Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Some individuals who avoid encounters with black youths may indeed be acting out of racism, but given that law-abiding blacks exhibit the exact same behavior it’s likely that most people are acting on probability. “If I’m walking down a street in Center City Philadelphia at two in the morning and I hear some footsteps behind me and I turn around and there are a couple of young white dudes behind me, I am probably not going to get very uptight. I am probably not going to have the same reaction if I turn around and there is the proverbial black urban youth behind me,” Theodore McKee, a black federal judge, told an interviewer in the 1990s. “Now, if I can have this reaction—and I’m a black male who has studied martial arts for twenty some odd years and can defend myself—I can’t help but think that the average white judge in the situation will have a reaction that is ten times more intense.”2 (When the interviewer, Linn Washington, also black, was asked on C-SPAN to respond to the judge’s remarks, he said, “I can relate to it because I ride the subways in Philadelphia late at night.”)3