Jason Riley
speaker
125 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 18 Feb
Jason Riley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But what you saw between the late 60s and the early 90s in particular, was a deterioration in Black couple-headed households.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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