As a teaser in an earlier post, I mentioned that I was reading an interesting new book by the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley titled Please Stop Helping Us:How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. The subtitle does not exactly hide the ball. And while perhaps other examples could be found, Riley addresses clearly and comprehensively several important areas of public policy in which liberal or progressive policies have hurt the interests of African-Americans.

For example, Riley offers an excellent summary of the considerable historical evidence that the first minimum wage laws were often adopted with the explicit goal of harming African-Americans. (Trigger warning, for those who appreciate that sort of thing: appalling citations about the bad history of a public policy popular with progressives to follow.) Riley writes:   “We don’t need to guess what politicians were thinking when they moved to implement when they moved to implement federal minimum-wage laws and Davis-Bacon statutes [which protect the wages and employment of union workers in the building trades]… During hearings, Representative William Upshaw of Georgia sympathized with Bacon, noting that ‘the real problem that you are confronted with in any community with a superabundance or large aggregation of negro labor…. Alabama Representative Miles Allgood recounted the story of a ‘contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. This is a fact. That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.’ He further quotes George Mason University Law School Professor David Bernstein, noting that “Testimony by union representatives [in favor of Davis-Bacon laws] reveals a definite racial element to their support.”

Today’s supporters of minimum wage laws, thankfully, do not generally share the minimum wage’s early supporters’  ugly racial motivations. But, as Riley documents, there is nonetheless considerable evidence that minimum wages continue to disproportionately price low-skilled African-American workers out of the market.  As he puts it: “The best anti-poverty program is not the minimum wage. Rather, it’s a job, even if it’s an entry-level one…. Reducing the number of entry-level jobs keeps people poor by limiting their ability to enter or remain in the workforce, where they have the opportunity to obtain the skills necessary to increase their productivity and pay, and ultimately improve their lives.”

Riley also does a good job summarizing the considerable evidence that school choice programs benefit African-American children, by creating competition and giving families more options that may better suit their children’s needs. As he notes, these programs may be particularly beneficial to black children stuck in failing public schools in poor neighborhoods. Strong as Riley’s education chapter was, it might have been even better if he had discussed the Obama administration’s discipline initiative intended to end racial disparities in discipline. As discussed at some length in the statements of Gail Heriot and Todd Gaziano in this U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report, there is little evidence that these gaps are caused by bias against students of color. It is instead much more likely that they result from differing rates of misbehavior between racial groups. The discipline initiative may therefore have the unintended consequence of encouraging teachers to discipline students of color less than they otherwise might, leading to more chaotic classrooms in inner-city schools and thus ironically making it more difficult for better-behaved minority students to obtain good education.

Regular New American Civil Rights Project readers are probably well-acquainted with  “mismatch” research, which shows that students who receive large racial preferences in college or law school admissions learn less than they would if they had attended institutions where their credentials are closer to the median student’s. Mismatch problems are not race-specific; legacy students, or students who receive preferential treatment in admissions because a close relative attended that university, have also been shown to suffer from the ill effects of mismatch. But, because large racial preferences in admissions are widespread, mismatch is of special concern in the racial context. Riley’s book does an excellent job summarizing the available empirical research into mismatch and explaining why it suggests that large racial preferences need to be scaled back. I am perhaps biased, though, because Riley cites favorably this report on which several New American Civil Rights Project members worked in their capacities as members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

If there is one section of the book that left me with more questions than answers,  it is Riley’s discussion of the War on Drugs. Riley does a good job debunking overblown claims that the War on Drugs’s racially disparate stem from intentional discrimination by racist police or judges.  At the same time, he shys away from stating a firm conclusion about whether continuing the War on Drugs really is in the interest of African-Americans. For example, he argues that high incarceration rates disproportionately benefit law-abiding residents of inner-city communities by keeping the worst offenders off the streets. But he does not engage with the possibility that drug prohibitionism has made these neighborhoods more violent in the first place; as Harvard University’s Jeffrey Miron puts it, “Prohibition drives drug markets underground, thereby generating violence and corruption. Participants in black markets cannot resolve their disputes with courts and lawyers, so they resort to violence instead.” Nor does Riley respond to claims that high incarceration rates have contributed to the breakdown of the African-American family. I should note that I oppose drug prohibitionism mostly for reasons unrelated to race, and Riley may not. Still, I hope to see him wrangle more with some of these questions in later editions of this book or in future writings.