Without question, Jason Riley is one of the most prominent black journalists in the United States, rightly known for his weekly columns in the Wall Street Journal. On a consistent basis, he shrewdly dissects the nostrums of many authors, both black and white, who assert that the road to a successful future in race relations depends on implementing a steady stream of programs whose factual predicate is that systematic racism in the United States going back to 1619 has created a toxic environment that now calls for the expansion of affirmative action programs in jobs, housing, and education.
The capstone of the program lies in aggressive demands for reparations for the sins, not only of slavery but of all past forms of segregation. These programs bear no relationship to either the $20,000 authorized in 1988 for Japanese Americans interned in World War II, or even the more generous payouts from the West German government to Israel in the aftermath of that war. Instead, by piling improbable assumptions on top of each other, the cash demands easily reach in aggregate 10 to 15 trillion dollars, both before the California legislature and the federal government. So far these programs have gone nowhere in practice, but the issue is sufficiently alive that it is sure to aggravate racial relations in Trump’s second term.
In this debate, Riley, as the steady voice of reason, has done an admirable job of collecting voluminous data from a wide range of reputable sources that goes a long way to refute, decisively in my view, strong claims of white exploitation of black persons by writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones. Theirs is a dreary DEI narrative that ultimately denigrates both black and white alike, though it still commands wide support in universities and blue states.
Riley’s “myth” is that these extreme responses are deeply wrong for two reasons: They ignore black past achievements, and they overpromote modern affirmative action programs.
On the first, the modern left-wing critique offers a model of black helplessness that ignores the many successful achievements of black individuals and groups during the period of systematic segregation that starts with the revival of Jim Crow just before 1900 and runs through the key decades of 1940 and 1960 when the citadels of segregation were challenged but not yet toppled. He thus dwells with great affection on the justly famous tale retold in Hidden Figures, where Katherine Johnson, a genuine math prodigy, did by hand the calculations that the astronaut John Glenn used as the basis of his decision to make his historic Friendship 7 flight in 1962. Riley rightly sees not weakness, but part of an indomitable will to overcome the ravages of segregation.
It is not just individual cases on which Riley relies. He also skillfully weaves together statistics that indicate the high rate of black progress in the postwar era between 1940 and 1960 when “the poverty rate for blacks fell nearly in half, from 87 percent to 47 percent,” correctly observing that it is not credible to attribute this rise to Lyndon Johnson’s vaunted “war on poverty” that began only after the huge gains had appeared. These massive gains, notes Riley, have been documented by the distinguished black economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, in addition to John McWhorter and Shelby Steel.
Missing from this is an explanation of the “other factors” contributing to this remarkable growth in the face of systematic racism and strong all-white unions. That account is strengthened once we recognize the proposition that the key enemy to all progress is the use of force that blocks people from any gainful form of employment. In the South, such force was prevalent and led to one of the major factors of black advancement, the rapid rise of migration (as noted by Isabel Wilkinson in The Warmth of Other Suns) to the North, where there was still segregation but with this difference: A person only needs to get one job in a sprawling economy—a string of refusals may lower the equilibrium wage but it will never shut black workers out of the market. As the wages for white workers were bid up by segregationist employers, the talents of black workers became more attractive so that the few employers that tapped into the market had a competitive advantage that profit-conscious employers of all races could not ignore. And by that simple dynamic black workers could earn wages competitive to those of white workers even under segregation.
At this point, it is important to mention a concurrent theme that Riley does not develop, namely that progressive New Deal legislation actually hampered black and other minority workers. Thus black and white workers in rival railway unions during the 1920s got roughly equal wages until the Railway Act of 1926 forced both groups into a single, white-run majority union that resulted in black workers being shunted off into inferior jobs. The Supreme Court created a duty of “fair representation” across races in Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railway Co. (1944), telling white union bosses they had a fiduciary duty to give blacks equal jobs. Yet that racially divisive program persisted at least until 1957 when the same union was charged in Conley v. Gibson with the identical abuses. Separate was in this instance better than equal.
Nor was this an isolated incident, for the minimum wage law often had the same effect of shutting out less-skilled black workers from competing for jobs by offering their services for lower wages that gave them a vital first chance to get on the job train. As Walter Williams observed, starting in 1948, these conditions created a sharp differential in levels of black and white labor participation that persists today. The same difficulty with progressive protective legislation was also at work in medical education where Abraham Flexner’s 1910 study sought to impose higher standards on the profession that resulted in the closure of many medical schools, often run by black groups in the period of segregation. As Riley notes, many of these black physicians treated white patients, so that everyone loses when there are gratuitous restrictions on contractual freedom. Riley is no mindless Candide—he well understood that some degrees of freedom were manifestly better than none.
The second key theme that Riley develops can be summarized by the old maxim that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He does a skillful job in explaining how the “goalpost moves” with the various accounts of affirmative action. The original use of that term in Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 was meant to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Rooting out various embedded forms of discrimination is one thing, but putting in place a new system that makes these reverse preferences into the law of the land is quite another. And it is that extension which morphs into a prolonged account of “a History of Retrogression,” in Riley’s well-chosen phrase, that starts in the 1970s. There are all sorts of social slights given to the likes of Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Justice Clarence Thomas because of the implicit assumption that their successes in life were attributable to their color and not their abilities.
More relevant is that in the modern era, as in earlier times, Riley documents that on net affirmative action programs did more harm than good, coming as they did after the undeniable levels of black progress between 1950 and 1970. This was in part because the overall growth in the economy was higher in the 1950s and ’60s (at around 4 percent) than in the 1970s and ’80s, where it was about 2.75 percent or about 32 percent less, validating once again the John F. Kennedy observation that a rising tide lifts all boats—with the exception of affirmative action programs that slowed down the increase in black wages.
Many of the headwinds were from those affirmative action programs as well, including the breakup of two-parent households brought in part by generous welfare benefits, which was a far worse situation than in the 1920s, when unified black families were far more common. And the fashionable modes of progressive teaching in places like New York and California have (adjusting for race) fallen behind the scores in Mississippi and Louisiana, where the emphasis on teaching reading through phonics has had a far greater success. And at the university level, the huge, but often concealed gaps, between Asian and white students on the one hand, and black students on the other does nobody any good by putting black students in settings where they are likely to fail. Riley rightly castigates activists like Ibram X. Kendi for treating inflammatory racist policies that only divert attention as to what should be done.
All this in some sense is a prelude to Riley’s paean to Chief Justice John Roberts for his famous remark in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), where he writes for the Court’s majority, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” But it is here where I think that a demurrer is appropriate. There are many people in this country who think that legitimacy in a democracy depends on respecting to at least some extent the preferences not only of majorities but of significant minorities, including those who take issue with a strict race-blind standard because they think the composition of any institution is more than the sum of its parts. Many of these people, like myself, can oppose the extreme measures that Riley condemns and still think that, with the advantage of local information, they can decide best how to select and run a class—where the secret is that the best managers of affirmative action programs are those who are uneasy about their adoption.
But that middle position is ever harder to maintain in an age of intense partisan politics, so we are often in practice stuck with regimes where government sponsorship expands affirmative action programs beyond their proper scope, or where a Roberts-like condemnation puts every version of these programs off-limits. As the eternal optimist, I hope that we can work to the more temperate provision, without much evidence to support my hopes. Remember Mark Twain once wrote, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” I am still uncertain whether he is right.
The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed
by Jason L. Riley
Basic Books, 288 pp., $30
Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU Law School, a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at UT-Austin, and Senior Lecturer and James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School.
