Please stop helping us How liberals make it harder for Blacks to succeed

ONE OF THE few things conservatives and liberals agree on about the '60s is that it was a decade of radical change in the nation's politics, ethnoracial and gender relations, popular culture and international policies. For liberals, the decade marked the nation's greatest transition toward a new era of personal, socioeconomic and political liberation and inclusion, especially for blacks, initiated by the courts, the civil and voting rights acts and the Great Society programs. To most conservatives, the period, with few exceptions, was a terrible turn for the worse. And for AfricanAmerican conservatives like Jason L. Riley and Shelby Steele, beyond the ending of formal discrimination in voting, education and civil rights, the era was for black Americans an unmitigated disaster, the consequences of which persist to this day. These men are intellectual kindred; indeed, Riley dedicates "Please Stop Helping Us" to Steele and Thomas Sowell Both claim that liberal policies to help black Americans have not just failed, but have become the main reason for nearly all their problems: unemployment, low income, family disorganization, violence, incarceration, the educational gap. Both attribute the scourge of liberal policies to white guilt; both condemn affirmative action for doing great harm to blacks and whites; both claim that blacks have been encouraged to develop a crippling mentality of victimhood and entitlement and an abandonment of the American creed of individualism and personal responsibility, leading to a culture of dependency. Both, therefore, insist that the best thing that whites, and the American government, could do for black Americans is to leave them alone to solve their own problems, and that the best strategy for black Americans is to assume "total responsibility for their future" through personal and collective transformation. These are boilerplate conservative themes. But the books differ markedly in the ways these themes are explored, in their styles of presentation, the depth of their arguments and the degree to which the familiar is given renewed urgency. Riley, an editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal, begins by questioning whether political power has been necessary for African-American advancement. Eager to slight the achievements of President Obama, he declares, with unfortunate timing, that his economic policies are a failure, and in another dig, that "having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home," a curious thought from a successful black man whose father, though having left home when Riley was a small child, nonetheless conscientiously managed to parent him. A thoroughly misinformed chapter on culture not only trots out the usual inaccuracies about hip-hop's influence but, failing to recognize the diversity of African-American cultures, proceeds to libel the entire group with the assertion that "black culture today not only condones delinquency and thuggery but celebrates it." On one page he applauds his parents' decision to move the family from a predominantly black neighborhood plagued by crime and what his father called the "knuckleheads" and "thugs" to a predominantly white one, yet on another page he flays government policies that attempt to move poorly housed blacks to white suburban communities. And so on. Steele's spirited polemic, "Shame," casts post-'60s America in a Manichaean "great divide" of "two political cultures forever locked in a 'Cold War' within a single society." One of these is liberal America, driven by shame and guilt about the nation's past sins - slavery, racism, sexism, imperialism, Vietnam - to make amends through "a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequality and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs"; its "enforcement arm" is political correctness. On the other side are the conservative guardians of "the principles and the disciplines of freedom," rooted in "'classic' Jeffersonian liberalism" that is subject to "every sort of test of truth and effectiveness." Steele, the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, delivers this message in an ardent, readable style. The book is really an intellectual autobiography that pivots around a poignant formative moment in Steele's late teens. A talented swimmer and captain of his high school's varsity team, Steele returned the fall of his senior year to learn that the entire team had been invited over the previous summer to the lakeside home of the esteemed coach's mother for three weeks of great fun. He had not been invited because he was black and the coach's mother was a racist. Steele's account of the coach's and his white teammates' increasingly dishonest attempts to explain why they had found nothing wrong with his absence, and his own personal transformation as well as the moral sense he made of it - his avoidance of self-pity, his unyielding, emancipative decision to quit the team, the dignified tranquillity that overcame him heading home afterward - are all forcefully and persuasively rendered. What follows is a skillful interweaving of his movement from '60s radical to Reaganite conservative with moments of disenchantment and discovery in his life - big Afro and black identity, a demystifying visit to Africa, the rediscovery of America, where "the Good is not the gift of public policy but rather of character . . . what follows from moral responsibility - both personal and collective." Steele's repeated claim that all government policies have been unalloyed failures and the cause of current black problems is now so demonstrably false that one need not waste time discussing them. Given his working-class background, Steele ought to know that the problem of the black poor, besides their unconscionably low wages, is not their failure to assume personal responsibility - which in their very American way they do, almost to a fault - but the very imprudent choices they tend to make, especially in their youth. However, this essay is not social science and, in all fairness, must be judged in Steele's own rhetorical terms. His guiding light is freedom. Yet he seems either unable to grasp or is ignorant of the long Western tradition of freedom going back to classical Athens that conceives of it not solely as personal autonomy, but also as something that complements personal empowerment and capability with a participative engagement in the collective power of the demos, the kind of active citizenship endorsed by the founding fathers. A free, virtuous republic, in John Adams's words, requires "positive passion for the public good, the public interest." Steele also shares the chronic contradiction of American conservatism regarding the past. On the one hand, the past is cherished for its heritage of all that is desirable - the Constitution, freedom, personal responsibility, the work ethic, American exceptionalism and all that. On the other hand, it is dismissed as trivial (get over it and pull up your socks!) when it comes to its bruising legacy of slavery, racism, Appalachian impoverishment, patriarchy, homophobia and periodic surges of excessive greed and inequality. At the same time, it has to be said that too much dissociative shame and a surfeit of dependence may incapacitate. If it is true that progressive public policies are essential for the improvement of disadvantaged groups, especially the least fortunate, as the histories of Europe's, Australia's and East Asia's welfare states all clearly demonstrate, as does America's earlier affirmative action for whites, it is equally the case that those to whom such policies are directed must, at some point, both accept personal responsibility and courageously make transformative choices for themselves and their future - including assimilation, "even if that felt like self-betrayal." To this second truth Steele, for all his flawed denial of the first, speaks with passion, eloquence and unremitting honesty. Both authors claim the best thing whites can do for black Americans is leave them alone. ORLANDO PATTERSON is a professor of sociology at Harvard. He is the editor, with Ethan Fosse, of "The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth."

Wall Street Journal columnist Riley says minimum-wage laws and affirmative action policies in education hurt more than help black communities. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.