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

by Jason L. Riley

  Moreover, these efforts were taking place during a period of civil rights gains and declining anti-black bias, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan explained to an interviewer in 1967:

  In the South . . . there were a great many outcomes—situations, customs, rules—which were inimical to Negro rights, which violated Negro rights and which were willed outcomes. Intended, planned, desired outcomes. And it was, therefore, possible to seek out those individuals who were willing the outcomes and to coerce them to cease to do so.

  Now, you come to New York City, with its incomparable expenditures on education; and you find that, in the twelfth grade, Negro students are performing at the sixth grade level in mathematics. Find me the man who wills that outcome. Find the legislator who has held back money, the teacher who’s held back his skills, the school superintendent who’s deliberately discriminating, the curriculum supervisor who puts the wrong books in, the architect who builds the bad schools. He isn’t there!24

  Ideally, welfare dependency should be a passing phase, and for most people it is. But for too many black families it has become the norm, and even those who escape it often return. The Economist magazine, citing a 2011 Chicago Federal Reserve study, noted that “roughly 60% of black Americans whose parents had an above-average income fell below the average as adults. The figure for whites was 36%.”25 An earlier Pew study found that some 45 percent of blacks (versus 15 percent of whites) who were born into the middle class in the 1960s had slid into poverty or near-poverty. Since it is unlikely that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow are hopscotching generations, perhaps something else is to blame. By retarding or otherwise interfering with black self-development, government programs have tended to do more harm than good. And black elites who choose to focus on the behavior of whites are encouraging these youngsters to do the same, and thus perpetuating the problem.

  A sad irony of the black cultural obsession with avoiding white behavior is that the habits and attitudes associated with ghetto life today can be traced not to Mother Africa but to Europeans who immigrated to the American South. From 1790 until the Civil War, approximately half of the white population of the South “was of Irish, Scottish, or Welsh extraction, and about half of the remainder had originated in the western and northern English uplands,” according to Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture. These immigrants brought their Old World habits and patterns to America and passed them along to the people who lived around them, which included most black people in America. Social critics of the period, including Frederick Law Olmstead and Alexis de Tocqueville, contrasted the behavior of these immigrants with those from other regions of Europe who settled in the northern United States. So have modern-day scholars of nineteenth-century Southern culture, like McWhiney, Forrest McDonald, and David Hackett Fischer. And what’s fascinating about their descriptions is how much they resemble black ghetto culture today. In the opening essay of his 2005 book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell neatly summarized some of these findings:

  The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists.26

  Most whites have of course abandoned this behavior, and have risen socioeconomically as a result. How ironic that so many blacks cling to these practices in an effort to avoid “acting white.” And how tragic that so many liberals choose to put an intellectual gloss on black cultural traits that deserve disdain. The civil rights movement, properly understood, was about equal opportunity. But a group must be culturally equipped to seize it. Blacks today on balance remain ill equipped, and the problem isn’t white people.

  03

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  During the summer of 1993, between my junior and senior years of college, I worked as an intern at USA Today. The newspaper’s offices were located in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., but I stayed with an aunt and uncle who lived on the other side of the District, in Maryland. I owned a car and drove to the office, and since I was assigned to the sports desk I often didn’t leave work until well after midnight, once the West Coast baseball games had been completed.

  The fastest way home was straight though D.C., though my uncle had warned me that it wasn’t the safest route at that time of night. In the early 1990s Washington was dubbed the “murder capital” because it led the country in per capita homicides. But then, 21-year-old males aren’t exactly known for being risk averse or heeding advice from their elders. Sure enough, one night after work, around 1 a.m., I was sitting at a red light when no fewer than four squad cars converged on me, lights flashing and sirens screaming. Seconds later police officers were pointing guns at me as I sat cowering in my Volkswagen Fox. I was ordered to exit the vehicle, to face away from it, and to place my hands on my head. I was not-so-gently pushed to the pavement facedown, then handcuffed and searched, along with the car, while two officers kept their weapons trained on me. When the police finished I was told that I had fit the description of someone they were after, something about me having New York license plates and problems with gunrunners from up North. They apologized and were gone as fast as they had arrived.

  I remember getting back into my car and just sitting there in a daze, sweating. The engine was off and the windows were up and it was a muggy summer night. Eventually another car pulled up to the light behind me and honked because I wasn’t moving. I pulled over to the curb, collected myself and the items from my glove compartment (mostly cassette tapes) that D.C.’s finest had left in the passenger seat and on the floor, and then I drove home. I changed my route home the next day and never doubted my uncle again.

  It was certainly the most terrifying encounter I’d had with the police, but it wasn’t the first or the last. Growing up in Buffalo, New York, in the 1980s I was stopped several times by the cops while walking alone through white residential neighborhoods where friends lived. When the police asked what I was doing there and I told them, sometimes they wanted the family’s name for verification. As a youngster I wondered if these neighborhoods were so well policed that cops really did know the names of everyone who lived there, or whether they just wanted me to think that they did. I don’t know if the police stopped me of their own volition, or whether a neighbor looking out his window had spotted an unfamiliar black kid and dialed 911. I never asked.

  The summer I graduated from high school my father helped me buy a car—the aforementioned VW—and the first thing I did was head over to the home of a former classmate to show him my new ride. I noticed a police car following me as I turned off the thoroughfare and headed into my friend’s neighborhood. I had to make several more turns to reach his block, and the cop turned every time I did. Naturally, I started getting nervous. Finally, about four houses from my destination, he hit the siren. The officer walked up to my car and asked me where I was headed. I pointed to the house. Then he looked at the temporary registration on my windshield and asked, “What’s that?” I said the car was new and that I was still waiting for the permanent registration to come in the mail. The officer told me to wait while he checked out my story. So I waited.

  It was a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon. People—white people—were outside. Neighbors were chatting. Kids were playing in their front yards. And now everyone had paused to stare at me, this young black guy who’d just been pulled over by the police. When homeowners look outside and see cops, they get curious. When they see cops stopping a black kid, they get nervous. The officer finally came back to the car and told me I was free to go, but I no longer had any interest in showing my friend my new car. I just wanted
to get out of that neighborhood, which is probably what that cop wanted, and thanks to him, probably what everyone else on that street who witnessed our encounter wanted. I obliged.

  These episodes would continue in college. While attending the University at Buffalo, where I lived off campus, I was stopped regularly while driving through the main drag of a tony suburb on my way to morning classes. I would hand over my license and registration and then sit in the car for ten minutes or so while the officers did whatever they do while you wait. I was never ticketed during these stops, or even told that I did anything wrong. I didn’t ask why I was being pulled over and the officers didn’t feel the need to volunteer an explanation. Sometimes I wouldn’t be pulled over, just tailed by a police cruiser until I reached the town line. But I was stopped often enough that I eventually started taking a different route to campus, even though it added ten to fifteen minutes to the trip.

  Like so many other young black men, I was also followed in department stores, saw people cross the street as I approached, and watched women clutch their purses in elevators when they didn’t simply decide to ride a different one. It was part of growing up. As a teenager I didn’t dress like a thug or go around scowling at people. I tucked in my shirts, embraced belts, and had no pressing desire to show others my underpants. My closet was full of khakis, button-downs, and crew-neck sweaters (still is), and when I donned a baseball cap it was turned the right way. My VW looked like a VW. It wasn’t tricked out with chrome rims and tinted windows. When I played music in my car, it ran to De La Soul and Talking Heads rather than Ice Cube, and in any case could not be heard several blocks away. All of which is to say that my suspicion-raising features, when it came to cops or pedestrians, obviously were my race and my age (and I gather mostly the latter, since the harassment stopped decades ago and I’m still as black as I was at 17). Was I profiled based on negative stereotypes about young black men? Almost certainly. But then everyone profiles based on limited knowledge, including me.

  In high school I worked as a stock boy in a supermarket. The people caught stealing were almost always black. As a result black shoppers got more scrutiny from everyone, including black workers. During college I worked the overnight shift at a gas station with a minimart. Again, the people I caught stealing were almost always black. So when people who looked like me entered the store my antenna went up. Similarly, when I see groups of young black men walking down the street at night I cross to the other side. When I see them on subways I switch cars. I am not judging them as individuals. Why take the risk? If I guess wrong my wife is a widow and my children are fatherless. So I make snap judgments with incomplete information.

  My attitude and behavior are hardly unique, even among other blacks. Like white cabdrivers, black cabdrivers have been known to avoid picking up black males at night, something I also experienced firsthand upon moving to New York City after college. Black restaurant owners ask groups of young black diners to prepay for their meals, seat them away from the exit, or take other steps to make sure that the bill is settled. And the lady who is nervous about sharing an elevator with a black man might be black herself. Describing her numerous conversations about racial perceptions with other black women, former Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole wrote, “One of the most painful admissions I hear is: I am afraid of my own people.”1

  Some individuals who avoid encounters with black youths may indeed be acting out of racism, but given that law-abiding blacks exhibit the exact same behavior it’s likely that most people are acting on probability. “If I’m walking down a street in Center City Philadelphia at two in the morning and I hear some footsteps behind me and I turn around and there are a couple of young white dudes behind me, I am probably not going to get very uptight. I am probably not going to have the same reaction if I turn around and there is the proverbial black urban youth behind me,” Theodore McKee, a black federal judge, told an interviewer in the 1990s. “Now, if I can have this reaction—and I’m a black male who has studied martial arts for twenty some odd years and can defend myself—I can’t help but think that the average white judge in the situation will have a reaction that is ten times more intense.”2 (When the interviewer, Linn Washington, also black, was asked on C-SPAN to respond to the judge’s remarks, he said, “I can relate to it because I ride the subways in Philadelphia late at night.”)3

  My encounters with law enforcement growing up were certainly frustrating; I was getting hassled for the past behavior of other blacks. But that doesn’t necessarily make those encounters arbitrary or unreasonable. After all, perceptions of black criminality are based on the reality of high black crime rates. I say that as though it’s a given, and it is a given in the real world. But in the alternate universe of academia and the liberal mainstream media, there is still a raging debate over whether people’s fears of young black men have anything at all to do with the actual behavior of young black men.

  Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, has written an entire book, The New Jim Crow, that blames high black incarceration rates on racial discrimination. She posits that prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to a war on drugs that was launched by the Reagan administration in the 1980s for the express purpose of resegregating society. “This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system,” wrote Alexander.4 “What this book is intended to do—the only thing it is intended to do—is to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetrating racial hierarchy in the United States.”5 Liberals love to have “conversations” about these matters, and Alexander got her wish. The book was a best seller. NPR interviewed her multiple times at length. The New York Times said that Alexander “deserved to be compared to Du Bois.” The San Francisco Chronicle described the book as “The Bible of a social movement.”

  But the conversation that Alexander wants to have glosses over the fact that black men commit a hugely disproportionate number of crimes in the United States. The New Jim Crow is chock-full of data on the racial makeup of prisons, but you will search in vain for anything approaching a sustained discussion of black crime rates. To Alexander and those who share her view, the two are largely unrelated. Black incarceration rates, she wrote, result from “a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control.”6 The author seems reluctant even to acknowledge that black people behind bars have done anything wrong. In her formulation, blacks are simply “far more likely to be labeled criminals”7 and are as blameless as slaves in the antebellum South. “When we say someone was ‘treated like a criminal,’ what we mean to say is that he or she was treated as less than human, like a shameful creature,” Alexander wrote. “Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages.”8 Really?

  When I say that someone is being treated like a criminal, I mean that person is being treated like he broke the law or otherwise did something wrong. (When I want to say someone is being treated as less than human, I say that person is being treated like an animal, not a criminal.) Her chattel slavery and Jim Crow analogies are similarly tortured and yet another effort to explain away stark racial differences in criminality. But unlike prisons, those institutions punished people for being black, not for misbehaving. (A slave who never broke the law remained a slave.) Yet Alexander insists that we blame police and prosecutors and drug laws and societal failures—anything except individual behavior—and even urges the reader to reject the notion of black free will. “The temptation is to insist that black men ‘choose’ to be criminals,” she wrote. “The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted.”9 What Alexander and others who buy her arguments are really asking us to resist are not myths but realities—namely, whic
h groups are more likely to commit crimes and how such trends drive the negative racial stereotypes that are so prevalent among blacks and nonblacks alike.

  In the summer of 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion. President Obama and Attorney General Holder wanted to talk about gun control. The NAACP wanted to talk about racial profiling. Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment, and the supposedly racist criminal justice system. But any candid debate on race and criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has been the case for at least the past half a century.

  Crime began rising precipitously in the 1960s after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, started tilting the scales in favor of the criminals. Some 63 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll taken in 1968 judged the Warren Court, in place from 1953 to 1969, too lenient on crime; but Warren’s jurisprudence was supported wholeheartedly by the Michelle Alexanders of that era, as well as by liberal politicians who wanted to shift blame for criminal behavior away from the criminals. Progressives said that eliminating poverty and racism is the key to lowering crime rates. “You’re not going to make this a better America just because you build more jails. What this country needs are more decent neighborhoods, more educated people, better homes,” said Hubert Humphrey while campaigning for president in 1968. “I do not believe repression alone can build a better society.”10 Popular books of the time, like Karl Menninger’s The Crime of Punishment, argued that “law and order” was an “inflammatory” term with racial overtones. “What it really means,” said Menninger, “is that we should all go out and find the niggers and beat them up.”11