Please Stop Helping Us_How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

  Moreover, in those instances where the political success of a minority group has come first, the result has often been slower socioeconomic progress. The Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century arrived from a country where 80 percent of the population was rural. Yet they settled in industrial centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and took low-skill jobs. Their rise from poverty was especially slow—as late as 1920, 80 percent of all Irish women working in America were domestic servants—despite the fact that Irish-run political organizations dominated local government in several big cities with large Irish populations. “To most Americans today, it is not immediately obvious that the black migrants who left the rural South for the industrial cities of the North starting in the 1940s resemble the Irish immigrants who left rural Ireland and crossed the ocean to the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard starting in the 1840s,” wrote political historian Michael Barone. “Yet the resemblances are many.”22 Among other things, explained Barone,

  both groups looked to control of government as a means of advancement, and both excelled at politics. They built their own political organizations, modeled on their churches: the Irish, hierarchical political machines; blacks, ad hoc organizations assembled by charismatic local leaders. They were initially the object of competition between Democrats and Whigs or Republicans, but within about twenty years both became heavily, almost unanimously, Democratic. Both used politics to create large numbers of public sector jobs for their own people. In some cities where they were majorities—Boston and Jersey City for the Irish, Detroit and Washington for blacks—they created predatory politics, which overloaded the public payroll and neglected to enforce the law, ultimately damaging the cities’ private economies.23

  Yet it was only after the decline of the famed Irish political machines that average Irish incomes began to rise. Irish patronage politics was not the deciding factor in group advancement, Barone noted.

  Society addressed the ills of the Irish through private charities, the settlement house movement, temperance societies, and police forces, all of which tried to improve individuals’ conduct and to help people conform to the standards of the larger society. The Irish rose to average levels of income and education by the 1950s, and in 1960 an Irish Catholic was elected president of the United States.24

  Sowell and Barone are conservatives, but some liberal scholars have made the same point. In their 1991 case study of Atlanta, political scientist Gary Orfield and coauthor Carole Ashkinaze described the city as “a center of black power” that at the time had been run by “two nationally prominent black mayors” for more than a decade. “Atlanta has been celebrated as a black Mecca, where the doors are open and a critical mass of black leadership already exists,” they wrote. “Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson”—elected to the first of his three terms in 1973—“expressed this in his frequent public promises to give minorities ‘a piece of the pie.’” Jackson and his successor, Andrew Young, implemented racial preference programs for hiring city workers and contractors, and the number of successful black firms increased rapidly. But according to Orfield and Ashkinaze, average blacks in Atlanta were left behind, and the black underclass lost ground.

  “If economic growth and black political leadership were sufficient to resolve racial differences in the 1980s, tremendous mobility for the region’s poor blacks should have taken place,” they wrote. “Indeed, some blacks made it. On average, however, the situation of the black population relative to whites became significantly worse in very important respects.” The authors went on to make a broader point about intentions versus results. “The late 1960s’ prophecies of dangerous racial separation have given way to a vague hope that racial inequalities are being resolved, perhaps through the election of black officials,” wrote Orfield and Ashkinaze. “Many blacks have reached positions of local power, such as mayor, county commission chairman or superintendent of schools, positions undreamed of 30 years ago. But these achievements do not necessarily produce success for blacks as a whole. In fact, they may contribute to our lack of knowledge about low-income blacks. Black officials, like their white predecessors, tend to publicize successes, not problems.”25 History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility.

  The 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed to ensure black access to the ballot, particularly in the states of the Old Confederacy where blacks risked life and limb to exercise their basic rights. Vernon Jordan, a former head of the National Urban League, called it “probably the most significant accomplishment” of the civil rights movement. The right to vote is a cornerstone of our democracy, but it was routinely denied to blacks in the states where most of them lived. “Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks were roughly one-tenth of the Deep South’s registered voters,” explained J. Harvie Wilkinson in his civil rights history, From Brown to Bakke. “By 1970 they comprised approximately 30 percent of the Mississippi electorate, a quarter of that in South Carolina, a fifth in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana.”26 In 1964, black voter registration in Mississippi was under 7 percent, the lowest in the region. A year after the act passed, black voter registration in Mississippi had climbed to about 60 percent, the highest in the South. The law was a success.

  “Nothing short of radical federal intervention would have enfranchised southern blacks,” wrote voting-rights scholar Abigail Thernstrom. “Sometimes good legislation works precisely as initially intended.”27 But like so much civil rights legislation, the law’s justification soon shifted from equal opportunity to equal results. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires states with a history of racially motivated voter intimidation to have any changes in voting procedures cleared by a federal court or the Justice Department. This so-called preclearance provision, always intended to be temporary, was slated to sunset after five years, but Congress renewed the provision repeatedly well after it became obvious that ballot access was no longer a problem for blacks. In 1982 a permanent part of the law, Section 2, was amended to allow for racial gerrymandering, or the drawing of voting districts to ensure that a candidate of a particular race is elected. The measure of success was no longer whether blacks had ballot access. Instead, it was whether enough black officials were being elected to office, and liberals became hell-bent on using Sections 2 and 5 to achieve proportional racial representation. “In 1965, the Voting Rights Act had been simple, transparent and elegant. Its aim was to secure basic Fifteenth Amendment rights in a region where they had been egregiously denied,” wrote Thernstrom. “But the cumulative effect of these amendments was to turn the law into a constitutionally problematic, unprecedented attempt to impose what voting rights activists, along with their allies in Congress, the Justice Department, and the judiciary, viewed as a racially fair distribution of political power.”28 In 2006, Congress renewed Section 5 for another twenty-five years.

  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. Never mind that in 1982 five black candidates from majority-white districts won seats in the North Carolina State House of Representatives. Or that from 1983 to 1995 a majority-white district in Missouri was represented in Congress by Alan Wheat, a black Democrat. Or that between 1991 and 1997 Gary Franks, a black Republican from Connecticut, represented a congressional district that was 88 percent white. Or that in 1996 Sanford Bishop, a black Democrat from Georgia, easily won reelection to Congress in a district that was only 35 percent black. Or that in 2010 Tim Scott of South Carolina and Allen West of Florida, both black Republicans, were elected to Congress from districts that are overwhelmingly white. Or that Representatives Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Keith Ellison of Minnesota are black Democrats who represent districts that are more than 60 percent white.
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  In 2008 Obama not only won the presidency of a majority-white country; he did better among white voters in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia than John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. Yet after the Supreme Court, in its 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder, effectively nullified Section 5’s “preclearance” provisions by ruling that Congress was using an outdated formula to determine which states must have federal oversight of their voting laws, Obama said he was “deeply disappointed,” and complained that the ruling “upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent.” The president and others on the left wanted the court to ignore the fact that, as Chief Justice John Roberts phrased it in his majority opinion, “history did not end in 1965.” Roberts took Congress to task for pretending that nothing had changed in nearly half a century, writing:

  By the time the [Voting Rights Act of 1965] was reauthorized in 2006, there had been 40 more years of it. In assessing the “current need” for a preclearance system that treats States differently from one another today, that history cannot be ignored. During that time, largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers. And yet the coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current needs.

  What do the current data show? Among other things, the statistics reveal that black voter registration is higher in the South than it is in other regions of the country. They show that the racial gap in voter registration and turnout is lower in the states originally covered under Section 5 than it is nationwide. Finally, they show that black turnout now exceeds white turnout in five of those six states, and that in the sixth state the disparity is less than one-half of one percent. In other words, it shows tremendous voting-rights progress.

  The political left, led by Obama, played down this racial progress and expressed disappointment with the outcome of the case, but their dismay had nothing to do with any fear that black access to balloting was in jeopardy. After all, most of the Voting Rights Act is permanent, and those who feel that a voting procedure is racially discriminatory still have legal recourse. What really concerns liberals is that the ruling could make it more difficult for them to use the Voting Rights Act to guarantee certain election results. As Roger Clegg and Joshua Thompson, who filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, explained, “the principal use that federal civil-rights officials now make of Section 5 is to require racially gerrymandered and racially segregated voting districts.” The argument is that racial minorities are entitled to a proportionate number of voting districts in which they are the majority. “Think about how far from the ideals of the civil-rights movement the Left’s definition of civil rights has led us,” wrote Clegg and Thompson. “Universities must be able to discriminate against students on the basis of skin color, and voters must be required to vote only among those of their own kind.”29

  The irony is that these efforts to go beyond the original intent of the Voting Rights Act in the name of helping blacks politically have almost certainly hampered blacks politically by limiting their appeal to nonblack voters. By creating “safe” black districts, racial gerrymandering has facilitated racial polarization and hyperpartisanship. Minority candidates have less incentive to make appeals to people outside of their racial or ethnic voting base, so winning statewide becomes more difficult. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus typically have voting records that are more liberal than the average white Democrat. “Black political progress might be greater today had the race-based districting been viewed as a temporarily needed remedy for unmistakably racist voting in the region that was only reluctantly accepting blacks as American citizens,” wrote Thernstrom. 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.”30

  One reason that returns on black political investment have been so meager is that black politicians often act in ways that benefit themselves but don’t represent the concerns of most blacks. So in addition to being overly reliant on politicians, blacks typically have poor political representation. “Pollsters have long known of the remarkable gap between the leaders and the led in black America,” wrote Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

  A 1985 survey found that most blacks favored the death penalty and prayer in public schools while most black leaders opposed these things. Most blacks opposed school busing, while most black leaders favored it. Three times as many blacks opposed abortion rights as their leaders did. Indeed, on many key social issues, blacks are more conservative than whites.31

  As more blacks have joined the American mainstream over the past half century, this disconnect between the black politicians and civil rights leadership and the people they supposedly represent has only grown. Black America “isn’t just as fissured as white America; it is more so,” wrote Gates.

  And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor’s guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism—something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.32

  For years, black political leaders in New York City aligned themselves with labor unions to block the construction of a Walmart in a low-income community with persistently high unemployment. According to a Marist poll taken in 2011, 69 percent of blacks in New York would welcome a Walmart in their neighborhood. Yet these black leaders put the interests of Big Labor, which doesn’t like the retailer’s stance toward unions, ahead of the interests of struggling black people who could use the jobs and low-priced goods. School choice is another area where black politicians continue to oppose policies overwhelmingly supported by black voters in general and the black underclass in particular. In 2012 voters in Georgia approved Amendment 1, a ballot initiative to expand school choice in the form of charter schools in a state where one-third of high-school freshmen failed to graduate in four years. Black voters were the strongest backers of the initiative, which passed 59 percent to 41 percent. “One of the most striking results of the vote on Amendment 1,” wrote journalist Douglas Blackmon, “is the absolutely extraordinary level of support received from African-American voters.” The measure was supported by 61 percent of voters in the twenty Georgia counties where blacks are half of the population. And in the thirteen counties that comprise more than half of the state’s black population, support was an even higher 62 percent. “The bottom line: Georgia’s black counties overwhelmingly desire dramatic new alternatives to the conventional school systems that have failed them for more than a century,” wrote Blackmon.

  That level of support flatly contradicts one of the flimsiest canards used to criticize Amendment 1—and charter schools in general. That is: the idea that somehow charter schools end up hurting minority or poorer students while disproportionately helping white and middle class children. The actual performance of charter schools in Georgia has always defied such claims. African-American students and all children living in urban areas with failed conventional public schools, like Atlanta, have benefited far more from charters than any other groups.33

  Yet within a week of the amendment’s passage, the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus joined a lawsuit to block expansion of charter schools in the state.34

  Whatever else the election of Barack Obama represented—some have called it redemption, others have called it the triumph of style over substance—it was the ultimate victory for people who believe that black political gains are of utmost importance to black progress in Ameri
ca. C. T. Vivian, a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr., told Obama biographer David Remnick that “Martin Luther King was our prophet—in biblical terms, the prophet of our age. The politician of our age, who comes along to follow that prophet, is Barack Obama. Martin laid the moral and spiritual base for the political reality to follow.” Since the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, wrote Remnick,

  the liberal constituencies of America had been waiting for a savior figure. Barack Obama proposed himself. In the eyes of his supporters, he was a promise in a bleak landscape; he possessed an inspirational intelligence and an evident competence . . . he was an embodiment of multi-ethnic inclusion when the country was becoming no longer white in its majority. This was the promise of his campaign, its reality or vain romance, depending on your view.35

  We’ll call it vain romance. The sober truth is that the most important civil rights battles were fought and won four decades before the Obama presidency. The black underclass continues to face many challenges, but they have to do with values and habits, not oppression from a manifestly unjust society. Blacks have become their own worst enemy, and liberal leaders do not help matters by blaming self-inflicted wounds on whites or “society.” The notion that racism is holding back blacks as a group, or that better black outcomes cannot be expected until racism has been vanquished, is a dodge. And encouraging blacks to look to politicians to solve their problems does them a disservice. As the next chapter explains, one lesson of the Obama presidency—maybe the most important one for blacks—is that having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home.