Jason Riley has a message for Bill de Blasio. It’s the blunt title of his new book: “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.”
But it’s not only Park Slope progressives Riley has in mind.
“One lesson of the Obama presidency — maybe the most important one for blacks — is that having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home.”
Just one of Riley’s many tart observations about the folly of believing politicians have the answers for what ails black America.
Now, Jason is a friend and former colleague whose wife, Naomi, writes for these pages. He is an affable Wall Street Journal editorialist who came to his views as a college student reading writers such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer in the otherwise liberal Buffalo News.
Over breakfast at a Sixth Avenue café, Riley explains that the conservative columnists seemed to him to have the better case.
Through them he was introduced to economist Tom Sowell and historian Shelby Steele, black thinkers who rejected the liberal pieties about race. Once he got a taste, he says, “it was off to the races.”
Riley’s fundamental question is this: “At what point does helping start hurting?” And it comes at a timely moment in our history, 50 years after the War on Poverty and with our first black president now in his second term.
And it has a special urgency for New York City, where our new mayor sees himself in the vanguard of a resurgent progressivism that Riley regards as deadly to the aspirations of black New Yorkers.
Take the minimum wage. At all levels of government today — federal, state, city — politicians are competing with one another to see who can raise it highest. Even Republicans such as Mitt Romney say it should be raised.
Few seem aware of its ugly past. Down Under, for example, minimum-wage laws were part of the “White Australia” policy that aimed to keep Chinese from competing with white Australians. Likewise in apartheid-era South Africa, where minimum wages were meant to price out blacks.
Though never as far-reaching, we had the same dynamic in the United States, a major reason why black leaders from Booker T. Washington to W.E.B. Du Bois regarded trade unions as the enemy of the black man.
In a telling nugget, Riley quotes then-Sen. John F. Kennedy, explaining at a 1957 hearing in Congress why he supported raising the federal minimum wage:
“Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too — the white worker who has to compete. And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage . . . it affects the whole wage structure of the area, doesn’t it?”
Riley notes that minimum-wage hikes today aren’t meant to keep blacks from competing with whites. Nevertheless, it’s still the effect.
“Up to the 1930s,” Riley says, “black Americans had a lower unemployment rate than white Americans. Up to the 1950s, the unemployment rates were roughly the same. But for the last five decades, black unemployment has been roughly double the white rate.
“And the turning point,” he says, “was in the 1930s, when Congress passed minimum-wage laws.”
He’s similarly scathing about those who tout the minimum wage as an antidote to poverty. “For most black households,” he says, “the problem isn’t a worker not earning enough. The problem is no one in the household has a job.”
But if the evidence is so clear, why does black America overwhelmingly vote for the pols who push the policies Riley finds so destructive? He puts down his coffee and gives two reasons.
One, he says, is a culture where many African-Americans look to government for jobs, whether in a public school or a post office. Riley cites an uncle who told him, “When I hear Republicans talking about ‘small government,’ I think, ‘That’s anti-black.’ ”
The other is a GOP that doesn’t do much to try to persuade them otherwise. He points out there’s now a huge Republican debate about how to take its message to Latinos. “Where’s the same outreach for black America?” he asks.
In making his arguments, Riley marshals a mountain of compelling statistics. But in the end, this book isn’t about numbers. It’s about the high human toll good intentions have inflicted on people least able to afford them.
“The left’s sentimental support,” writes Riley, “has turned underprivileged blacks into playthings for liberal intellectuals and politicians who care more about clearing their conscience or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead.”
Maybe someone ought to send a copy up to Gracie Mansion.