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Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed (2014)

by Jason L. Riley(Favorite Author)

4.32 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1594037256 (ISBN13: 9781594037252)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Encounter Books

review 1: Excellent work - a must read for every African American! This book follows in the tradition of historical black scholars such as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington, and celebrates the work of Thomas Sewell. The descendants of African slaves need to wake up to the reality of the damage done by the cultural norms we have allowed to proliferate and the politics we have emotionally aligned ourselves with. We need to start accepting responsibility for our own destiny. An African American billionaire once said, and I paraphrase: the best antidote to racism is excellence. It's time we embraced the fact, proven throughout history, that education, sustained effort and a true sense of self-determination, not handouts, are the key ingredients of success. This excerpt from the... more introduction says it all: Yes, the Obama presidency is evidence that blacks have progressed politically. But if the rise of other groups is any indication, black social and economic problems are less about politics than they are about culture. The persistently high black jobless rate is more a consequence of unemployability than of discrimination in hiring. The black-white learning gap stems from a dearth of education choices for ghetto kids, not biased tests or a shortage of education funding. And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it’s been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior—behavior too often celebrated in black culture.
review 2: Jason Riley, a member of the editorial board of the WSJ, does an excellent job of arguing his position that many of the well-intended policies that are meant to help African Americans actually help to hold them back and that part of the responsibility for black achievement (or lack of it) lies with their own behavior. He quotes Martin Luther King who once said, “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world too. We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.” Riley writes candidly about his very scary experiences as a young black man being pulled over by police for what we now call “driving while black” and at the time he believed the cops were racist. He also writes of how he worked in high school as a stock boy in a supermarket and in a gas station mini mart and says that the people he caught stealing were almost always black and as a result black shoppers got more scrutiny from him and others who worked there. When he moved to NYC after college he saw that black restaurant owners sometimes asked groups of young black diners to prepay for their meals or put them in the back of the restaurant to make sure they didn’t skip out on the bill. He writes, “And the lady who is nervous about sharing an elevator with a black man might be black herself.” He quotes former Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole who wrote “One of the most painful admissions I hear is: I am afraid of my own people.” One of the tenants of the left is that poverty and racism are the two main reasons that African Americans have not succeeded to the same degree as others in our society and that the high black inmate population is due to a racist criminal justice system. He cites the example of other groups who endured rampant poverty and racial discrimination who did not become over represented in the criminal justice system. He writes, “During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under $4,000 per year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing in any area of the city. That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet in 1965 there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California." (source Wilson and Herrnstein).If you are willing to look beyond the propaganda of victimization and consider the facts, you will learn a lot from “Please Stop Helping Us, How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed.” Excellent read. less

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