About 20 years ago, I attended a symposium at Howard University in Washington, D.C. called, “I Remember U.” The purpose was for scholars to videotape a large group of elderly African-Americans who had gathered together to remember life in Washington, D.C., during segregation.

I arrived at Frederick Douglass Hall and took a seat in a large room that quickly filled up with people already in the midst of their reminiscences.

That’s when the unexpected happened. I was expecting to hear dark stories about the terrible times spent under segregation and Jim Crow. Instead, “I Remember U” became a celebration. People happily shared about a time when the “Black Broadway” of Washington’s U Street was the home of great theaters, jazz clubs, and businesses—as well as doctors, dentists and lawyers. There was comfort, community and stability. “We should have never left the ghetto,” one man lamented.

I was put in mind of this “I Remember U” conference because it gets to what’s at the heart to Jason L. Riley’s new book, The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed.

Riley, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, is a graceful and powerful writer. In The Affirmative Action Myth, he marshals a tremendous number of statistics in support of historical and cultural research to prove his thesis. Black Americans made almost superhuman progress in the decades following the Civil War, progress that stalled in the later decades of the 20^th century with the advent of affirmative action and massive government spending. What happened?

The short answer is cultural and familial collapse. Riley:

While it is undeniable that black-white gaps persist, it is also undeniable that black progress in America has been significant, both in absolute terms and relative to white progress, and it has been most significant for those who aspired to the middle-class attitudes and behaviors championed by proponents of respectability politics. Between 1940 and 1960, the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points as blacks left the rural South for better schools and higher-wage jobs in the urban North. Credit for this phenomenal poverty reduction cannot go to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nor can credit be given to “war on poverty” social programs or affirmative action, since none of those things existed between 1940 and 1960. What did exist during that period were far higher black marriage rates—and far lower percentages of black children born to single mothers—than we would see in the post-1960s era, when respectability politics was falling out of favor with the black intelligentsia, and black activists were downplaying the importance of the traditional family. Married people of any race or ethnicity are much less likely to be impoverished, and children raised in two-parent homes are much more likely to finish high school, attend college, enter a skilled profession, avoid contact with the criminal justice system, and marry before they have children of their own.

Riley, who also authored a terrific biography of Thomas Sowell, is very good at using popular culture to make his point. He opens the book by talking about Good Times, the 1970s sitcom created by Norman Lear. Good Times took place in the housing projects of the Chicago ghetto. The breakout star was Jimmy Walker who played “J.J.” Riley notes that the actors who played the parents, Esther Rolle and John Amos, were not happy about how J.J. depicted a young black person. “Jimmie Walker, the actor who played J.J., had a background in stand-up comedy and portrayed the character as something of a buffoon.” Riley notes. “He channeled dated negative stereotypes about black people that were lost on me at age twelve or thirteen but were still fresh in the minds of blacks of my parents’ generation. J.J. was bug-eyed, oversexed, and dim-witted. He was a preening, jive-talking goofball who flashed his teeth on cue and shouted “Dy-no-mite!” whenever he got excited about something. “

Esther Rolle and John Amos, Riley explains, “took issue with the character, and it wasn’t because they were jealous that Walker had become the show’s breakout star. Rather, like my parents, they viewed J.J. as an embarrassing and harmful throwback to the minstrelsy of an earlier era.”

Riley goes on:

It’s noteworthy that Rolle and Amos were born in 1920 and 1939, respectively. In each US census taken from 1890 to 1940, black marriage rates surpassed white marriage rates. A 2012 Census Bureau report on marriage trends noted that until 1960, black men were more likely than white men to be married, and that the same was true of black women compared to white women until 1970. As of 1960, two out of three black children still lived with two parents, and 71 percent of black women between ages fifteen and forty-four either were married and living with their spouse (51 percent) or divorced, separated, or widowed (20 percent). Just 28 percent of these black women had never been married, versus 24 percent of comparable white women.

All of this began to change in the early 1960s, when crime and illegitimacy began to rise in connection with the breakdown of the black family. The 1968 riots in Washington following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. had nothing to do with the assassination, but everything to do with black revolutionaries who, capitalizing on broken homes and juvenile delinquency, set about to cause massive destruction.

This was the time of the rise of what the great urban historian Fred Siegel (who is cited in Riley’s book) called “riot ideology.” In his 1997 book The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities Siegel describes this ideology as what comes about when “public officials are reluctant to confront public disorder and crime for fear of violent opposition.” Riot ideology was once a hallmark of Marxist groups like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. It is ignored by the mainstream media even as it has helped destroy America’s cities. The 2020 urban riots over the death of George Floyd cost an estimated $2 billion, a record.

In “Forever 1968,” a 2016 City Journal article, Siegel argued that “there is [a] continuity between the current moment and the never-ending sixties: the revival of Black Pantherism in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the new Eldridge Cleaver.”

Siegel noted that “the sixties are sometimes associated with the idea of participatory democracy, but that concept was buried under the weight of Great Society bureaucracies.” Siegel pinpoints the main problem:

One feature of the sixties has endured: the glorification of violence … Violence incarnate was glamorized by the dashing, handsome, leather-clad Black Panthers and their gorgeous consorts. The Panthers colonized the minds of the New Left—particularly Students for a Democratic Society and its offshoot, the Weathermen—which longed to win their approval. Liberals were caught up in Panthermania, too.

Those liberals have now become people like Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi, who push the nonsense of “critical race theory.” Riley nails it: “Critical race theory amounts to little more than a fancy justification for racial favoritism, and it always has.” But through all the academic jargon, the calls for “social justice,” and the incoherent defenses of racial preferences, and one thing will always remain true, Riley argues: “No one with any self-respect wants to be perceived as a token, whether in the workplace or on a college campus, and racial preferences can facilitate those kinds of assumptions even for the most accomplished black professionals.” 

The race-obsessed radical left has helped destroy those it claims to want to help. Increasingly the courts, including the Supreme Court, have come out against racial preferences. Riley still sees a struggle ahead:

Even if opponents of affirmative action are mostly successful in keeping proponents from doing end runs around the Supreme Court ban, the black underclass will still have to shake off the effects of 1960s liberalism. For more than sixty years welfare state programs, through the incentives they provide, have abetted socially destructive behaviors and attitudes, while elected officials and their media allies have told black people that the resulting carnage should be blamed on racism.

Riley ends The Affirmative Action Myth with some bracing and powerful words:

When you tell low-income black people that America’s slave past has doomed them to failure, that the police are targeting them for no reason, that their behavioral problems are someone else’s fault, and that they are entitled to what other people have without putting in the same effort and developing the same capabilities, you are not simply filling their heads with lies. You are also the increasing the likelihood that they and their own offspring remain low-income black people.

Indeed, perhaps that has always been the intention—not just for blacks, but for anyone conditioned to look to government for affirmation, money, or respect.