Fifty years ago, 1964, the civil rights movement that had begun in the 1950s achieved its goal with the Civil Rights Act and a year later with the Voting Rights Act.
A remarkable book, “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed”, by Jason L. Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board who is black, should be must-reading by Afro-Americans and white Americans to understand that, while there has been progress for those blacks who achieved an education and moved into the middle and upper classes of America, far too many blacks have embraced a culture that has doomed them to poverty, prison, and a sense of victimization.
Having lived through the civil rights movement, observing it from the vantage point of having seen the segregation and prejudice that had afflicted blacks prior to it, I was not surprised by the evidence put forth in Riley’s book of self-inflicted failure to embrace the opportunities as other groups have done.
On June 16 Riley wrote an opinion article, “How Not to Help Black Americans”, saying that “The Obama presidency is evidence that blacks have progressed politically. But if the rise of other racial and ethnic groups is any indication, black social and economic problems are less about politics than about culture. The persistently high black jobless rate is more a consequence of unemployability than of discrimination in hiring.”