Three New Books Challenge Preconceived Notions of Race

Far-left activists, scholars and journalists dominate the debate with views most black Americans reject.

By Jason L. Riley of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"A majority of blacks tell pollsters that they support school choice and voter ID requirements and that they oppose racial preferences."

"One of today’s most prominent activist organizations, Black Lives Matter, has advocated defunding the police, while polling has shown that upward of 80% of blacks want the level of policing in their communities to remain the same or to increase."

"“Black leaders have turned to group identity rather than individual identity and American principles of assimilation. The result has been cultural stagnation for some black communities.”"

"Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury challenges the left’s notion that racism mainly explains this cultural underdevelopment. “The ‘structural racism’ argument seldom goes into cause and effect,” he writes. “We are all just supposed to know that it’s the fault of something called ‘structural racism,’ abetted by an environment of ‘white supremacy’ that purportedly characterizes our society. Any racial disparity, then, can be totally explained by the imputation of ‘structural racism.’ ”"

"In “Agency,” Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the path out of poverty is not more government wealth redistribution but more focus on family structure and the so-called success sequence: graduate from high school, find a job, get married and then have kids, in that order."

"Rafael Mangual has just authored “Criminal (In)justice,”"

"The book’s discussion of the popular belief that poverty is a “root cause” of crime is instructive. Mr. Mangual reports that New York City homicides fell from more than 2,220 to fewer than 300 between 1990 and 2018, a period during which the city’s poverty rate increased slightly. Even during the 2007-09 Great Recession, which hit New York especially hard, crime continued to decline. Between 2006 and 2009, the jobless rate for black men, who are most of the city’s murder victims and perpetrators, nearly doubled, yet homicides and other violent crimes fell significantly."