Please Stop Helping Us Quotes

“Moreover, in those instances where the political success of a minority group has come first, the result has often been slower socioeconomic progress.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“There have been a handful of prominent Asian American politicians, like Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, but Asians have tended to avoid politics, compared with other groups.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“The economist Thomas Sowell has spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups in the United States and internationally. And his findings show that political activity generally has not been a factor in the rise of groups from poverty to prosperity.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“By 2013 Mississippi had more black elected officials than any other state, but it also continues to have one of the highest black poverty rates in the nation.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Between 1940 and 1960—that is, before the major civil rights victories, and at a time when black political power was nearly nonexistent—the black poverty rate fell from 87 percent to 47 percent.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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!”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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, thought 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”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“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”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“In the summer of 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion. President Obama and Attorney General Holder wanted to talk about gun control. The NAACP wanted to talk about racial profiling. Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment, and the supposedly racist criminal justice system.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“When I say that someone is being treated like a criminal, I mean that person is being treated like he broke the law or otherwise did something wrong. (When I want to say someone is being treated as less than human, I say that person is being treated like an animal, not a criminal.) Her chattel slavery and Jim Crow analogies are similarly tortured and yet another effort to explain away stark racial differences in criminality. But unlike prisons, those institutions punished people for being black, not for misbehaving. (A slave who never broke the law remained a slave.) Yet Alexander insists that we blame police and prosecutors and drug laws and societal failures—anything except individual behavior—and even urges the reader to reject the notion of black free will.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“But the conversation that Alexander wants to have glosses over the fact that black men commit a hugely disproportionate number of crimes in the United States. The New Jim Crow is chock-full of data on the racial makeup of prisons, but you will search in vain for anything approaching a sustained discussion of black crime rates. To Alexander and those who share her view, the two are largely unrelated. Black incarceration rates, she wrote, result from “a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control.”6 The author seems reluctant even to acknowledge that black people behind bars have done anything wrong. In her formulation, blacks are simply “far more likely to be labeled criminals”7 and are as blameless as slaves in the antebellum South. “When we say someone was ‘treated like a criminal,’ what we mean to say is that he or she was treated as less than human, like a shameful creature,” Alexander wrote. “Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages.”8 Really?”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Though income is the primary predictor, the lack of live-in fathers also is overwhelmingly a black problem, regardless of poverty status,” reported the Washington Times in 2012, citing census data. “Among blacks, nearly 5 million children, or 54 percent, live with only their mother.” Just 12 percent of poor black households have two parents present, compared with 41 percent of poor Hispanic families and 32 percent of impoverished white families. “In all but 11 states, most black children do not live with both parents. In every state, 7 in 10 white children do.”2”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Since the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, wrote Remnick, the liberal constituencies of America had been waiting for a savior figure. Barack Obama proposed himself. In the eyes of his supporters, he was a promise in a bleak landscape; he possessed an inspirational intelligence and an evident competence . . . he was an embodiment of multi-ethnic inclusion when the country was becoming no longer white in its majority. This was the promise of his campaign, its reality or vain romance, depending on your view.35”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Black America “isn’t just as fissured as white America; it is more so,” wrote Gates. And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor’s guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism—something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.32”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement,” wrote Sowell. “Nor has eager political participation or outstanding success in politics been translated into faster group achievement.”21”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Impressive socioeconomic advancement has been made and the black middle class has grown, but wide black-white gaps remain, not only with regard to income but also respecting educational achievement, labor-force participation, incarceration rates, and other measures. 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.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Yet between 1972 and 2011—that is, after major civil rights gains, as well as the implementation of Great Society programs—it barely declined, from 32 percent to 28 percent, and remained three times the white rate, which is about what it was in 1972.20”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“Washington’s style of interracial engagement has been all but forgotten, and when remembered, usually disparaged: he put a premium on finding consensus and empathizing with other groups, and by his example encouraged dominant groups to do the same,” wrote Norrell. “He cautioned that when people protest constantly about their mistreatment, they soon get a reputation as complainers, and others stop listening to their grievances. Blacks needed a reputation for being hard-working, intelligent, and patriotic, Washington taught, and not for being aggrieved.”19”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“But racial allegiance doesn’t entirely explain black attitudes toward Obama, according to David Bositis, a political scientist at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies who specializes in black issues. “You have to put the choice that African Americans are making in context,” he told the Huffington Post in 2011. “Certainly there may be some residual good feelings from that historic moment in 2008. But support for the president remains strong because there is no real menu of political options for African Americans.”11”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“He was born in Florida in 1941, but in the 1950s his family move to Newburgh, New York, where he attended high school.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“What do the current data show?”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

“16 John Lewis, the 1960s civil rights activist who would later become a congressman, suggested that Washington deserved to be “ridiculed and vilified by his own people for working so closely with white America.”
― Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed