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

by Jason L. Riley

“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”15 The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the United States today are run by blacks.

“Disclosing crime rates—the proper benchmark against which police behavior must be measured—would demolish a cornerstone of the Times’s worldview: that the New York Police Department, like police departments across America, oppresses the city’s black population with unjustified racial tactics,” wrote Mac Donald. In one instance, the Times made a very big deal of the fact that in 2009 blacks were 23 percent of the city’s population but 55 percent of those stopped by the police. By contrast, whites were 35 percent of the population but accounted for only 10 percent of stops. What the story left out, noted Mac Donald, is that blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown.16

Backing up this bias claim has been the holy grail of criminology for decades—and the prize remains as elusive as ever. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however—an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records.18

“The absence of any charge by black members of Congress that the crack–powder differential was racially unfair speaks volumes; after all, several of these representatives had long histories of distinguished opposition to any public policy that smacked of racial injustice. That several of these representatives demanded a crackdown on crack is also significant. It suggests that the initiative for what became the crack–powder distinction originated to some extent within the ranks of African-American congressional officials.”19

In 2009 blacks were 85 percent of crack offenders, and sentences for crack offenses averaged twenty-four months longer than those for powder cocaine. Civil rights groups and others who equate racial disparities with racism have used such data to decry the sentencing guidelines as racially unjust, yet they don’t seem overly concerned with whether blacks in the main are helped or hurt when crack dealers are locked up longer for pushing a substance that has devastated urban black neighborhoods.

Some 90 percent of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Why should we care more about black criminals than their black victims?

Nor is the racial disparity in prison inmates explained by the enforcement of drug laws. In 2006 blacks were 37.5 percent of the 1,274,600 people in state prisons, which house 88 percent of the nation’s prison population, explained Heather Mac Donald. “If you remove drug prisoners from that population, the percentage of black prisoners drops to 37 percent—half of a percentage point, hardly a significant difference.” It’s true that drug prosecutions have risen markedly over the past thirty years. Drug offenders were 6.4 percent of state prison inmates in 1979 but had jumped to 20 percent by 2004. “Even so,” wrote Mac Donald, “violent and property offenders continue to dominate the ranks: in 2004, 52 percent of state prisoners were serving time for violence and 21 percent for property crimes, for a combined total over three and a half times that of state drug offenders.” Drug-war critics like to focus on federal prisons, where drug offenders climbed from 25 percent of the inmate population in 1980 to 47.6 percent in 2006. “But the federal system held just 12.3 percent of the nation’s prisoners in 2006,” noted Mac Donald. “So much for the claim that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because of the war on drugs.”21

“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,” according to the social scientists Wilson and Herrnstein. “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.”22 Those who want to blame crime on a lack of jobs cannot explain why crime rates fell in many cities during the Great Depression, when unemployment was high, and spiked during the 1960s, when economic growth was strong and jobs were plentiful. Indeed, the labor-force participation rate of young black men actually fell in the 1980s and 1990s, two of the longest periods of sustained economic growth in U.S. history.

Lott noted that “blacks make up just 16.6 percent of Florida’s population, but they account for over 31 percent of the state’s defendants invoking Stand Your Ground defense. Black defendants who invoke this statute to justify their actions are acquitted 8 percent more frequently than whites who use the same defense.” None of this is to suggest that there is a causal link between stand-your-ground laws and gun violence, though liberals like Obama seem certain that one exists. If they’re right, it’s an argument for more such laws, not fewer.

Liberals like to obsess over how many people America incarcerates. They say that the number of inmates is simply “too high” or “excessive” without acknowledging the benefits of prison—benefits that accrue especially to the most likely crime victims: poor blacks. The relevant issue is not how many people we imprison per se but whether our higher arrests and conviction rates and longer prison terms affect behavior, wrote John Lott: Many blacks have their lives disrupted by the criminal justice system, but the lives and property of many blacks are also protected by that same system. . . . Blacks overwhelmingly commit crime against other blacks. For example, in 2007, 90.2 percent of black murder victims were murdered by blacks. To go even further, poor blacks commit crime against poor blacks. Is it less racist to care about the victims or the criminals?”25

The homicide figures are particularly noteworthy. Between 1964 and 1974 the homicide rate more than doubled, and in the late 1980s was at 1974 levels. Then in the 1990s it fell consistently. “Even with more than 2,800 killings from the attack on September 11, 2001, the homicide rate that year was more than 30% lower than the periodic peak rates that were the top portions of the 20-year cycle that began in the mid-1970s,”27 wrote Zimring. According to the Justice Department, the 1990s also saw declines of between 23 percent and 44 percent in rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, auto theft, and larceny. Again, the benefits of less crime are not spread evenly throughout the population.

The crime decline was the only public benefit of the 1990s whereby the poor and disadvantaged received more direct benefits than those with wealth. Because violent crime is a tax of which the poor pay much more, general crime declines also benefit the poor, as likely victims, most intensely. And impoverished minority males in big cities also benefited from less risk of both victimization and offense.28

For all the talk on the left that unemployment drives crime, the recent recession has not reversed trends. Between 2008 and 2010 the jobless rate doubled to about 10 percent, yet “the property-crime rate, far from spiking, fell significantly,” according to the Wall Street Journal. For 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported an 8% drop in the nationwide robbery rate and a 17% reduction in the auto-theft rate from the previous year. Big-city reports show the same thing. Between 2008 and 2010, New York City experienced a 4% decline in the robbery rate and a 10% fall in the burglary rate. Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles witnessed similar declines.30

The move was supported by Attorney General Holder. “To be clear, I’m not ordering an end to the practice of stop and frisk,” wrote the judge, allowing that the Supreme Court has found the practice permissible. “The purpose of the remedies addressed in this opinion is to ensure that the practice is carried out in a manner that protects the rights and liberties of all New Yorkers, while still providing much-needed police protection.”

Beginning in the 1960s, New York’s murder rate rose steadily, peaking at 2,245 deaths in 1990. By 2012 the number had dropped to 419, a forty-year low. Former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly credited stop and frisk and other kinds of proactive policing as a major reason for the decline. Again, the biggest beneficiaries of this trend were blacks, who comprised 60 percent of murder victims in the Big Apple in 2012. “No police department in the country has come close to achieving what the NYPD has,” wrote Heather Mac Donald. “New York’s crime drop has been twice as deep and has lasted twice as long as the national average since the early 1990s. Today, 10,000 minority males are alive who would have been killed by now had New York’s homicide rate remained at its early-1990s levels.”31 To the extent that soft-on-crime rulings like this result in less effective policing, blacks will suffer most.

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.33

Lemon went on to make five simple suggestions for black self-improvement: pull up your pants, finish high school, stop using the n-word, take better care of your communities, and stop having children out of wedlock.

Black boys without a father were 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father. James Q. Wilson put an even finer point on what’s at stake: If crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character; if weak character is more likely among the children of unmarried mothers; if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods; if boys become young men with no preparation for work; if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having “sold out” to a dominant white culture; if powerful gangs replace weak families—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing by plan and in the near future the crime rate of low-income blacks are slim.34

After the Civil War black leaders continued to be skeptical of unions. In his 1874 essay “The Folly, Tyranny, and Wickedness of Labor Unions,” Frederick Douglass argued that there was “abundant proof almost every day of their mischievous influence upon every industrial interest in the country.” W. E. B. Du Bois called trade unions “the greatest enemy of the black working man.” Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave and opposed unions his entire life, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1913 that “the average Negro who comes to town does not understand the necessity or advantage of a labor organization which stands between him and his employer and aims apparently to make a monopoly of the opportunity for labor.”

The decline in formal exclusion by international unions does not mean that discrimination has declined, because local affiliates of these unions, as well as others which never had formal race bars, exclude Negroes by a number of informal means. These include agreements not to sponsor Negroes for membership; refusal to admit Negroes into apprenticeship programs or to accept their applications; general “understandings” to vote against Negroes if they are proposed . . . [and] refusal of journeyman status to Negroes by means of examinations which either are not given to whites or are rigged so that Negroes cannot pass them.2

In fact, polls have shown that more than 90 percent of professional economists contend that increasing the minimum wage lowers employment for minimum-wage workers. Even highly respected economists such as David Card and Alan Krueger, who are skeptical of the consensus view, concede that the minimum-wage hypothesis “is one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics.”3 Why? Because a basic tenet of economics is that a rise in the cost of something tends to lower demand for it. Put another way, an artificial increase in the price of something causes less of it to be purchased. When that something is the price of labor, the result is a labor surplus, also known as unemployment. “It’s simple,” wrote Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992, “hike the minimum wage and you put people out of work.”4

Our overall sense of the literature is that the preponderance of evidence supports the view that minimum wages reduce the employment of low-wage workers. . . . Moreover, when researchers focus on the least-skilled groups that are most likely to be directly affected by minimum wage increases, the evidence for disemployment effects seems especially strong.”5

But others immediately pushed back at that notion, and quite hard. Becker wrote that the Card and Krueger studies had “serious defects,” and other economists—including Donald Deere, Finis Welch, and Kevin Murphy—spelled them out in detail. A major flaw, it turned out, was the shortness of the sample periods used in the case studies, which didn’t allow enough time for the negative employment effects to show up. “Subsequent research has tended to confirm evidence of adverse longer-run effects of minimum wages on employment,” explained Neumark and Wascher. Similarly, a 1997 study from the union-backed Employment Policy Institute claimed that employment didn’t decline after a 1996 increase in the federal minimum wage. But later studies showed that EPI obtained that result by using just six months of data. Adding three more months of data would have reversed the conclusion:

The research on this issue suggests that studies claiming to find no minimum wage effect on employment should be discounted unless the evidence points to no effects in both the short run and the longer run. Indeed, this issue turns out to figure prominently in our assessment of the research literature, as the studies that fail to detect disemployment effects typically do not allow for a longer-run impact.8

A 2012 article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, citing U.S. Department of Education figures, noted that among students who entered college in 2005 and earned their degree within six years the graduation rate was 60.2 percent for whites and 37.9 percent for blacks, a 22-point difference.11

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, told a congressional hearing in 2001 that he would abolish the minimum wage if he could. “I’m not in favor of cutting anybody’s earnings or preventing them from rising,” he said, “but I am against them losing their jobs because of artificial government intervention, which is essentially what the minimum wage is.”12

States took the lead in establishing a minimum wage, with Massachusetts going first in 1912. Within a decade, fifteen states and the District of Columbia had minimum-wage laws on their books. This was the Progressive Era, and proponents said that workers were being exploited and needed more bargaining power. Employers disagreed, and challenged the laws in court on the grounds that they “violated employers’ constitutional rights to enter freely into contracts and deprived them of their private property (i.e., their profits) without due process,” wrote economists Neumark and Wascher.13 The Supreme Court agreed in a 1923 ruling against the District of Columbia’s minimum-wage law. And by the end of the decade similar laws in most other places had been declared unconstitutional, repealed, or otherwise neutered to avoid a legal challenge. They would reappear in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which called for workweeks of thirty-five to forty hours and minimum pay of $12 to $15 per week. The Supreme Court would find that unconstitutional as well in 1935, but not before an estimated half a million black workers lost their jobs due to the minimum-wage requirements.

In fact, Davis-Bacon has been so effective at putting blacks out of work that 1930, the year before the law passed, was the last year that the black jobless rate was lower than the white rate.17

Northern unions and unionized firms, for example, have traditionally supported higher minimum wages to hobble their low-wage competition in the South. . . . Forty years ago, the politicians who pushed for the increased minimum wage did not hide their motives. Nor, in an era of state-sanctioned segregation, did they feel the need to hide their knowledge of who the intended victims of minimum-wage increases would be.

Of course, having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete. And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?

For decades the black unemployment rate has tended to be about double that of whites, irrespective of the economic climate. At the end of 2012 jobless rates were 6.3 percent for whites, 9.8 percent for Hispanics, and 14 percent for blacks. Even during periods of strong economic growth such as the 1990s the labor participation rate for black men between 16 and 24 fell.

This was just before the minimum wage law was amended in 1950 to catch up with the inflation of the 1940s which had, for all practical purposes, repealed the minimum wage law, since inflated wages for even unskilled labor were usually well above the minimum wage level specified when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938. The key role of the federal minimum wage laws can be seen in the fact that black teenage unemployment, even in the recession year of 1949, was a fraction of what it would become in even prosperous later years, after the series of minimum wage escalations that began in 1950.21

The effect on black workers was so pronounced, wrote the authors, that “employment losses for 16-to-24-year-old black males between 2007 and 2010 could have been nearly 50% lower had the federal and state minimum wages remained at the January 2007 level.”

Around 5 percent of hourly workers in the United States earn the minimum wage, according to the 2012 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. Most are 25 or younger and 69 percent of them work part-time. They are not their families’ sole breadwinner; they come from households that don’t depend on their earnings. Thus, the beneficiary of a minimum-wage increase is more likely to be a teenager in a tony suburb than a single mom in the ghetto. And hiking the minimum wage will diminish the job prospects for that single mom. A 1995 study concluded that mothers in states that raised the minimum wage remained on public assistance an average of 44 percent longer than their peers in states where the minimum did not rise.

“We find no evidence that minimum wage increases between 2003 and 2007 lowered state poverty rates. Moreover, we find that the newly proposed federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour, like the last increase from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour, is not well targeted to the working poor,” wrote Burkhauser and Sabia in a 2010 paper.

Only 11.3% of workers who will gain from an increase in the federal minimum wage to $9.50 per hour live in poor households, an even smaller share than was the case with the last federal minimum wage increase (15.8%). Of those who will gain, 63.2% are second or third earners living in households with incomes twice the poverty line, and 42.3% live in households with incomes three times the poverty line, well above $50,233, the income of the median household in 2007.

Federal per-pupil spending rose by an inflation-adjusted 375 percent between 1970 and 2010. School spending also grew steadily and dramatically at the state and local level, tripling between 1970 and 2005. Over the decades the government has prioritized poor children through programs such as Title I, which was created in 1965. “These federal streams accomplished precisely what was intended: helping equalize the funding of poor and affluent districts,” explained education writer Andy Smarick. “As of the 2004–5 school year, America’s highest-poverty districts had per student revenues virtually equivalent to the nation’s lowest-poverty districts.”1

In 2004, black 9-year-olds trailed their white peers in reading by roughly the same amount that they had twenty-five years earlier.2 Black 17-year-olds scored at the same level in reading and math as white 13-year-olds. And white 13-year-olds outperformed black 17-year-olds in science. In five out of seven categories—math, science, history, physics, and geography—a majority of blacks scored at the lowest level.3

On average, black fourth and eighth graders perform two full grade levels behind their white peers.4 Large urban school districts where a majority of children are black or Hispanic produce even worse results. A U.S. Department of Education report released in 2012 showed that 79 percent of eighth graders in Chicago public schools, which are 41 percent black and 44 percent Hispanic, could not read at grade level, and 80 percent could not perform grade-level math. Incredibly, those students were still better off than their peers in Detroit, where 7 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading and only 4 percent were proficient in math.5 Detroit public schools, which are 95 percent black, “had the lowest scores ever recorded in the 21-year history of the national math proficiency test” in 2009, reported the New York Times.6

The gap between their performance and that of their peers is perceptible from the first day of kindergarten, and only widens thereafter. In the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress—the massive, federally mandated report card on student performance, measured in grades 4, 8, and 12—the reading scores of African-American boys in eighth grade were barely higher than the scores of white girls in fourth grade. In math, 46% of African-American boys demonstrated “basic” or higher grade-level skills, compared with 82% of white boys. On the National Education Longitudinal Survey, 54% of 16-year-old African-American males scored below the 20th percentile, compared with 24% of white males and 42% of Hispanic males. Having well-educated parents did not close the gap: In 2006, 43% of black high-school seniors with at least one college-educated parent failed to demonstrate even basic reading comprehension, nearly twice the percentage of whites.7

A 2012 Schott Foundation for Public Education report noted that the black-white disparity in high-school graduation rates among males had narrowed by just three percentage points in the previous decade. “At this rate of progress,” said the report, “. . . it would take another 50 years to close the graduation gap between Black males and their White male counterparts.”8 These results are occurring despite the fact that the growth of the education workforce has far outpaced student enrollment. “Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers’ aides,” wrote Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute in 2012. “Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment.”9 Harvard professor Paul Peterson noted that since the 1960s, per-pupil spending in the United States has more than tripled after adjusting for inflation, while the number of pupils per teacher has fallen by a third.10