The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed, Jason L. Riley, Basic Books, 2025, pp. 282, $30.00, hardcover.
Jason L. Riley is a leading figure among black conservative intellectuals—a cohort that includes Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Armstrong Williams, Robert L. Woodson Sr. (deceased 2026), Wilfred Reilly, Stanley Crouch, Coleman Hughes, and Walter E. Williams—who have long dissented from the prevailing orthodoxy on the Left that links black upward mobility to the welfare state and affirmative action. A columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Riley is also the author of a well-received biography of Sowell, the most prolific and arguably the most consequential black conservative thinker of the past half century. Riley’s latest book, while unlikely to surprise those already conversant with this intellectual tradition, offers a succinct and cogent critique of affirmative action and the modern welfare state.
The roots of contemporary black conservatism stretch as far back as the nineteenth century. The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, born a slave, called on whites to remove “the barriers to our improvement” and for blacks to improve their own economic and social conditions. Decades later Booker T. Washington argued that blacks did not need the assistance of government, which had previously imposed slavery and then racial segregation on them.
Riley’s book appears two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that the use of race in college admissions was unconstitutional, a decision which polls revealed most blacks supported. Eighty-six percent of blacks who responded to a 2001 survey conducted by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University believed that college admissions and the hiring of faculty “should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race/ethnicity.” In a 2019 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of blacks surveyed believed race should not be a consideration in the college admission process. The 2023 decision, nevertheless, led to overheated laments from college administrators that the black middle-class would suffer grievous harm without racial quotas, and that the decision was merely the first step in a rightwing conspiracy to reverse the advances made by the civil rights movement.
This is all nonsense, as Riley notes. A major part of his book is devoted to showing that black social and economic mobility and the black marriage rate was quite high before quotas and affirmative action were imposed beginning in the late 1960s. Between 1940 and 1960 and before anyone ever heard of affirmative action, he reports, the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent to 47 percent. This occurred at a time of growing racial tolerance anchored by the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools. The increase in black income, home ownership, and college attendance slowed down beginning in the 1960s along with a decline in the labor force participation of black males, a drop in the marriage rate of blacks, an increase in the number of black children born out of wedlock, and a rise in the black crime rate.
These negative socio-economic outcomes occurred just as the government began to enter the picture in a significant way, but whether government policies contributed to these problems, as some conservatives argue, is difficult to prove. Riley is convinced, however, that a shift in emphasis of federal policies impeded black economic and social mobility. “Under policies promoting equal treatment,” he writes,
America’s black population rose significantly, both in absolute terms and relative to whites. Under policies promoting special treatment, those gains leveled off. On balance, blacks have fared better under color-blind policies than they have under policies that promoted racial discrimination or racial favoritism.
Affirmative action policies, Riley notes, “have coincided with slower income growth, stagnation, and even retrogression” within the black population. The desegregation of schools which occurred during the 1950s and 1960s,” he further claims, “has been far more important to the creation and expansion of the black middle class than the racial preferences and anti-poverty programs of the 1970s and ‘80s.”
Riley’s most fervent wish is for the civil rights movement to return to its original goal of universal standards of treatment for everyone. This objective, he argues, should be “to transcend race, not make it all-important.” He praises the famous dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan in the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which accepted racial segregation and the “separate but equal” standard for public schools and public conveyances. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan declared, “and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Harlan’s dissent would become law in 1954 when the court in the Brown decision outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The era of color blindness would last less than two decades and was replaced by a racial spoils system involving affirmative action, quotas, and set-asides.
Affirmative action, Riley believes, resulted in the lowering of academic standards and spawned a new industry of administrators within academia and business whose livelihoods were dependent on stirring the kettle of affirmative action. “Black advancement in higher education,” Riley argues,
was far more momentous in the decades immediately prior to the implementation of quotas and set-asides…. Those who credit affirmative action with black educational advancement are getting the order wrong. Black advancement came first…. A history of social and economic advancement that should be a source of pride for blacks—and of inspiration for other minority groups—has received relatively little consideration.1
Affirmative action, by contrast, has harmed blacks who were admitted to educational institutions for which they were not qualified, has embittered whites and Asian-Americans who believe the cards have been stacked against them, and has reinforced racial stereotypes, including the belief that blacks cannot make it on their own.
The history of what America’s blacks achieved prior to the introduction of affirmative action, Riley emphasizes, has been ignored or denied by politicians and activists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo, who have a stake in perpetuating an historical narrative revolving around racial prejudice. This narrative ignored the advantages provided by a free-market economy in encouraging black self-advancement. Within a few decades after the Civil War, a black middle-class of professionals, clergy, skilled workers, and business entrepreneurs had emerged, and their numbers would grow rapidly during the first half of the twentieth century. That blacks lifted themselves out of poverty through hard work—“an odds-defying rise in America unmatched by any racial or ethnic group in history”—should have been a source of pride for blacks. Instead, Riley laments, this narrative of self-improvement has been sidelined by a historiography of suffering and powerlessness in the face of racism and in which government has played the crucial role in the social and economic advancement of blacks. rather than blacks themselves.
Crucial in the recent debate over the experience of blacks in the U.S. has been the issue of reparations, a topic which takes up an entire chapter of The Affirmative Action Myth. Initially black leaders such as Bayard Rustin and Barack Obama derided the notion of reparations as illogical and a product of guilt-ridden whites. Reparations “send a message to Americans of every other race that blacks are wards of the state because they are a broken people,” the journalist and author Juan Williams claimed two decades ago. “Social ills in the black community would be exaggerated as black people, flush with one big check, decide they don’t need school, don’t need a job, and remove themselves from the vitality of mainstream American life. Black people would be more highly stigmatized and stereotyped than ever before.” Arthur Ashe, the tennis player, agreed. “What I and others want is an equal chance, under one set of rules, as on a tennis court.”
More recently, however, politicians and activists on the Left, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, John Conyers, Cory Booker, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah-Jones have argued that reparations were necessary to compensate blacks for the economic exploitation they experienced during slavery, which ended one hundred and sixty years ago.
The argument for reparations, Riley observes, is based on a shockingly mistaken reading of the history of American slavery, including the complicity of whites in the South’s peculiar institution. In fact, more whites fought in the Civil War to abolish slavery than to maintain it, while a majority of the contemporary American population is descended from immigrants who came to America after the Civil War. “By what logic,” Riley asks, “are the grandchildren of Iranian refugees or Korean victims of Communism responsible for payouts to black Americans today, who happen to already be the wealthiest black people in the world?” The belief that contemporary American whites should pay reparations for slavery is based on the notion that all whites in America benefitted, directly or indirectly, from racism in the past and that all blacks today suffer from its disadvantages.
A significant percentage of the contemporary black American population are descendants of immigrants who came to the United States after the Civil War, and their ancestors had never been slaves in the American South. Why, Riley wonders, are they uniquely deserving of reparations? What about other groups such as “the descendants of Irish migrants who faced employment discrimination, women who were denied the franchise, Jews who faced anti-Semitism in the academy, or Asian migrants who were lynched, forced to attend segregated schools, and denied property rights?”
Riley notes that the argument for reparations is based on the mistaken assumption that slavery and the exploitation of black labor after the Civil War was the source of American prosperity rather than the free-market capitalism under which American blacks had become the richest black people in the world. Differences in the economic status of various racial and ethnic groups, Riley points out, is normal and not due solely to racism. He notes that the wealth gap between Asian Americans and Hispanics is greater than the wealth gap between whites and blacks, and that the wealth of the median Asian American family is higher than that of the median white American family. “The notion that racial disparities in the twenty-first century are directly linked to the slave era,” Riley concludes, “is based more on ideology than hard evidence.” Furthermore, “it’s abundantly clear that despite centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, black Americans today are far better off than black people who never left Africa.”
The statistics Riley provides on the deleterious impact of affirmative action in academia and elsewhere are devastating, but they are unlikely to have their desired effect in an era in which objective truth has been displaced by mantras of multiculturalism, racial entitlement, and diversity-equity-inclusion. As Riley points out, the era of affirmative action occurred at the same time as a tremendous expansion of the welfare state. Tens of thousands of bureaucrats now stand guard in defense of an ideology of victimization in which the adoption of middle-class cultural norms and personal responsibility is seen as a cop-out. For Riley, the growth of the welfare state has encouraged “destructive behaviors and attitudes” within the black ghetto. “This welfare state indoctrination” he writes, will be even more difficult to move past “given the political left’s growing deference in recent years to social justice warriors, ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ propagandists, and other far-left progressives who now dominate one of the two major political parties, as well as the mainstream media and most of higher education.”
The problems caused by the welfare state are particularly noticeable within black neighborhoods.
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 increasing the likelihood that they and their own offspring remain low-income black people.
And yet the people pushing such ideas are celebrated within academia and the press. Even if we are at the “end of the affirmative action era,” writes Riley, “this latter development ought to be of deep concern to anyone who cares about the future of the black underclass.”
Edward S. Shapiro is professor emeritus of history at Seton Hall University; edshapiro07052@yahoo.com. He is the author of A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (1992), Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (2006), and A Unique People in a Unique Land: Essays on American Jewish History (2022) and is the editor of Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism and the Cold War (1995). Shapiro appeared in our Winter 2025 issue with “Taking No for an Answer,” a review of Pamela Nadell’s Antisemitism: An American Tradition.
1 Jason L. Riley, “The Tragedy of Affirmative Action,” Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2025. See also Riley, “A Chance to Remove Race from College Admissions,” Ibid. January 25, 2022 and “Minorities Reap the Benefit when Affirmative Action Ends,” Ibid. September 10, 2024.
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