people had been the biggest box office draw for decades. You had black actors or actresses being the biggest box, their movies making tons of money. The only people stopping this was the academy. Although they’re going to sit around and go, “Look at how much progress the country has made.” And I kind of feel like the Supreme Court’s essentially…

Rafael Mangual: Is it much in the same vein? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Riley: I mean, the public was already there. So I am optimistic in that sense, but I’m not optimistic that our political class is going to let any of this stuff go away. There’s too much at stake in our racial grievance industry in this country for them to let it go away. So I think they’re going to try and continue to keep race front and center for as long as they can. So if

Rafael Mangual: If there’s a young man or woman out there who is on the fence about these things, they are being told by the activists and the educational elite that they as a minority are a step behind everyone else, that the system is rigged against them and you have more conservative America saying, “No, race doesn’t matter. You can just decide for yourself what your life outcomes are going to be.” What’s your advice to that young person?

Jason Riley: Oh, just to ignore those people and there are more opportunities in this country for them than ever before, and you have to seize them. And if you prepare yourself to seize them, they will be there. There’ll be even more, but you can’t go out into the world thinking like that. And shame on the adults that are doing that. Shame on the adults that are sending these young minority kids out there telling them that the cops are gunning for them, that the teachers are racist, that the principal’s racist, that the judges are racist and the prosecutors are racist, and that they can’t get shame on these adults. They are not doing these kids any favors. And that’s who we should really be taking to task are the people who are out there pushing this pessimism for their own, again, to serve their own agendas onto the next generation when there’s just plenty of opportunity out there for people today.

Rafael Mangual: Well, Jason, I wish that I could have you on for the next two and a half hours, and I hope you will come back on the show because this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. To you all who are watching, thank you, for watching, listening. Please do not forget to smash that like, subscribe, button, hit the bell, do all the things for the algorithm, leave us a comment, let us know what you thought of the episode. And until next time, you have been watching the City Journal Podcast.

Photo by J. Conrad Williams Jr./Newsday via Getty Images