[Federalist] With The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed, Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has written another clear-eyed analysis of affirmative action policies. This latest book serves as a follow-up to Riley’s 2014 title, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed, and both are lucid, well-written arguments from a black perspective against special considerations.
Much has happened in the intervening ten-plus years since Please Stop Helping Us — particularly the emergence of critical race theory and the host of pseudo-intellectuals promoting it, such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Nikole Hannah-Jones. Riley quickly debunks these people and the projects they promoted, including the 1619 Project, the campaign for reparations, and the dubious research regarding "redlining," upon which arguments for reparations are based. Black home ownership between 1940 and 1980, like many measures of advancement, rose at a greater pace than it did for whites.
Indeed, the postwar period saw "black upward mobility" — even amidst "laws, policies, and customs that openly discriminated against blacks." As an illustration, Riley refers to the popular 2016 movie Hidden Figures, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly about three black female mathematicians working for NASA in the 1950s and 1960s. Shetterly’s "sketches of black America in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century," Riley writes, "may surprise readers in the twenty-first century who have come to associate black communities with crime, violence, underperforming schools, empty lots, solo parenting, and high levels of unemployment."
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