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

by Jason L. Riley

The intentions behind welfare programs, for example, may be noble. But in practice they have slowed the self-development that proved necessary for other groups to advance. Minimum-wage laws might lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they also have a long history of pricing blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education was intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates—particularly in the fields of math and science—than we’d have in the absence of racial preferences. And so it goes, with everything from soft-on-crime laws that make black neighborhoods more dangerous to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.

Upward mobility depends on work and family. Social programs that undermine the work ethic and displace fathers keep poor people poor, and perverse incentives put in place by people trying to help are manifested in black attitudes, habits, and skills. Why study hard in school if you will be held to lower academic standards? Why change antisocial behavior when people are willing to reward it, make excuses for it, or even change the law to accommodate it?

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.

In April 1865, one hundred years before Johnson addressed Howard University graduates, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke at a Boston gathering of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on a similar theme. “Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What should we do with the Negro?’” said Douglass. “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall.... And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!” Douglass was stressing the primacy of group self-development, a not uncommon sentiment among black elites in the decades following the Civil War. Booker T. Washington, who like Douglass was born a slave, said that “It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.” Douglass and Washington didn’t dow...

In the fall of 2011, nearly three years after Barack Obama won the keys to the White House, the president’s job-approval rating had slipped below 50 percent for the first time. No one wondered why. The official unemployment rate stood at 9 percent; economic growth was stagnant; and survey after survey demonstrated that Americans, a normally optimistic bunch, had become increasingly pessimistic about the country’s future. One clear exception was black Americans, who of course had overwhelmingly supported Obama’s historic election. Polls showed that white support for the president fell by 25 percentage points between his inauguration in January 2009 and September 2011, when it rested at just 33 percent. Yet even as the country endured the worst economic downturn in generations, black fealty toward Obama remained largely undiminished. This exception was notable because the downturn hit blacks especially hard. In September 2011 white unemployment was 8 percent, versus a black unemployment rate of 16 percent. For black men it was 18 percent, and for black teens the jobless rate topped 44 percent. Nor was employment the only area where blacks as a group had regressed economically under Obama. According to the Census Bureau, black homeownership rates in 2011 had fallen to a point where the black-white gap was the widest since 1960, wiping out more than four decades of black gains.

Despite this grim economic picture, blacks backed Obama in the third year of his presidency almost as strongly as they had on Election Day. Historically speaking, it fit a pattern. Between 1980 and 2004 black support for the Democratic presidential candidate ranged between 83 and 90 percent.

Yet Barack Obama managed to squeeze even more out of this voting bloc. He won 95 percent of the black vote in 2008, a year that also saw a record percentage of eligible black voters turn out to elect the nation’s first black president. The surge was driven mostly by black women and younger voters; white voter turnout in 2008 actually fell from what it had been four years earlier. And while black support for Obama had declined slightly by the fall of 2011, it seemed unlikely that black America would be abandoning the president in significant numbers anytime soon. According to Gallup, Obama’s approval rating among blacks had dipped from an average of 92 percent in 2009 to 86 percent in mid-2011. Separate polling by Pew showed that Obama’s support among blacks remained essentially unchanged at 90 percent over the same period.

It could be that blacks, like so many others who supported his reelection in 2012, were cutting the president slack because the economy was already in bad shape when Obama took office. As one black voter put it to a reporter in August 2011, “No president, not Bush, not Obama, could turn the mess that we are in around in four years.” But in the past, the black approval rating of a president had tended to correlate with the jobless rate. Yet black unemployment was lower under George W. Bush than it had been at any point during the Obama administration. In addition, the black-white income disparity that widened under Obama actually narrowed in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan also inherited a weak economy from his predecessor. The Great Recession that began under George W. Bush in December 2007 had officially ended in June 2009, six months after Obama took office.

Economic historians, citing one hundred and fifty years of U.S. business cycles, generally agree that the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery. Not so under Obama, and not so especially for blacks. A report released by two former Census Bureau officials in August 2013 found that since the end of the recession, median household incomes had fallen 3.6 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks.1 Which means that even when controlling for the effects of the economic slowdown that Obama inherited, under his presidency blacks have been worse off both in absolute terms and relative to whites.

Broad racial solidarity is another possible explanation for why blacks have remained so bullish on Obama despite his economic record. A black member of Congress told political scientist Carol Swain that “one of the advantages, and disadvantages, of representing blacks is their shameless loyalty . . . You can almost get away with raping babies and be forgiven. You don’t have any vigilance about your performance.”3

The administration itself has stoked this sentiment in hopes of maintaining strong black support. It has pushed to loosen “racist” drug-sentencing laws. It has sued employers who use criminal background checks to screen job applicants. It has unleashed federal housing officials on white suburban residential communities that it considered insufficiently integrated. The goal is to sustain goodwill with the civil rights establishment and black voters, even if these measures are more symbolic than substantive. Black incarceration rates are not driven by drug laws; empirical research shows that employers who check criminal histories are more likely to hire blacks; and polls have long shown that most black people have no interest in living in mostly white neighborhoods. Yet these kinds of measures are used to foster an “us-versus-them” mentality among blacks and then exploit such thinking for partisan political gain.

A 2007 study by the Heritage Foundation concluded that “in general, respondents in photo identification and non-photo identification states are just as likely to report voting compared to respondents from states that only required voters to state their name.”8 The findings applied to white, black, and Latino voters alike.

While blacks were steadily increasing their numbers in Congress and among elected officials at the state and local levels in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, black welfare dependency rose, as did black teen unemployment, black crime, and black births to single mothers.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires states with a history of racially motivated voter intimidation to have any changes in voting procedures cleared by a federal court or the Justice Department. This so-called preclearance provision, always intended to be temporary, was slated to sunset after five years, but Congress renewed the provision repeatedly well after it became obvious that ballot access was no longer a problem for blacks. In 1982 a permanent part of the law, Section 2, was amended to allow for racial gerrymandering, or the drawing of voting districts to ensure that a candidate of a particular race is elected. The measure of success was no longer whether blacks had ballot access. Instead, it was whether enough black officials were being elected to office, and liberals became hell-bent on using Sections 2 and 5 to achieve proportional racial representation. “In 1965, the Voting Rights Act had been simple, transparent and elegant. Its aim was to secure basic Fifteenth Amendment rights in a region where they had been egregiously denied,” wrote Thernstrom. “But the cumulative effect of these amendments was to turn the law into a constitutionally problematic, unprecedented attempt to impose what voting rights activists, along with their allies in Congress, the Justice Department, and the judiciary, viewed as a racially fair distribution of political power.”28 In 2006, Congress renewed Section 5 for another twenty-five years.

We are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and a black man has twice been elected president in a country where blacks are only 13 percent of the population. Yet liberals continue to pretend that it’s still 1965, and that voters must be segregated in order for blacks to win office. Never mind that in 1982 five black candidates from majority-white districts won seats in the North Carolina State House of Representatives. Or that from 1983 to 1995 a majority-white district in Missouri was represented in Congress by Alan Wheat, a black Democrat. Or that between 1991 and 1997 Gary Franks, a black Republican from Connecticut, represented a congressional district that was 88 percent white. Or that in 1996 Sanford Bishop, a black Democrat from Georgia, easily won reelection to Congress in a district that was only 35 percent black. Or that in 2010 Tim Scott of South Carolina and Allen West of Florida, both black Republicans, were elected to Congress from districts that are overwhelmingly white. Or that Representatives Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Keith Ellison of Minnesota are black Democrats who represent districts that are more than 60 percent white.

In 2008 Obama not only won the presidency of a majority-white country; he did better among white voters in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia than John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. Yet after the Supreme Court, in its 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder, effectively nullified Section 5’s “preclearance” provisions by ruling that Congress was using an outdated formula to determine which states must have federal oversight of their voting laws, Obama said he was “deeply disappointed,” and complained that the ruling “upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent.” The president and others on the left wanted the court to ignore the fact that, as Chief Justice John Roberts phrased it in his majority opinion, “history did not end in 1965.” Roberts took Congress to task for pretending that nothing had changed in nearly half a century, writing: By the time the [Voting Rights Act of 1965] was reauthorized in 2006, there had been 40 more years of it. In assessing the “current need” for a preclearance system that treats States differently from o...

What do the current data show? Among other things, the statistics reveal that black voter registration is higher in the South than it is in other regions of the country. They show that the racial gap in voter registration and turnout is lower in the states originally covered under Section 5 than it is nationwide. Finally, they show that black turnout now exceeds white turnout in five of those six states, and that in the sixth stat...

What really concerns liberals is that the ruling could make it more difficult for them to use the Voting Rights Act to guarantee certain election results. As Roger Clegg and Joshua Thompson, who filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, explained, “the principal use that federal civil-rights officials now make of Section 5 is to require racially gerrymandered and racially segregated voting districts.” The argument is that racial minorities are entitled to a proportionate number of voting districts in which they are the majority. “Think about how far from the ideals of the civil-rights movement the Left’s definition of civil rights has led us,” wrote Clegg and Thompson. “Universities must be able to discriminate against students on the basis of skin color, and voters must be required to vote only among those of their own kind.”29

One reason that returns on black political investment have been so meager is that black politicians often act in ways that benefit themselves but don’t represent the concerns of most blacks. So in addition to being overly reliant on politicians, blacks typically have poor political representation. “Pollsters have long known of the remarkable gap between the leaders and the led in black America,” wrote Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. A 1985 survey found that most blacks favored the death penalty and prayer in public schools while most black leaders opposed these things. Most blacks opposed school busing, while most black leaders favored it. Three times as many blacks opposed abortion rights as their leaders did. Indeed, on many key social issues, blacks are more conservative than whites.31

The black underclass continues to face many challenges, but they have to do with values and habits, not oppression from a manifestly unjust society.

As the next chapter explains, one lesson of the Obama presidency—maybe the most important one for blacks—is that having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home.

Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers.

In the late 1990s the black residents of Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent Cleveland suburb, invited John Ogbu, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, to examine the black-white academic achievement gap in their community. Roughly a third of the town’s residents were black, and the school district was divided equally along racial lines. Yet the black kids trailed far behind whites in test scores, grade-point averages, placement in high-level classes, and college attendance. Black students were receiving 80 percent of the Ds and Fs.

Nationwide, the racial gap in education is well documented. Black kids are overrepresented among high-school dropouts and students who are not performing at grade level. Black scores on the SAT and other standardized tests are far lower on average than those of whites. The achievement gap begins in elementary school and widens in higher grades. By the end of high school the typical black student is several years behind his white peers in reading and math. The usual explanation of this is class inequality. Blacks don’t perform on the level of whites because they come from a lower socioeconomic background and their schools have fewer resources, goes the argument. But what Ogbu found is that this problem transcends class and persists even among the children of affluent, educated black professionals.

“None of the versions of the class-inequality [argument] can explain why Black students from similar social class backgrounds, residing in the same neighborhood, and attending the same school, don’t do as well as White students,” wrote Ogbu. “Within the Black population, of course, middle-class children do better, on the average, than lower-class children, just as in the White population. However, when Blacks and Whites from similar socioeconomic backgrounds are...

Ogbu and his team of researchers were given access to parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and students in the Shaker Heights school district, which was one of the country’s best. And he concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books. “A kind of norm of minimum effort appeared to exist among Black students,” wrote Ogbu. “The students themselves recognized this and used it to explain both their academic behaviors and their low academic achievement performance.”5 Due to peer pressure, some black students “didn’t work as hard as they should and could.” Among their black friends, “it was not cool to be successful” or “to work hard or to s...

Ogbu found that black high-school students “avoided certain attitudes, standard English, and some behaviors because they considered them White. They feared that adopting White ways would be detrimental to their collective racial identity and solidarity. Unfortunately, some of the attitudes labeled ‘White’ and avoided by the students were those that enhanced school success.” The behaviors and attitudes to be avoided included, for example, enrolling in honors and advanced-placement classes, striving for high grades, talking properly, hanging around too many white students, and participating in extracurricular activities that were populated by whites.

But in at least one important respect, Ogbu faulted the school system itself for the achievement gap. It turned out that teachers were passing students who did not perform at grade level. The practice was widespread, particularly in kindergarten through eighth grade, and well known among students. And the teachers who were setting lower standards for black kids had “good intentions,” he reported. But it had the effect of leading some black kids to believe that they were doing better in school than they really were. Other kids simply didn’t try as hard as they would have otherwise. When Ogbu asked students why their grades were poor, “they would say that they did not take their schoolwork seriously because they knew they were going to be passed into the ninth grade anyway.” Ogbu’s team of researchers also noted that in classes where most of the kids were black, teachers expected less of the students in terms of homework, even going so far as to de-emphasize its importance. Obviously, school officials aren’t responsible for the poor attitudes and lack of effort among black kids, but ignoring or indulging this isn’t going to help close the learning gap.

When WNYC, the local NPR affiliate in New York, looked at 2012 admissions data for these selective schools, it found that a disproportionate number of the students lived in an Asian immigrant community in Brooklyn. “An analysis by WNYC found more than 300 students from three zip codes in the vicinity got into the city’s specialized high schools last year,” the radio station reported. Those three zip codes include parts of Sunset Park, Borough Park and Dyker Heights. They were among the 20 zip codes with the most acceptances to the elite high schools. Yet, the average incomes in those three zip codes are low enough for a family of four to qualify for free lunch (they range from about $35,000-$40,000 a year). That’s striking because most of the other admissions to the elite schools came from middle to upper class neighborhoods. The report went on to explain how diligently the families prepare for these admissions tests. It turns out that the most popular weekend activity for middle-school students is test preparation. While the parents work six or seven days a week in menial, labor-intensive jobs, the children, beginning in sixth grade or earlier, are preparing for high-school entrance exams. “Even the lowest paid immigrants scrape up enough money for tutoring because those high schools are seen as the ticket to a better life.”13 The parents push the children to do well academically, and the students in turn encourage one another. The culture places a high value on education...

In Philadelphia circa 1880, 75 percent of black families and 73 percent of white families were comprised of two parents and children. In Philadelphia circa 2007, “married-couple families account for only 34 percent of African American family households, while white married-couple families account for 68 percent of white family households,” according to the Urban League of Philadelphia. Was there less racism in America, structural or otherwise, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War than there was a year before Barack Obama was elected president? In 1847 Philadelphia—that is, prior to the end of slavery—historians report, two-parent families were more common among ex-slaves than freeborn blacks. And Philadelphia was no outlier. Nationwide, data from every census taken between 1890 and 1940 show the black marriage rate exceeding the white rate. Liberals want to blame the “legacy” of slavery and racism for the breakdown of the black family and subsequent social pathologies.

Social welfare programs that were initiated or greatly expanded during the 1960s resulted in the government effectively displacing black fathers as breadwinners, and made work less attractive.

Crime began rising precipitously in the 1960s after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, started tilting the scales in favor of the criminals. Some 63 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll taken in 1968 judged the Warren Court, in place from 1953 to 1969, too lenient on crime; but Warren’s jurisprudence was supported wholeheartedly by the Michelle Alexanders of that era, as well as by liberal politicians who wanted to shift blame for criminal behavior away from the criminals.

Crime rates rose by 139 percent during the 1960s, and the murder rate doubled. Cities couldn’t hire cops fast enough. “The number of police per 1,000 people was up twice the rate of the population growth, and yet clearance rates for crimes dropped 31 percent and conviction rates were down 6 percent,” wrote Lucas A. Powe Jr. in his history of the Warren Court. “During the last weeks of his [1968] presidential campaign, Nixon had a favorite line in his standard speech. ‘In the past 45 minutes this is what happened in America. There has been one murder, two rapes, forty-five major crimes of violence, countless robberies and auto thefts.’”13 As remains the case today, blacks in the past were overrepresented among those arrested and imprisoned. In urban areas in 1967 blacks were seventeen times more likely than whites to be arrested for robbery. In 1980 blacks comprised about one-eighth of the population but were half of all those arrested for murder, rape, and robbery, according to FBI data. And they were between one-fourth and one-third of all those arrested for crimes such as burglary, auto theft, and aggravated assault. Today blacks are about 13 percent of the population and continue to be responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property crimes—is still typically two to three times their represen...

“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.

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

Critics insist that blacks are overrepresented among those arrested because police focus on black communities, but data consistently show little if any difference between the rate at which victims report the racial identities of their attackers and the rate at which police arrest people of different races. As Mac Donald noted, “No one has come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.”17 Nor is there any evidence to support the claim that prosecutors are overcharging blacks—or that judges are oversentencing blacks—for the same crimes committed by nonblacks. Mac Donald wrote: 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 prosec...

What about the contention that racist drug laws are driving black incarceration rates? Might that help explain why blacks are 13 percent of the population but half of all prison inmates? In 1986, in response to the crack cocaine epidemic that was crushing American inner cities, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which instituted harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses than for powder cocaine offenses. For sentencing purposes, the law stipulated that one gram of crack cocaine be treated as equivalent to 100 grams of powder cocaine. Because crack cocaine offenders tended to be black and powder cocaine offenders tended to be white, critics of the law denounced it as racially biased in hindsight. But it’s worth remembering that black lawmakers led the initial effort to pass the legislation. The harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including New York Representatives Major Owens of Brooklyn and Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black communities, and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentenc...

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

Liberal elites would have us deny what black ghetto residents know to be the truth. These communities aren’t dangerous because of racist cops or judges or sentencing guidelines. They’re dangerous mainly due to black criminals preying on 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

Perceptions of black criminality aren’t likely to change until black behavior changes. Rather than address that challenge, however, too many liberal policy makers change the subject. Instead of talking about black behavior, they want to talk about racism or poverty or unemployment or gun control. The poverty argument is especially weak. In the 1950s, when segregation was legal, overt racism was rampant, and black poverty was much higher than today, black crime rates were lower and blacks comprised a smaller percentage of the prison population. And then there is the experience of other groups who endured rampant poverty, racial discrimination, and high unemployment without becoming overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

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. Shouldn’t ghetto attitudes toward work at least be part of this discussion?

According to John Lott, a former chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission, states with stand-your-ground laws (also known as castle doctrine laws) in place between 1977 and 2005 saw murder rates fall by 9 percent and overall violent crime fall by 11 percent.23 “The debate has everything backwards over who benefits from the law,” Lott told me in an e-mail exchange shortly after the Zimmerman verdict. “Poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas are not only the most likely victims of crime, they are also the ones who benefit the most from Stand Your Ground laws. It makes it easier for them to protect themselves when the police can’t be there fast enough. Rules that make self-defense more difficult would impact blacks the most.” 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.

Gun deaths fell by 39 percent in the United States between 1993 and 2011. Justice Department data from 2013 show that “In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns.”24 More remarkable is that this drop in gun violence happened at the same time that firearm purchases were increasing. In 2012 background checks for gun purchases reached 19.6 million, an annual record, and an increase of 19 percent over 2011. Some of the most violent cities in America, like Chicago and Baltimore, already have some of the strictest gun laws. Yet the political left continues to insist that disarming ghetto residents improves safety in those communities. 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 we...

The reality is that locking up lawbreakers has worked better than going easy on them, and has worked best for law-abiding black people. After incarceration rates began to rise in the 1980s, crime plummeted. “The rate of reported crimes in the United States dropped each year after 1991 for nine years in a row, the longest decline ever recorded,” wrote Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “And crime dropped all over the United States—in every region, in the country as well as the city, in poor neig...

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.

It did not matter to critics that police cited stop and frisk as an important crime-fighting tool or that crime rates bore this out. 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 most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home,” concluded William Comanor and Llad Phillips after examining data from a national longitudinal study of young people. Black boys without a father were 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father.

But to understand why these laws make it harder for blacks to find jobs, it first helps to look at how minimum-wage laws impact labor markets in general. And it turns out that economists, a famously argumentative lot, tend to agree that minimum-wage laws destroy jobs. 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 In 2008 economists David Neumark and William Wascher published a book that surveyed the minimum-wage literature of the previous three decades. They reviewed more than one hundred academic studies on the impact of such laws and found “overwhelming” evidence that younger, lesser-skilled workers suffer what economists call “disemployment effects,” or a loss of employment when the m...

Neumark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, about research that shows no harmful effects on hiring when the minimum wage is increased, he told me that those studies are outliers. “There’s quite a bit of agreement,” he said in an interview. “You do see papers sometimes claiming that there are no disemployment effects from the minimum wage. They tend to come from the same people. And clearly some of them, the ones coming out of the UC Berkeley group”—a reference to the famously liberal flagship campus of the University of California—“clearly they have a political agenda.” Neumark also said that the press has a tendency to play up contrarian studies, which gives them more weight than they might deserve. “Most of the studies say there’s a disemployment effect, so that’s not really news anymore. So you get disproportionate attention in the media and sometimes in the profession to studies that find surprising results.”6

Two go-to academics for the pro-minimum-wage crowd are the aforementioned David Card of Berkeley and Alan Krueger of Princeton. In 1994, when both men were teaching at Princeton, they coauthored a widely cited case study that compared employment changes in fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania after New Jersey’s minimum wage rose from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour. Following the increase employment fell in New Jersey, as most economists would have predicted. But because it also fell by just as much in Pennsylvania, which hadn’t hiked its own minimum, Card and Krueger argued that the drop in both states must have been caused by something else. “Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model of the minimum wage,” the authors concluded, “we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.” In their subsequent book, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, the authors went even further. Under close scrutiny, the bulk of the empirical evidence on the employment effects of the minimum wage is shown to be consistent with our findings . . . which suggest that increases in the minimum wage have had, if anything, a small, positive effect on employment, rather than an adverse effect.7 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, a...