How affirmative action failed Black Americans, according to author and WSJ columnist Jason Riley

Yahoo

19-05-2025

In 2023, after the Supreme Court said universities could no longer use race when considering potential students, Jason Riley watched with interest as proponents of affirmative action spoke in 'apocalyptic' terms of how this would affect Black Americans.
It wasn't a viewpoint he shared.
That's because Riley, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, knew the history of Black advancement in the United States — how, for example, the poverty rate among Blacks had fallen in the decades preceding the era of affirmative action policies.
At the same time, most Black Americans were enjoying the benefits of what some now call a hallmark of 'white privilege' — a two-parent home.
The gap between white and Black earnings was closing as affirmative action policies began to take hold across the U.S., along with other social programs that were expected to help lift Black families economically. But instead, they wound up harming the people they were supposed to help, Riley argues in his new book 'The Affirmative Action Myth.'
'The point here is not to in any way downplay or romanticize the country's awful history of slavery and racial segregation, or to imply that racism is over and done with. Racism still exists, and I don't expect to live to see the day when it doesn't,' Riley writes in the book.
But, he said, 'the relevant question is to what extent does past or current racism, in whatever form it takes, explain ongoing racial disparities, and to what extent are racial differences in outcomes being driven primarily by other factors that don't get nearly the amount of attention that racial-bias explanations have received,' Riley writes.
One of those oft-overlooked factors, Riley said in a conversation with Deseret, is the decline of the two-parent family, which he said has become unfashionable to address in some political circles.
Meanwhile, another form of affirmative action — diversity, equity and inclusion programs — proliferated across the U.S. after the death of George Floyd in 2020. Such programs have pushed aside the concepts of color-blindness and equality to the detriment of Black Americans, Riley writes in the book. Moreover, 'affirmative action has been given undue credit for the Black upward mobility that has occurred.'
Riley, who is married to Deseret contributor Naomi Schaefer Riley, and whose previous books include 'Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell' and 'Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed,' spoke with the Deseret News about the trajectory of the Black middle class in America, the costs of racial preference programs and how both Black and white elites helped promote affirmative action despite these policies' unpopularity among ordinary Americans.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
DN: It's been a little more than 10 years since your book 'Please Stop Helping Us' was published. What has changed for Black Americans since that book was published?
JR: I did cover some of this material in 'Please Stop Helping Us,' but that was also about other issues — minimum wage laws and school choice and all kinds of different policy efforts to help the Black underclass. This is a deeper dive into racial preferences. The impetus was the Supreme Court decision in 2023, striking down racial preferences in college admissions.
The decision was not particularly surprising, but there was all kind of apocalyptic talk about how the end of racial preferences would impact Blacks. People were saying this will be the end of the Black middle class, that racial preferences had created the Black middle class and that college campuses will be whitewashed, Blacks won't be able to get ahead in this country.
And I said, wait a minute, there was a significant Black middle class long before affirmative action policies became commonplace, and it was growing at a much faster rate than it was growing during the first few decades of affirmative action. So the idea that the Black middle class existence is based on the existence of racial preferences and affirmative action was just not something that comported with the track record, with history.
DN: Since it's just been two years, it's too early to tell if any of those apocalyptic predictions will come true. At what point can we be sure that there was no harm from the ruling?
JR: It's just been two years since the Supreme Court decision, but keep in mind that 9 or 10 states had already banned racial preferences in higher education, going back decades — California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Michigan — so we have some idea of what higher education will look like without racial preferences in college admissions. We don't have to guess what will happen.
California, way back in the 1990s, passed a ballot initiative that ended racial preferences in college admissions. Initially, Black enrollment at the most selective colleges in the system — Berkeley and UCLA — dropped. But throughout the University of California system, Black enrollment and Hispanic enrollment increased. Not only did enrollment increase, but so did Black graduation rates and grade point averages, by a lot in both cases.
So more kids were going to UC-Santa Cruz, UC-Riverside, UC-Santa Barbara and so forth, where they were better matched with the other students, and were apparently thriving. They were also graduating from the more difficult disciplines at higher rates — science, engineering, math.
'Affirmative action is sold in the name of helping the Black poor, but in practice, it has helped Blacks who were already well off become even better well off.'
Jason Riley
What this shows me is that a policy that had been put in place to increase the ranks of the Black middle class had in practice been producing fewer Black lawyers and doctors and physicists and engineers than we would have had in the absence of the policy.
I'm not at all concerned about what will happen if Yale and Georgetown and Duke can no longer admit Black students with SAT scores 300 points below those the average student at the school just because they want more Black faces on campus. I think we have plenty of evidence of what will transpire when those policies go away.
DN: Can you talk about the proliferation of DEI initiatives across the country? Were they a kind of a replacement for affirmative action?
JR: DEI is affirmative action in a different guise, lowering standards, a focus on outcomes rather than opportunity; DEI shares the same goals, and methods frankly, as affirmative action. The biggest reason they took off might be the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, which gave DEI a lot of legs, not only on campus but in the corporate world and in the nonprofit sector.
Let me add, I don't think the folks pushing DEI or racial preferences are going to give up, just because of this ruling. I liken it to what took place after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling on school desegregation. It's not as if the southern segregationists threw up their hands and said, 'Oh well, I guess we're going to have to desegregate, the Supreme Court has spoken.' We had decades of further segregation and judicial rulings and lawsuits and so forth in an attempt to enforce Brown vs. Board of Education.
Similarly today, you have a progressive left that is adamantly opposed to color-blind policies. Color-blind has become a dirty word on the political left today, so I don't expect them to give up. You're going to see them trying to find end-runs around race, perhaps using class as a proxy for race, and you'll see a continuation at the K-12 level, trying to get rid of test schools, high schools that use entrance exams, getting rid of gifted and talented programs … anything that results in any kind of racial disparity, anything that emphasizes objective standards, meritocracy, will be under attack, and I think they will continue to fight this, and those of us who oppose these policies cannot let our guard down going forward.
DN: Another policy that keeps coming back is reparations, which are in the news again, even as DEI policies are being rolled back under the Trump administration.
JR: The reparations folks are really asking a bit too much of the American public in the year 2025. Most white Americans today trace their ancestry to people who came here after the Civil War, so the reparations folks are really asking white Americans who aren't even descendants of slaveholders to pay reparations to Black people who were never slaves. And I don't think this argument is going to get very far.
The other problem I have with the reparationists is that, to me, the policy amounts to yet another huge wealth redistribution scheme. And we've had that in this country, time and again. That's what the Great Society programs were all about in the 1960s and early 1970s. If we could address social inequality with government checks in the mail, we would have solved poverty a long time ago. And I am not at all convinced that one more huge wealth redistribution scheme will get the job done.
There does seem to be an appetite for it on the progressive left; you still see popular writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of 'The 1619 Project,' pushing for it — in fact, 'The 1619 Project' is now part of the K-12 curriculum in thousands of school districts all over the country. So I think the issue will, for no other reason than that, continue to germinate. I just don't see it going anywhere. I think it's a political loser for Democrats, but right now, progressives still seem to be firmly in control of the Democratic Party, so you're going to see issues like reparations continue to percolate.
DN: Can you talk a little bit about the role the media plays in perpetuating — in your language — the 'myth of affirmative action'?
JR: The doomsday chatter around the Supreme Court decision in 2023, a lot of that was coming out of the elite Black left — Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, cable news personalities, Black politicians, Black academics. The reason is because they have been the ones who benefited from the policies, to the extent that these policies have done any good. Affirmative action is sold in the name of helping the Black poor, but in practice, it has helped Blacks who were already well off become even better well off.
If you look at income data from the late 1960s through the first 25 years or so of affirmative action, you'll see that the highest earning Blacks, the top 20%, saw their share of income grow throughout the '70s, '80s and early '90s — about the same rate as top-earning whites. Among the bottom share of Blacks, their income fell in that same period at more than double the rate of the lowest earning whites in this country. So affirmative action, to the extent that it benefited anyone, benefited Black people who were already better off, and those are the ones who defend these policies.
The media has played a role in this because it has often turned to Black elites to serve as spokesmen for all Blacks — in many areas, not just affirmative action. It's clear that the opinions of Black elites are not the opinions of rank-and-file Blacks, and oftentimes, Black elites want to go in a completely different direction … For example, while the elites were denouncing the Supreme Court decision and continuing to express support for racial preferences, polls showed that most Blacks were opposed to affirmative action and agreed with the Supreme Court decision. ...
Look at an issue like voter ID laws in this country — Democrats love to rail against voter ID laws, but a majority of Black people support voter ID laws. Look at charter schools, tax credits, again, opposed by Black elites, supported overwhelmingly by Black people. So the media has continued to turn to these Black spokesmen to speak on behalf of Blacks and given the general public the impression that the average Black person shares the agenda of the NAACP or Al Sharpton or Black Lives Matter, when in fact, that oftentimes is simply not the case. So I do blame my own profession for keeping these folks on speed-dial when they're not representative of most Black people.
DN: In the Daily Wire film 'Am I Racist?' Matt Walsh talked to ordinary people who found the (racial justice) concepts he was presenting to them ridiculous … The film 'American Fiction' also made fun of elite attitudes about race. How much can movies like this, and Hollywood in general, make a difference in the national discourse about race?
JR: I've seen both of those films, and they're not just highlighting the disconnect between Black elites and Black rank-and-file, but also the disconnect between white elites and white rank-and-file. The 'Am I Racist?' film, I think does a very good job of that, talking to everyday people who are clearly not on the same page as your average liberal professor at Columbia or Yale.
When I describe how out-of-touch Black elites are, I really am describing how out-of-touch intellectual elites of any race are, compared to everyday folks in this country. There's a long history of intellectuals as a class being generally far to the left of everyday voters and that continues to be the case in America today.
My general thinking is, and others have said this, that Hollywood is sort of downstream from culture; it's not driving it, it's reflecting it.
If you go back, there are some films that have made a huge splash – Al Gore's environmental film, for example — and Hollywood is a medium that the left likes to use to try and advance its agenda. But it's hit or miss how much Hollywood drives the discussion, as opposed to reflecting the discussion that's already taking place.
DN: You talk in the book about what has been called the 'privilege' of growing up with two parents. What can we do to reclaim that privilege for children of all races?
JR: One thing we can do is start talking about how important it is, and I'm not being snarky here. This is a conversation people don't want to have on the political left.
Melissa Kearney published a book, 'The Two-Parent Privilege,' and she says in the book, that when she was doing research, her academic colleagues discouraged her from writing about this … (saying) you don't discuss family formation when you discuss what's driving income inequality in this country.
That is absolutely insane. We know all of the negative outcomes associated with absent fathers in the home, not only in the household income being lower, but also bad outcomes for children: more teen pregnancy, higher high school dropout rates, involvement with the criminal justice system, and on and on. And yet we're not supposed to talk about fathers not being involved with their children? One thing we can do is to start discussing these things more openly and honestly than we have been.
Just to illustrate how important it is, one of the things that was happening in the late '60s, is that you had a convergence of Black and white incomes that was occurring; the white-Black gap in income was narrowing. But right around the late 1960s, this trend starts to slow, and one of the reasons it slows is because around this time, you begin to see a proliferation of Black single-parent homes. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, there were far more Black two-parent homes; Black marriage rates exceeded white marriage rates.
Single-parent homes can't compete economically with two-parent homes. You can see how family breakdown has led to all kinds of bad economic outcomes. Affirmative action was not going to be able to make up for that.