Paul Gigot Interviews Jason Riley on 'The Affirmative Action Myth'
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Welcome to Potomac Watch, the daily podcast of the Wall Street Journal Opinion Department. I'm Paul Gigo, the editor of WCA Opinion. And today we have a special guest, a special show, as we're going to talk to Wall Street Journal columnist,

Jason Riley about his new book. It's entitled The Affirmative Action Myth, Why Blacks Don't Need Racial Preferences to Succeed from Basic Books. So welcome, Jason. Good to see you. How are you doing? Good to see you, Paul. I'm doing well. Okay. Let's talk about the core argument of your book that will let you define it. Sure. The core argument of the book is that blacks were progressing at a faster rate, both educationally and

And economically, in the decades leading up to affirmative action, which began in earnest in the 1970s,

than they were in the era of affirmative action, which the Supreme Court, in a sense, finally brought to an end in its 2023 decision, Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. So the book is an attempt to sort of do a comparison of before and after trends among Blacks. And so that was the point in writing the book. And the lead up to that Supreme Court decision, which many people were expecting, there was all of this doomsday drama

discussion on the left in particular among elites that this would spell the end of the black middle class if we got rid of racial preferences and

And I wanted to push back on that narrative because the data does not show that affirmative action or racial preferences created the black middle class. There was a black middle class in this country prior to 1970, and it was growing at a nice clip. And if anything, the growth of the black middle class has slowed dramatically.

during the era of affirmative action. So the book lays out the argument for why I think that's the case. Well, yeah, that is fascinating is that difference you described, the historical advances made by Black Americans in the, what I guess would have been the first half of the first 60 years

or so, 70 years of the 20th century. Because, I mean, the narrative does not, that when people talk about American racial progress, that almost never comes up. That era is defined by Jim Crow, okay? And of course, it was defined by Jim Crow in a huge section of the country, the American South.

And there was a lot of racism, still is, of course, in some pockets, but in the South in particular. Yet you say that the statistics show that Blacks were making steady progress. Why don't you go into some of that data? Well, one of the data points that I mention in the book is what was going on with the Black poverty rate. So if you go all the way back to 1940, 87% of Black families in this country were living beneath the poverty line.

Over the next 20 years, between 1940 and 1960, that fell from 87% to 47%, a 40 percentage point drop, which occurred, as you mentioned, during peak Jim Crow. This was a time when you could put a sign in your window that said, we don't hire Blacks. And it was legal.

It was legal by law. It was legal by custom. And yet you saw a tremendous amount of progress, not only before the era of affirmative action, but before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So I wanted to lay out what was going on in Black America at that time that allowed that to take place. And you certainly can't credit it to affirmative action. Now, poverty has continued.

to decline in the 1970s and 80s and so forth, but at a much, much slower rate than it had been declining before. And you can go from poverty on to home ownership rates, income levels, school attainment, and on and on. The trends were all moving in the right direction at a faster clip

pre-affirmative action than they would be in the decades following the implementation of these policies. Jason, is there any difference in that era between progress by region? In other words, did you see greater advancements relative to whites by blacks in the North and the West, essentially in the non-Jim Crow states? Yes, there was a difference, a rather large difference. Part of the reason blacks were advancing

is because they were leaving those parts of the country where they were treated the worst. They were leaving the South. That's the Great Migration. The Great Migration. That's the Great Migration. That's right. And so doing the same job in Cleveland, Ohio, that you were doing in Birmingham, Alabama, is going to pay a lot more money in Cleveland, Ohio. So simply moving

is going to be an improvement economically. And millions and millions of Blacks were migrating out of the South. And even those that stayed in the South, Paul, were moving from rural areas, which tend to be poor, to urban areas, which tend to be wealthier. So yes, physical relocation had a big deal to do with it. But there's another point to make here about what was going on in the Jim Crow South. There was a book out some years ago called "One Affirmative Action Was for White People" or something along those lines.

And during Jim Crow, that's exactly what you had, in a sense, affirmative action for whites. But it's interesting that whites in the South, under Jim Crow,

did not improve their position economically with regard to Blacks in the South or with regard to whites in the North. In other words, Jim Crow policies did not do much to help white Southerners. There was a gap between the earnings of whites and Blacks in the South, but that gap did not increase for whites during the period of Jim Crow.

So it's interesting that even when a policy is put in place by the majority to help the majority, it doesn't necessarily get the job done. And that's not only a phenomenon we saw in the U.S., but you've seen that in other countries that have tried the same thing. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk further with Jason Riley about his new book, The Affirmative Action Myth, when we come back.

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Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigo here on Potomac Watch with my guest, Jason Riley. And we're talking about his new book. One of the interesting sections in your book, it's not extensive, but it's illustrative, concerns the women scientists of NASA who helped to found the state program. They were featured in that movie Hidden Figures of some years back, which was a commercial success and was revelatory for me.

And what's really interesting to me is the way you describe these women as having been the fisheries of a family, strong family structure in many cases, and a focus on education. And some of the, I think one or two of the women at least, went to the historically black colleges. So that focus on education, which of course has been a traditional path on upward mobility for all Americans, really was helping them.

the black middle class rise economically and educationally and, you know, just in certain terms of social mobility throughout those decades. Right. And you're correct that it has traditionally been a way up for various minority groups in particular over the decades and centuries in this country. And blacks were able to do that as well. A couple of things were going on. You know, one was wartime economy. Very tight labor markets.

And finally, those labor markets were open to Blacks who were able to take advantage of them because they had been doing the hard work since Reconstruction, since Emancipation, of improving their human capital, improving their years of schooling, their work experience, and so forth. And so when things began to open up,

In the 40s and 50s, they were able to take advantage of the situation, and they did. And what's interesting is how the progress that was taking place back then started to stall in the late 60s and early 70s, right around the time of affirmative action, to the point where this convergence you saw between blacks and whites in terms of educational development

attainment, not only K through 12, but also high school completion and college completion began to stagnate to the point where today, college completion rates for Blacks are about where they were in 1970, Paul. So that's 50 years into affirmative action, that's what happened.

And so, again, this is data that does not receive a lot of attention. It's not something that civil rights organizations are eager to highlight because it kind of shows their own irrelevance in helping Blacks, particularly if the main cause can't be laid to racism. Obviously, this progress that was taking place during the time period of the women you described

on through the 50s and 60s, there's not as much racism today as there was back then, and yet they were making progress notwithstanding Jim Crow racism. And then you also have politicians who want to credit government programs for what was going on in terms of the rising level of Black achievement in terms of incomes and education and home ownership and so forth. But again, even when government policies worked against Blacks, as in housing, for instance, you saw...

greater advancement in homeownership among blacks than you did among whites, frankly, the rate of growth. And so it's a story that does not receive a lot of attention. And I think it has a lot to teach us about how to move forward today. I want to make clear to the audience, and Jason, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not making an argument against the civil rights statutes of 64 and 65. Those are still necessary.

to break up government oppression in the Southern states, correct? That is correct. I think that those were monumental achievements, both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And I think Brown versus Board of Education was a pivotal Supreme Court decision that I support. No, that is not the point. Those actions, whether it was legislative actions or the Supreme Court's actions, made this country more fair and more just for everyone. And I would not want to go back

to a pre-civil rights era or back to a pre-Brown era. I think that would be horrific and a huge step backwards. The point I'm making, Paul, is that the narrative on the left is that it is racism that explains racial disparities today, full stop. And I want to challenge that narrative because you can point to a time when there was far more racism in this country

And yet racial disparities were closing at a faster rate than they are today. I mean, Black incomes are another example of this. You go back to the late 1960s, you see parity or something approaching parity between the median Black income and median white incomes among households.

But then in the 70s and 80s, you see this divergence. You see black income stalling and white incomes moving forward to the point where by the early 1990s, between the late 60s and the early 1990s, most of this being the affirmative action era, the share of income for the top-earning blacks went up at about the same rate it did for the top-earning whites.

But among the lowest earning blacks, they saw their share of income decline at more than double the rate of low income whites throughout the 70s, throughout the 80s, and into the early 90s. And to what do you attribute that, Jason? It's not affirmative action per se. Other things are going on. One thing I attributed to Paul is the breakdown of the black family. What starts happening in the late 60s is an explosion of single parent homes in the black community.

And of course, married couples tend to make more than single people running households. And that's what you saw. That's what happened in the late 60s and 70s and the 80s, and neither affirmative action nor a larger welfare state.

was able to replace fathers in the home. And that is what you saw. So the welfare state, if anything, contributed to the social breakdown we saw in the Black community by trying to replace fathers in the home, by subsidizing antisocial behaviors that then proliferated. So that, I think, is what the main cause was. But my point is that there is far too little attention placed on

on the necessity of two-parent families and far too much emphasis placed on what the government can or should be doing to address black poverty today. I want to go back to that period after the Civil Rights Acts of 64 and 65.

particularly 64, because Hubert Humphrey rose, I think, if I remember correctly, on the Senate floor. He was the senator from Minnesota who became vice president. And he argued that if the movement, the civil rights movement, had a change to favoritism by race, it would be a

a defeat. You know, he believed in the idea of equality for all, regardless of race. And yet the debate over race and racial preferences shifted.

So that by the early 70s, you were seeing the argument that you had to have these racial preferences rather than the vision of Martin Luther King Jr., which was nobody should be judged by the content of your character, not the color of your skin. And yet it changed that argument. And over time, it became embedded in policies, federal government policies, and in some legal decisions as well.

What happened? What was driving that? Because the vision of equality for all, one standard, is extremely powerful and helped drive the success of the civil rights era. Well, one of the things I would attribute that shift and emphasis, and that's exactly what it was, you know, the civil right wasn't just Humphreys, but the civil rights leadership at the time, the NAACP, Martin Luther King, all of those folks used colorblindness as a standard. You know,

The dissent in Plessy was referred to as Thurgood Marshall's Bible. We are a colorblind constitution is what we have. And that's what we- Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy v. Ferguson, that's right. And so over time, it did shift. And what happened was that the political leadership, or I should say the civil rights leadership,

began to believe that it was more important to seek political power. The thinking was that if we could just get more of our own into office, these other problems, these other socioeconomic problems will take care of themselves. And so you saw an emphasis in the late 60s to move toward achieving political power.

And there was less emphasis put on the human capital development that we saw among Blacks in the 40s and 50s and 60s. It became more about special preferences and not equal treatment. It was special treatment and favoritism and so forth. And that is the path that...

that the left in particular has continued down. And that to me has been one of the big mistakes of the civil rights leadership. And we see the outcome today. You know, the election of Barack Obama was sort of the culmination of this strategy. But even before he was elected,

It had been somewhat successful on its own terms. In other words, you had black mayors of large cities with large black populations starting in the late 60s and early 70s, your Clevelands, your Detroits, your Chicagos, and on and on and on, Philadelphias and so forth. But that black political power did not produce the black economic advancement that we were told was going to happen.

And so the culmination of this strategy was, of course, the election of Barack Obama. And even having a black man in the White House, we learned, is not as important as having one in the home. And I think that is one of the biggest takeaways from this effort to pursue political power first and foremost. So achievement and upward mobility cannot be promoted by government policies that favor one group or another.

They have to basically go back to the time-honored model of family cohesion, parents who promote the right values and promote those in their children, a quality education, which I would argue is the single most important civil rights era of our age now because of the failure of public schools in so many areas. But education, parental values and promotion, and

And then, I guess, an economic opportunity that's created by a growing economy. Is that what you're talking about or the secrets? Yes, I agree. You know, one of the unfailing beliefs of the political left is that racial disparities between groups result from how others are treating those groups and not from the differences in performance.

performance among various minority groups. And I believe they have much, much more to do with differences in performance. And so to the extent that a group can develop its human capital, its attitudes, habits, behaviors, skills, that will do far more to help that group advance regardless of how they are being treated by other groups. And we have so many examples of this. If you look at, say, Chinese Americans who were forced to attend separate schools

were not allowed to own land in certain areas. Japanese Americans who were placed in internment camps during World War II. You see these groups today, despite where they started,

outperforming the white majority, both economically and academically, and have for decades. And to me, it tells you that how a group treats you is not what matters most. It's how that group develops internally, and that there is really no shortcut to developing that human capital. It's not something that lends itself to a government solution. What the government can do is get out of the way and let these groups develop. And so when you talk about something like education,

We know that the traditional public school system, which is assigning kids based on zip code, is not doing any favors for poor Blacks. So get rid of that type of system. Give parents school choice. Or on the economic front, you can look at minimum wage laws that are pricing younger people and less experienced people, many of whom happen to be Black, out of the labor market. Stop pricing them out of the labor market or

occupational licensing requirements that force someone who wants to start a hair salon or a jitney service to go through a whole bunch of red tape, move it out of the way, and let that entrepreneurial spirit flourish in these communities. So that's what it's really about, I think. It's not about a government program that's going to be a silver bullet.

It's about our policymakers becoming a little more humble and realizing that there's only so much public policy can do on these fronts. And we have to get out of the way and let these groups develop internally. We're going to take another break. And when we come back, we'll talk to Jason Riley about the arguments that if racial preferences aren't useful, what about economic class-based affirmative action when we come back?

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Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot here with Jason Riley talking about his new book, The Affirmative Action Myth. Let me turn to a little debate that has been going on in regard to so-called affirmative action. And it's Richard Kallenberg, the economist, has argued, including a letter to the editor in response to one of your columns on this subject, that preferences by race are wrong, but preferences, particularly in college admissions—

based on economic circumstances is something that can help raise opportunity and reduce some of these gaps in achievement for minorities. And he argues in particular, if you have a student who gets 1400 on the SATs, say, and does well in school, but because of where that person is from,

just hasn't had the same kind of opportunity or has had more obstacles. Say he has a single parent household, okay? Why not give that student an advantage and say when they're applying to school over the suburban young person whose parents might be a too professional family and has had every opportunity of a good family upbringing? - Well, there are a few problems which refer to commonly as class-based affirmative action.

And one of the problems, Paul, is that this will be used as a proxy for race. And it will be yet another subjective standard that schools will want to apply. And we know from race-based affirmative action that when schools are given wiggle room to apply subjective standards over objective standards like test scores and grades and class rank,

The subjective standards always crowd out the objective standards in order to meet whatever racial balance they want on campus. And so I would expect that when most people think about class-based affirmative action, they're thinking about family income as being the measure, the way we do with needs-based programs.

But schools will have to find a much more fuzzy definition of class. They're going to have to get into whether you grew up in a high-poverty neighborhood or went to a high-poverty school or highly segregated school and so forth. Are you a single parent? You will have a very malleable definition of disadvantaged parents.

or poor in order for them to meet whatever racial outcome they want to meet. So that's one problem, is that it will become another subjective standard. And we know that these schools abuse wiggle room when we give it to them.

The second problem, however, is that just on a numerical basis, the number of low-income whites in this country far outnumber the number of low-income blacks. And so it would be very easy for all of the class-based slots to be filled by whites. The other problem is that even low-income whites and low-income people of other racial and ethnic groups, particularly Asians, outperform low-income blacks on test scores for admission to college.

So that's another problem that the class-based model would have to address. And so again, I just think that class will end up being a proxy for race. And we know from the examples of mismatch, that is when you, the most important thing in terms of where a kid goes to school is that his incoming academic credentials match those of the other people at the same institution.

And it doesn't matter whether that child is the child of a donor, alumni, a superstar athlete. It doesn't matter. If their credentials are significantly below those of the other kids at the school, they're going to struggle.

And it's a shame because there are so many other schools they could be attending where they could go on and have a very productive college life and major in what they want to and not be pooling at the bottom of the class and struggling and so forth. And yet affirmative action mismatches kids with schools. And so you end up at the end of the day with fewer black professionals than you'd have in the absence of these policies because so many are funneled into these schools where they are struggling and they either drop out or they switch to easier majors.

So these programs have been counterproductive. And whether they're based on race or whether they're based on socioeconomic status, they're still going to be counterproductive if they're mismatching kids with schools. But what about the middle class kid, son of a cop or a school teacher or, you know, just a small business person or, you know, relatively low income who shows real talent? OK, top of their class and so on and so forth.

real gumption, real character, despite the neighborhood, despite the area, despite family circumstances.

and shows that grit, that character. What's wrong with giving that person a leg up, saying, you know what? You're close enough here to the son of the alumni couple in most things. Let's give this person a shot. I mean, look, I was a middle-class kid, Jason, and I got into schools probably more because of the fact that I played football than because I was a superior student.

Is there any problem with that? Well, if the person you're describing exists, and I don't know how many of those people there are, but my point is that if that person meets the academic credentials of the other kids at the school, I have no problem with the school choosing that person. And if I had my druthers, we'd get rid of legacy admissions. We'd get rid of athletic scholarships. I think that these schools should be open to the people who have the most to gain from attending them.

I mean, I'm someone who believes probably too many people go to college right now. But the school should be focused not on just increasing the body count on campus, but opening the school to people who are most likely to get something out of a four-year college education. And if people are there to play sports or they're because of rich family members or their connections to the school, that might not be the person you want on campuses.

and maybe this driver that you're describing is the person, but I think it's most important that they meet those academic credentials. And the reason that schools have lowered their standards to admit certain racial and ethnic minority groups is because of what's known as the pool problem. You mentioned a 1400 SAT score recently. That is about the minimum.

for the most selective schools in the country. The average student going to those schools got at least a 1400 on the SAT. I recently looked at the 2023 data for SAT scores broken down by race. Among people who scored 1400 or higher, 25% were Asian, Paul. 1% were Black.

And that is the pool problem these schools are dealing with. And part of the problem I see here, Paul, and what we haven't talked much about, is where these schools and where the left wants to intervene. Waiting until a kid sits down at age 17 or 18 to take an SAT test and saying, we are going to draw the line here and expect equal outcomes or racially balanced outcomes.

That's crazy. Whatever score is produced when that kid is 17 or 18 years old, that is so far downstream from where the divergence in academic credentials begins. And yet there's far too little discussion on what could be done at the K-12 level to obviate the need for any preferences based on race or class.

at the SAT level, at the college level, and also the idea that you're going to give a kid with SAT scores 200 or 300 points below the average of the school.

You're going to say, oh, you know, we'll make it up with a few remedial classes freshman year at Duke. No, you won't. That is a fiction. You're not going to make it up. You're going to put that kid in a situation where he's in way over his head, probably can't major in what he wants to major in, is going to get frustrated. You know, a lot of problems that we have on campus today, particularly on elite campuses, is coming from a lot of kids who perhaps might not deserve to be in that school if entry to that school is based strictly on merit.

And that's another conversation, an uncomfortable conversation, that a lot of people in these circles don't want to have. Yeah, the mismatch problem is significant in some cases. And you really do not want to undermine an otherwise talented kid.

by putting him into schools where they have to compete against people who've had 12 years of better education, not for any fault of the kid who's left behind, but the fact that he didn't go to schools that were as good. And it's also what it does to the school. In other words, once you start admitting students who really can't cut it unless you lower standards,

You're then going to have to lower standards in grading because you don't want to flunk out all these kids you just admitted for diversity purposes. And then you're going to have to lower graduation standards at the same school. And so it's a slippery slope here. And we want our schools to be pursuing excellence. And I think they've forgotten that sometime, what their role is here. Okay. What's the future of affirmative action here after the fair admissions case? Are we seeing...

it essentially going to be going away or is it going to make its way back?

in some fashion through other means. What do you think the future is? Well, there'll certainly be an effort at the latter, and I think that's what you see in diversity, equity, inclusion policies on campus. And I think the organizations that fought against this stuff, against affirmative action, are going to have to stay on the job and stay on the case and make sure that these schools are

are adhering to the Supreme Court's decision. And I think, frankly, it'll take many more lawsuits and many more follow-up threats of lawsuits to make sure that schools aren't cheating. I think we're going to see them continue to try and cheat. We don't know yet whether they are cheating or aren't.

Diversity has gone down at some schools, as you might expect. It's gone up at others. So we don't know. I think it's a little too early to tell. But I think that opponents of affirmative action will have to keep up the fight because these schools are not going to give in very easily. And not only at the college level,

But I think also at the K-12 level, to the extent that you have high schools pursuing DEI efforts and even grade schools and middle schools and gifted and talented programs and so forth pursuing it, there's still a big fight ahead, I think, to make sure that schools are adhering to the Supreme Court's decision. All right. We'll leave it there, Jason. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for your time. He is the author of The Affirmative Action Myth, Why Blacks Don't Need...

Racial Preferences to Succeed, out tomorrow from Basic Books. Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it. Thank you, Paul. And thanks to all of you for listening. We're here every day on Potomac Watch. Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the pro's number one most trusted app. Finding a home is like dating. You're searching for the one. With over 500,000 new listings every month, you can find the one today.

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