Jason Riley
Appearances
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Well, you laid it out pretty well, and it's good to see you again, Megan. What prompted me to write this book was all the chatter around the Supreme Court decision in 2023, Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. And there was a lot of anticipation that the court would rule the way it eventually did, that racial preferences violated.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
the 14th Amendment, Equal Protection Clause, and were unconstitutional. But the talk in the media, particularly among the left-wing elites, black and white, was that this would be a devastating blow to the black middle class, that these policies that the Supreme Court was about to strike down had created
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
the black middle class and that without special treatment, without racial favoritism, the black middle class would be decimated. And I said, wait a minute, that is not what the historical record shows. There was a black middle class well before affirmative action policies took effect in the 1970s. And in fact, that black middle class was growing at a significantly faster rate
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
than it grew during the era of affirmative action. So that's why I wrote the book, to take on some of these false narratives out there that want to credit government programs and expanded welfare state, racial preferences, and so forth with Black uplift, when in fact that is not what drove Black uplift in this country historically.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Well, it's what it does to any student, Megan, that is admitted without the credentials of the surrounding students at the same institution. That's the issue here. As I've said before, if you admitted to Harvard left-handed redheads, With SAT scores that were 300 points below those of the average Harvard student, you would see left-handed redheads pooling at the bottom of the class.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
You'd see them dropping out at higher rates. You'd see them switching from harder majors to easier majors. That's just the way it works. The most important credential for a student going to any institution is that they have to match the academic preparation of the surrounding kids at that school. And when there's a gap,
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
That is what, that's when you run into trouble and affirmative action mismatches kids with schools. And we often speak of it in racial terms, but the same could be true of children of alumni. The same could be true of student athletes, the children of donors and so forth. Anytime there's a mismatch of the child and the institution, you're going to see those kids pooling at the bottom of the class.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And we have a ton. of evidence showing this. One of my favorite studies that point this out is one done by an economist at Duke University who interviewed freshmen at Duke and asked them what they wanted to major in. And the students that were black Black men in particular were asked whether they wanted to major in the STEM fields or in, I should say, the natural sciences and economics.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And what happened was about 75% or so of Black freshman males at Duke said they wanted to major in natural sciences or economics. But only about 35% ended up with a degree in those fields. So you had a 35-point attrition rate. Among white males, it was four points, the attrition rate. And what the economists showed was that
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
What produced this result, what accounted for this disparity entirely was whether the student had been admitted to the school with the same credentials as other kids at Duke. In other words, Duke admits some black kids that do meet the standards of other kids and some black kids who don't. And that attrition rate could be explained entirely by which black student we were talking about.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Those blacks that had been admitted to Duke with the same credentials as everyone else at Duke ended up with a degree in that major. Those who didn't switched out of the major. And so that shows you the mismatch effect of affirmative action.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Right, and what it also shows is, again, how counterproductive the policy is. So when, for instance, California banned racial admissions back in the mid-90s, and by the way, a number of states, nine or 10 states, even prior to the Supreme Court's decision, had already done this. Big states, Texas, Florida, California. So we have some idea of what's gonna happen in the absence of these policies.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And what happened in California is that, yes, For a period immediately after the ban went into effect, the most selective schools in the California system, Berkeley and UCLA, saw a reduction in Black and Hispanic enrollment. But the University of California system overall saw an increase in enrollment because kids were going to schools where they were better matched.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And more importantly, what California saw was a sharp increase in the graduation rates of Black and Hispanic students throughout the system, including in those more difficult STEM fields, computer science, engineering, physics, and so forth. Much, much higher GPAs, much, much higher graduation rates because kids were being better matched with schools.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And so my point is that a policy that was put in place to help increase the ranks of the Black middle class, at the end of the day, was resulting in fewer Black doctors and Black lawyers and Black engineers than we would have had in the absence of the policy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And I think one of the real tragedies here, Megan, is that when you look at these Black kids who are admitted to some of these selective schools with lower standards, what you find is that they have higher standards than the average college student in this country. They're just lower than they are for students at those more selective schools. So these kids would be hitting it out of the park
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
academically at a less selective institution. I mean, if they're going to Michigan State instead of Michigan, if they're going to North Carolina State instead of UNC, exactly, you're gonna have them graduating with the degrees they want. It's not that these kids are unqualified for college, it's just they have been put into a situation where they're in over their head
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
academically, where the pace that classes are taught at is much faster than they're used to. So you're turning really smart kids into artificial failures in the name of helping them. Oh, so interesting. And so good riddance to affirmative action is what I say.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Yeah, exactly. You have not only turned a lot of kids into artificial failures, the ones who are successful on their own merit, their success is somehow tainted by these policies. No one wants to be, and what self-respecting person wants to be the token on campus or in the workplace? And that is what affirmative action has done.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
It's also reinforces stereotypes and the justices got into this in the majority opinion. If you go to an elite school and you're surrounded by minority kids who clearly don't belong there and are struggling in class and so forth, you leave college with a certain view of the intellectual capabilities of minorities. That's what these programs are doing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
They're reinforcing that stereotype by setting up these kids to fail. And it's a real shame. And the point I'm making in the book is that in the era prior to affirmative action, this is not what was happening. Kids were attending, black kids were attending schools where they met the credentials and they were graduating and they were closing the gap, Megan, with white college graduates.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
The rate at which blacks were entering school and graduating from college was getting closer and closer to the white rate. And what we know from the data is that around 1970, that convergence stalled. The rate of college completion among Blacks is the same today as it was in 1970. That's the legacy of affirmative action.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Yeah, well, the narrative is to talk a lot about the legacy of slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow, not to talk about the legacy of affirmative action or the legacy of the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson. And that's what happened in the 1970s. in the late 1960s, is we had these expansions of government programs.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And I think they interfered with Black development that had been ongoing and ongoing, again, at a much faster pace than before. I mean, when you look, I'll give you an example with employment. In the late 1960s, something like 80% of the least educated Blacks had a job. By the early 1990s, it was down to fewer than half of the least educated blacks had a job.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
There again is affirmative action in practice. And one of the other things that happened during this period, Megan, and it's why affirmative action was so ineffective, I believe, one of the reasons, is the deterioration of the black family.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
So there was not only this convergence going on in terms of educational achievement, there was also a convergence going on in terms of black earnings as a percentage of white earnings. Blacks, again, in the pre-affirmative action, were closing the gap. Gaps were narrowing in economic advancement. So the median income of blacks was getting closer to the median income of household income of whites.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
But what you saw between the late 60s and the early 90s in particular, was a deterioration in Black couple-headed households.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
married blacks heading the household and he saw an explosion of single black parenting and so that economic advancements simply could not keep up among blacks because obviously married couples make more money than single couple than someone who's single and running a household and so because you saw this proliferation of of solo parenting in the black community that economic convergence that narrowing of the black white gap in earnings started moving in the opposite
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
direction and affirmative action could not make up for it. And the Great Society programs and the war on poverty efforts could not make up for it. Even a black president and Obama could not make up for it. As I often said back at the time, is that we learn once again that a black man in the White House is not as important as a black man in the home.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
You know, you can tell economically that is not something that lends itself to political intervention. This is something culturally going on among Black Americas. And you see the legacy of single parent families. And again, that's another point that I get into in the book.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Well, what you saw was an attempt for Blacks, and this again is what you saw in the first half, first two thirds of the 20th century. What you saw was an attempt among Blacks to assimilate to middle class values. And this was the focus of the Black leadership. Behave yourself. you know, pull up your pants, finish school, take care of your children. These were priorities.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
How you present yourself matters. And that was the belief of the black leadership. Martin Luther King believed that. Thurgood Marshall believed that. How you present yourself to whites. Yes, there's racism. Yes, we have to fight for equal rights. But there are also things that we have to be responsible to for ourselves, the things we can't continue blaming whites for indefinitely.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And they were very specific about that. That was very common among the Black leadership. You just don't hear that sort of talk today. It's derided as respectability politics. And people say, well, it didn't work because there's still racial disparities in this country.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And my point is that it didn't not work because of the track record of advance that I just laid out when it came to incomes and educational attainment. Oh, yes, it was working quite well. We just stopped practicing it. And that is the problem. It's not that it doesn't work. It's that we stopped practicing it. And by the way, it was extremely successful.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
It was the type of mindset that produced progress. Brown versus Board of Education, and it's produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That generation of Black leadership had solid, solid accomplishments, and they were very much focused on respectability politics and the behavior of Black people.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Yeah. And I think where I see this most prominently is in the sort of hip hop culture where you have people, you know, the guy sitting in prison now, Sean Combs, you know, made a living trafficking and the worst stereotypes about black people.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
materialism drugs violence misogyny people jay-z you know snoop all these guys dr dre and they were just elevated by our cultural elites um that's all they did was traffic in negative stereotypes about black people and and and became multi-millionaires in the process and
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And putting out products, gutter lyrics, that most decent black people, most black people in fact, want to shield their kids from. My parents didn't want me listening. If I got caught listening to stuff like that, I'd get in trouble. And that was very typical of a lot. But there are a lot of white elites that celebrated it. Celebrate, oh, this is just, they're authentic black people.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
The black kids that are raising their hand in class, that are studying, that are studious, that speak standard English, oh, they're acting white. They're not authentic. You know, Snoop is authentic. He's keeping it real. And you hear this even today coming up. The types of Black people that the left wants to celebrate and elevate are those types.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And they put them out there as standard bearers for Black. I'll take the most obvious example, George Floyd. George Floyd was presented as your typical Black person in America, what they go through every day. George Floyd. George Floyd, Megan, was high on drugs, a lifelong criminal who died resisting arrest. He is not your typical black person in America.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
And yet we are putting up statues of George Floyd and taking down statues of Abraham Lincoln. It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
No, you're right. That's what they're going to do. No, they're not going to comply. They're not going to comply willingly. And that's why I'm glad that the person who, Edward Bloom, the head of Students for Fair Admission, who won that Harvard lawsuit, is staying on the case. He's going to continue to follow up with...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
threats to sue again if he finds them trying to evade what the Supreme Court ruled. And I think that is very, very necessary. These schools are very committed to this diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I think they are going to try and stay the course and wait out the Trump administration's pushback. So no, I don't think this is over at all. I think they have their work cut out.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Met Gala Goes Racial, Media's False Trump NBC Narrative, and Affirmative Action Myth, with Andrew Klavan and Jason Riley | Ep. 1064
Thank you, Megan.