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

by Jason L. Riley

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.