primary election coverage, the presidential impeachment process and now the federal response to the coronavirus. you can watch all of c-span's public affairs programming on television, online or listen on the free c-span app and be a part of the national conversation to c-span daily washington journal program or through our social media feeds. c-span, created by private industry america's cable television company as a public service and brought to you today by your television provider. >> next, it is book tv monthly in-depth program with all author jason riley. he is the author of weapon in, the case for open borders would how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed. also black power, a critique of black civil rights leaders. >> jason riley, author of

colonist, contributor to "the wall street journal" at the manhattan institute, fox newsey contributor among your books i want to begin where your book concludes because you say the following quote, liberalism as succeeded tragically in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. >> yes, i believe that is a big part of a political strategy actually. they have been added for some time and unfortunately they have had a lot of success in painting blacks as primarily f victims ad as defined by their demise asian first and foremost and then thei follow-up of course is that we have a government program or government solution to help you overcome your victimhood so it's a political strategy.. >> your book writes about this and they have been a number of essays in lyndon johnson in the great society and wasn't a failure or success? >> i think if you look at the

actual track record of the program and if you look at the goals that the objectives that were stated at the time you would have to say it's largely a failure and that particularly with regard to the people that were targeted by many of these programs and by that i mean the black poor their lot has not significant the improved and to the extent that we were told it would not -- it would improve at the time. >> another debate i think that we will move beyond separate but equal but in your book you talk about his darkly black colleges in the case of president ronald masonry who was he and why is he important under terms of trying to merge historically black colleges forced out because of the concerns of the impact it would have on other institutio institutions? >> i think the issue there was what has become of these institutions since the civil rights act and since we've seen

more integration in the country and the problem that these institutions have are that because blacks do not have options that they did not once have, particularly in the first half of the 20 century they are exercising those options and they are not attending a historically broad colleges to the extent that they once did because they have more options nowadays and so these schools are struggling with how to stay viable both economically and in terms of what they can contribute to higher education and among some of the plans were the smaller colleges perhaps merged and take advantage of scale. this is been resisted by some who want the schools to remain or maintain their independence and i can understand that but is often missed aldrich for reasons rather than practical reasons and so mason is someone who is pushing for this plan or a way to save some of these schools

and he got pushed back because of that. >> are these schools still relevant or should they merge with -- >> i think, if they are producing good results then yes, they should stay in existence. the problem is a lot of them are not and they are being kept afloat primarily through federal dollars that flow to them and my point is if a school is failing these charges then it should close and it doesn't matter whether it's an all-black school or a traditional white school. if it is not meeting its subjective it should. close. where i think the value-added in the school systems of late in recent decades is in the stem fields where they do an excellent job of educating kids, math, science, engineering and so forth and you see a preponderance of blacks to go into those fields coming out of those schools so i do think they

do serve a very vital purpose in higher education but that is not to say that all of them are performing at duty at the same level and should therefore all be kept closed. >> this is a cover story of washington post sunday magazine visualizing races in one of the headlines from gene robinson calling it america's longest w war. your reaction to that? >> i think there is a tendency to view black history at large, particularly in america's history of what whites have done ha blacks. and there are various reasons that various groups want to keep that narrative alive but in the end i think black history is about more than that and yes, racism still exists and i don't know any reasonable person who would argue otherwise and nor do i expect to see america

vanquished racism in my lifetime. but i do think that black history is more than that and for me the question and the more relevant question is what can be done in the face of whatever racism still exists? what was done in the past by blacks in the face of racism and i think that is the relevant story to tell today and that is the message to give to young people today and my fear is that by perpetuating this notion that it's all about victimization and all about racism that you are sending the wrong message, i think, to the next generation. why try in school if the teachers are racist and the tests are racists? if employers are racist? if youou send a kid out the door with that message i don't thank you are helping that child.

>> heavy felt the sting of racism? [crowd boos] oh, certainly. i've experienced racism in a been called names and i've been followed around department stores and i've been pulled over by police for no reason that i can understand. >> you describe that in detail in washington dc. where were you and how did that happen? >> i was doing an internship back in the early '90s in washington dc and i was interning at usa today and staying with a relative in the area and i was a on the sports desk so we had two or we do not leave work until the baseball games on the west coast were over so it was usually quite late at night by then. i was driving to and from my uncles house where i was staying and usa today headquarters and i had my car which had new york plates because i was from new york although i was driving in

dc and i was driving home one evening after work or probably early the next morning, sometime after midnight and i hear the sirens blaring and the police pull me over and ordered me out of the car at gunpoint and pushed me to the ground and face away from the car and all the rest and they said i fit the description of someone they were after without a state plates and no one. >> what were you thinking? >> i was terrified. i remember getting back into the car after i left because they seem to be gone as quickly as they came after they realized i was not the right person and in my car shaking. i remember i had a standard and i cannot get it out of gear and my hand was shaking so vigorously but it was terrifyi terrifying. >> story in washington dc making headlines, three black men, 16 years old, 36 years ago convicted of a murder that they did not commit or just released

from jail what does that tell you about america's criminal justice system? >> that it is not perfect. i thank youk will find and youd be hard-pressed to find a black person of my age who has not experienced the things i have experienced. i think the criminal justice system is certainly an improvement today over what it used to be and over what my father or grandfather experienced in this country but it is still not perfect. but i would caution against taking thesese examples and sait they are typical. nurses exceptions or aberrations. or saying the reason that so many blacks are in the criminal justice system is because it's a racist system per per se. i don't see a lot of evidence for that and i think often time we have discussions about the racial makeup of prisons and

jails but we don't talk about the racial makeup of people who perpetrate crimes in this country and i don't thank you can really have one discussion without the others so as imperfect as communal justice system is and has been and continues to be i still think wthat there are behavioral differences among groups that lead to some being overrepresented in that system and others being under representative student must talk title of three of your books. first one, please stop helping us. what's the message? >> that was a look back at the great society programs put in place under lyndon johnson and expanded under nixon and others and i wanted to say what is the track record? visa programs that were put in place to help the black in particular, welfare programs, housing programs and expansions of minimum wage laws and so

forth and i wanted to look back and say what works and what hasn't worked and why. i was attempting to do that in that book. i >> all spot power? >> that was a book about and i have a little bit on this in police stop helping us but it's essentially about the track record of using political power to advance a group economically which is essentially bent the strategy of the civil rights movement since the time of canaan. the issue there was if we can integrate political institutions the economics and everything else will take care of itself but we just need to get our own people in place and the civill rights movement had quite a bit of success in doing that. if you look back by the early 1980s youou had major black cities in the u.s. and los

angeles, philadelphia, washington dc and so forth that had black mayors and in addition to that you had left black police chiefs and fire commissioners and school superintendents and so forth but if you look at the track record of the poor in these black run cities and if you look at washington or marionberry's washington dc in the 1980s or new jersey in the 1990s or coleman youngs detroit in the 1970s under these black regimes you have the poor becoming even more impoverished on their watch so i don't think the track record there is a very good one. that is not to say that the blacks should disengage in the political process because we have seen black regression under white men in white congressmen and white police chiefs. it is to say that the connection

we were told was essential between black political power in black economic progress simply is not proven to be a strong as some people hoped it would be. >> generally speaking, have these government programs helped or hurt african-americans? >> i think, by and large, they have hurt. theyla have hurt in a way -- the way i explain it is that there -- what the underprivileged need of any race or ethnicity is a moonwalk that has to occur. it's not something that lends itself essentially to political solutions. these are cultural changes that need to take place. economists refer to it as human capital,ha certain attitudes and behaviors and habits that need to develop in a group in order to rise in america. it is what we've seen happen to other groups in this country. to the extent that a government

program interferes with that necessary self-development i think is doing more harm than good and what a lot of the great society programs did interfere with thatre self-development or persons or groups work ethic is not going to improve if they think that the government is going to take care of them. you can't replace a father in the home with a government accheck. if you have a system in place that says to a woman, you know, if you have an additional child we will send you more money. if we see the father of the child around your house we will stop sendingd you that money. you can imagine the perverse incentives that were put in onace under programs like that and that is what we saw going on. we corrected, i think i must some of this with bill clinton's welfare reforms of the 1990s but not entirely. i still think there's a legacy

there. >> we are in new york and our guest is jason riley in addition to his book he is a regular contributor in his column is available at [inaudible] in "the wall street journal". as always, we welcome your phone calls. 202748 ###-8002 and be sure to follow us at the book to be on twitter and you can also send us a text message at (202)748-8003 and jason riley let them in, the case for open borders. >> asked, that was a book written in the middle to thousands and about immigration. i had i was working at "the wall street journal" at the time and the person i had been covering immigration for the paper got a new position and asked me if i wanted to take over the beat and that's how it fell into my lap and i did have a real dog in the

fight in the sense that i'm not an immigrant or the child of immigrants and so forth but i did enjoy i studying history and immigrant history is fascinating. if only, the arguments wee realize as you read about it so old and have been around for so long. that book really came out of my writing editorials for the newspaper at that time. it's sort of i sort of expand on the arguments that "the wall street journal" editorial pages made about immigration over the decades and is very pro- immigration editorial page. which sometimes upsets conservatives, in particular. it is interesting what is happened with that debate because the sort of immigration review on the right and the trump era is very different from what it used to be.

you always had a sort of isolationist protectionist strain on the right going back to pat buchanan view in the 1990s but that was never the dominant view on the right. reagan was extremely pro- immigrant and put in place in amnesty in fact. george w. bush and his father were both very pro- immigrant and even the republican nominees that lost like the mccain or romney were still far more pro- immigrant then you had in donald trump. this is a new development on the right although there is always been this just -- more anti-immigrant on the right but a summer up in the dominant one so were in a new era here. >> should be rules be different for an immigrant versus a refugee? >> oh yes, two different groups but traditionally they have been

considered two different groups. these days they are more senflated but the people who have started this will generally tell you that someone who is forced out of their country and who would rather be back home and is coming to the u.s. is going to be a very different link from someone who willingly leaves their country to start a tonew life in a new place. excuse me, what i am writing about in that book primarily economic immigrants and the case that i make is that we would do better to put in place guestworker programs or other types of programs that allow the law of supply and demand to determine the level of immigration. right now it has been made by politicians and public policymakers were trying to think real hard about the u.s. needs of the economy we will take a little bit from here or there and we will fill this demand and that just does notn

work. it's a soviet style planning that isth left us with document fraud, 12 million plus illegal immigrants in the country and hundreds of dead bodies in the arizona desert and i think we would do better to put in place market mechanisms that would allow us to regulate the flow. >> the current book you are working on is what? >> i'm currently working on anin intellectual biography of the economist [inaudible] who is based at the hoover institution td is someone who i've known a little over the years and whose books and writings had a huge impact on me when i discovered them in college. it's a project i'm looking forward to. >> how would you define your ideology? can you put it in a box or is it more disparate than that? >> i guess i would define myself as a free market individual, free-market conservative, someone who believes that

smaller government is the way to go. someone that believes in individual freedom. >> from please stop hoping us, you also wrote, the civil rights movement has become, in your words, and industry trade and industry by whom? >> it's become an industry for everyone from individuals like you or al sharpton's and jesse jackson's two entire soganizations like the naacp. ... i think they have effectively monetized black victimization. different groups have done it for different reasons. if like the naacp. it is not in your interest or knowledge the things that have improved for black people, and

what you're trying to do that the civil rights battle that has been hot and one and you are trying to stay relevant. if you're an organization like lives matter you want to raise money so you're going to play out certain aspects of what's going on out there on the racial front. whether or not they are actually relevant, you're going to play that out because it's in your interest to do so. we were talking earlier about the victimization narrative, and that something that democrats and black democrats in particular used to get reelected. so different groups i think have different incentives here, but it has very much i believe, an industry trend one you see an industry that is no vested interest in realistic assessments of black pathology. >> guest: because again that doesn't serve their purpose. they want to stay relevant by the want to raise money by the want to get reelected, and so

they are going to keep race and racial victimization front and center at the national debate, whether or not it's relevant. >> host: where you do most of your thinking and writing? >> guest: at home. i have a home office, and that's why worked out of mostly. >> host: you find yourself disciplined to do that? >> guest: disciplined enough. it took a little getting used to. i commuted into an office for more than two decades at the "wall street journal", ," so it took a little adjustment but i find it more productive now than to simply being able to get started right away. >> host: our guest is jason riley. we'll get to your calls in a moment.y let me ask you about your father because you write about it in the book. your parents had separated when you were young but your father was to very much enjoyed as a child. >> guest: yes, he was. i think it made a big difference. he was an excellent role model. not only my father, i grew up -- my mother was very religious and

we attended church to three week, and the congregation was full of black men who took care of their families, dressed a certain way, spoke a certain way, behaved a certain way. so ies was very fortunate. i grew up around a lot of very solid male role models, and i think it made a big difference. and i think today part of the problems that many blacks, particularly the black underclass face, is not having that sort of stability. the lack of role models in the community or even in the home, given the high illegitimacy rates, hydrate a single parenting in a poor black communities, it's a problem trend born and raised in both of. >> guest: yes. >> host: yonkers new york, welcome to booktv. >> caller: hello. the question of why to ask --

goodue afternoon. the question of one. ask is, republicans, especially like republicans, why don't they educate the blacks who failed history as far as political? for instance, voter suppression, voter suppression she explains and she thinks she knows what it is but it's actually the fording affording many blacks since 1973. today there could've been 70, 80 million blocks are maybe 60 million blocks voting. power to the blacks but no, we don't have power to the blacks. and so many -- i could be here, you should have on your radio, the tv program discussing this. and what it asking you to do is

go through history until the black people, asked them, as i did, because when i i ran for e house in florida i was a republican. i was called a racist. when jackie robinson was my hero and a monusco reader program under dr. martin luther king, and we are being called racist, especially me. that's terrible. in fact, i asked them what democrat opened up the schools in the south? jfk. no, dwight eisner. over fierce objections of democratic governors, wallace, and as i said i could go on forever and that's what you should be teaching them. teaching them -- >> host: thank you for the call. we would get a response. >> guest: i would agree with the caller that there is a lot of black history that doesn't get a lot of attention from civil rights organizations and

black politicians, particularly liberal black politicians. because again it doesn't serve their interest, their personal interest. and a lot of this has to do what was going on in the black community in between the end of slavery in the beginning of the modern day civil rights movement in the 1950s and '60s. there was quite a bit of progress being made and his progress was remarkable given that it was happening during a time of widespread racism in this country. that was open, and legal fees of the days of jim crow, but he's a at the rate of which blacks were leaving poverty, the rate at which there are educating themselves can both in absolute terms and relative to whites, the race of which they were joining the middle class professions, this was a time of tremendous progress that actually slowed after the civil rights legislation of the

1960s passed, at the decades that followed of the passage of that legislation. we saw many of these trends either slow down, stall, or in some cases even reverse course. it's not a lot, doesn't get a lot of attention from the civil rights activist today because of course it doesn't serve their narrative. >> host: back to something you said earlier,t you write in "please stop helping us" that poor blacks have performed better in the absence of government in schemes like a primitive action, calling it. why? >> guest: we have a lot of natural experience that happened that we can look back on and see if, in fact, these programs were effective. back in 1996 the university of california system ended race-based affirmative action in admissions policy throughout the entire system here what we saw

after that band went into place is the number of black graduates from university of california systemgr increase by more than 50%. 50%. the number of hispanics graduates increased again by more than 50%. so a program that had been put in place racial preferences to increase, expand the rates of the black middle class had in practice been resulting in fewer black doctors or lawyers or architects or social workers and would've had in the absence of the policy. and look at the track record over the years. >> welcome to the conversation. i remember reading you in the new york post.

i'm a black american and agree with everything you say. it doesn't make a difference. and it is not going to change. a racist or racism, and feelings and emotions, and facts are facts and facts don't care about your feelings. what i believe you are saying -- my family, no matter what, i didn't vote for trump. i won't vote for him in 2020. it doesn't make a difference. i sound defeated but you were

told, it is never going to change. democratic party is waiting for you. i know what you are talking about too. are we shooting something like that? black folks get feelings and emotions up and vote democrat and take them for the past -- i didn't vote for trump. i'm voting for him now because what have you got to lose? look at the facts. look at the facts of unemployment, employment. you know what i am talking about, never going to change. >> host: thanks for the call. your response? you are smiling. >> guest: makes a lot of

excellent points. it is a tough road home. and pushing government programs are the solution. and, he does make some excellent points. >> the democrats are coming here not to work but to take advantage of our magnetic social welfare program, why then are they disproportionately saying skimpy with citizens for the poor? >> guest: that is one question i often ask my friends on the

right who see immigration as a problem, going on the dole. the idea immigrants are coming here to go on welfare to go on work is not borne out by the facts on many fronts. pick your number. the unemployment rate in a 50 year low. and 1.2 million jobs available, notwithstanding that we have 15 million people here illegally.

the other argument is they put dollard pressure on wages. as a black person, you should be especially wary of these folks coming because they are going after jobs that are held by a lot of blacks. what is the situation today? black unemployment, we are at generational lows. wages have been rising at the low end of the pay scale. and rising for management. they were stealing jobs and wages. >> you basically say 50 years ago he was fighting for jim crow laws, fighting for his own relevance. >> guest: absolutely. they were thought and won. what you see among civil rights

leaders is a search for relevance even among the activist groups. what they are pushing for, where they want emphasis placed is so at odds with the reality, hard to know where to begin. one of the previous callers, police shootings are tragic. and is that the problem today that these activists today, and in the early 1970s, 1971, shot 300 people, the most recent staff from a couple years ago,

and in police shooting fatalities over the past 41/2 decades. and activist movement out there based on there being an epidemic of police shootings in this country. the facts do not bear that out. new york is not an outlier. you can look at other large cities where police shootings make up 1% or 2% of all shootings going on in the country. if there are bad cops let's root them out. if someone breaks the law and they hold a position of authority like a police officer. and they are responsible for 2% of the shootings instead of 90% of the shootings. especially it is completely ridiculous. >> host: let's talk about crime rate and blacks in jail. >> guest: we begin with the

fact that blacks are responsible for an astonishingly disproportionate number of times which is the case for the past half-century. >> guest: blacks are responsible for have all murders in this country despite making up 12% of the population. it is different. that is something we to speak honestly about. and it was the prison system but don't want to think about the racial makeup. they have nothing to do with one another and that is ridiculous. they obviously have something to do with one another and if we want to reduce the number of people involved in the control justice system or the number of blacks we have to do something

about the black crime rate but that is having an artist conversation. >> if you look at the poverty rate, what percentage our african americans are black americans. >> poverty rates are 3 times higher among married blacks, poverty rates are in single digits and have been for 25 years. the idea that racism is driving the poverty rate versus family formation, that was the facts -- that is at odds with the facts. no one is going to not disseminate against you if you are black because you are married and make a distinction, look at the totality of the situation, is poverty a

function of racism or family formation, if it is the latter, why aren't they at the rates, and the poverty issue. they jump into racial disparity resulting from racism and the other factors driving these outcomes. you don't need to deny that racism exists. the question is to what extent is racism responsible for these outcomes we see. >> guest: >> host: it is that cycle. and to have these families.

>> >> my father - he never lived more than a couple miles, take holidays and weekends and he was very involved in my life. the problem is that is not typical. that is atypical and that is the problem. you go back as recently as the 60s, you have 2 of 3 black kids raised by a mother and a father.

that statistic alone goes a long way toward explaining gang related violence or involvement in the criminal justice system of these kids. >> did - did you realize what he did. >> guest: i'm sure i didn't thank my father enough, >> thank you for waiting. welcome to "in depth" on booktv. >> i'm sitting here listening, i have so many questions for this gentleman, utilize the statistics to support his position, obviously didn't have

a good class in statistics, black families if they are married, kids are in a better position, 60%-70% of all marriages in america end up in divorce. or when he cites that for example by his analogy, in new york city in the 60s and only ten rapes of women in the 60s, not only ten rapes, to emphasize how important it is that you shouldn't rape women, you talk about a systematic -- people using the civil rights movement to their advantage. you have been in a situation your entire educational career and professional career, where you were the first or only

black wherever you were so therefore. at the wall street journal they are happy to have an educated black man like yourself who espouses theories that generally are not supportive of black people. you have done probably the same thing in your professional life that you are accusing jesse jackson and others of doing. let me make my final point. you talk about a system, the g.i. bill was affirmative action and for white soldiers from world war ii because black people were not allowed to be in the army. the loan bill was affirmative action. you just have to be a white mail in world war ii & up and go to any college the government would pay for. after the economy start to boom and everyone is moving out, all the business of left urban

areas, rapists it is, left black people in the cities and all the people moved to the suburbs. factories moved to the suburbs, the banks which are sanctioned by the government, refused to give blacks loans, gave whites loans, the new factories refused to hire blacks even if they could get out there. red line the district where blacks were with support and backing of the federal government. >> host: we will get a response. a lot on the table. >> guest: i will respond to a couple points. i haven't accomplished anything other black people didn't accomplish before me. to the wall street journal by a black gentleman who had been senior editor for a number of years and could not have disagreed with me more on my

politics at the time. in terms of the g.i. bill -- there are blacks who attended college in the g.i. bill in the 50s. the gentleman i'm writing about, who attended college on the g.i. bill. quite thankful for the g.i. bill for allowing them to do that. also mentioned deindustrialization as a source of many problems in the inner cities and in these societies, communities disintegrated and he is getting the order wrong. the factories left after these societies had fallen into disrepair.

the riots happened first, then the companies left. you have to get the order right. >> host: taking your messages at 200-748-8003. a lot coming in including from a viewer saying police shootings are down because of protests and demonstrations. >> guest: that is not what the record shows. in 1971, 314 police shootings, 20 years later by 1991 that had fallen by more than half, fallen down to 100. 20 years later it had fallen into the teens. this has been a long-standing trend that predates what we have seen in the last two years.

useless force has been declining steadily. particularly among use of force against minorities. there was in a study from the economist in harvard that was published a couple years ago, he examined a number of police shootings in big cities around the country and expected to find bias. he found black suspects and hispanic suspects were less likely than white suspects to be shot at by police. this was not a function of these protests. what protests have done a risk doing is forcing police to scale back, to stay in their cars and not patrol on foot, to take their time answering these 911 calls.

a have this target on their back, if they have politicians and activists breathing down their neck it will affect how they do their jobs and my fear there is people who are harmed most by this are law abiding blacks in poor communities who are the majority of blacks in poor communities. the criminals prey on them first and foremost. they are not headed into lily white suburbs to rob holmes. they are robbing their neighbors. to the extent the police pull back and what is effective policing in these communities you are hurting the blacks more the, the most. that is what i fear activists will be doing by making policing the problem and the problem is criminality. >> host: another text message, how much chris's and you get from friends and colleagues when they see you on fox news? >> guest: deepens which friends and colleagues.

i have friends of all political persuasions, relatives of all political persuasions, but when people see you on tv they are more likely to tell you how you looked then how you sounded. >> host: edward joining us across the river in jersey city, new jersey. welcome to "in depth" on booktv. >> caller: i want to say happy holidays to you, rest in peace your father, there was a personal story you shared. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: no problem. i don't have a problem with your view on how democrats are dissatisfying the blacks or a harmful party in your view, but as far as politics go, the way forward for our country and black people particularly and i am black, i believe in bernie sanders. bernie sanders's vision for the

country, he challenges the democratic party. that is me telling you i am 35. i am a black mail, i live in new jersey, i'm dissatisfied with the democratic party. they are not doing enough with wars overseas or in new jersey we don't have any trade schools, trade schools are private, why don't we have trade schools that teach like public high schools, welding, we are not doing enough in education. the democratic party is not doing enough getting big money out of our system. i don't -- our primaries all the way in june, the presidential election and a closed primary so i have to declare. that is a couple reasons of dissatisfaction with the democratic party and that is fine but you are not encouraging us to vote for the republican party, are you? if you are than i don't like that but they don't spend any

dollars on our communities. it is beneath the republican party. for some reason maybe they don't turn their backs towards or against us but they don't even look at us. lindsey graham doesn't speak to us at all on the federal level. which one of them, who speaks to us? bernie sanders is the way forward. you and candace owens, your views are very toxic. you are black and have the right. we all have the right to everything so suggesting our way forward, but the gop is not the answer. >> caller: let me respond two level, let's separate bernie sanders for a second.

the caller is right, i think, when he talks about the lack of interest republicans are showing on the black vote. you can speculate, on a practical level, what is driving it is they don't need the vote to win. in politics it is about numbers and time spent going after a constituency you don't have much chance of getting, or on people you think you can get. that could be one explanation right there. >> host: jack kemp and paul ryan did try to push word. >> guest: they are not the only examples. you have ian good smith, another politician who did this and chris christie when he ran for reelection as governor of new jersey did quite well among black voters because he went into these places and asked for their vote but the problem with

all the people we just named is they are the exceptions and not the rules. you don't see republican candidates in black neighborhoods at the barbershop or grocery store and don't see them advertising on black radio or television programs. when it is allowed it is for the democratic candidate to paint a complete monster with no pushback so i do think republicans have to do a better job with this vote and i don't blame blacks who have the attitude of voting democrat are staying home. >> host: last month in your column in "the wall street journal" you wrote black voters showed little interest in either cory booker or kamala

harris and why? >> guest: if you had asked me about cory booker and kamala harris five years ago i would have had positive things to say about both of them. both of them are democrats, both of them are liberals. we can start with cory booker. cory booker was an education reform minded man before he became a senator. he believed in school choice. he believed in charter schools. he was tough on crime. he came in, he hired a proactive police commissioner and was going to model what he was going to do in his city on what rudy giuliani and bloomberg did in new york. kamala harris as a prosecutor and you can look up youtube videos of her saying yes, there may be races in the criminal justice system but that's not

the reason i applied locks on my door. she was a tough-minded prosecutor when it came to protecting the rights of poor black people in those communities which were the targets of these criminals. they have abandoned -- booker walked a little bit of anti-charter stuff but by and large they decided they need to become more progressive. that is where the party was or put aside what i consider a sensible talk and that is my problem with where we are today versus where they are before. the other thing was bernie sanders. essentially my problem with bernie sanders is his socialism which amounts to wealth redistribution as a way of helping the poor and helping

the black poor in particular and talking about the great society program, redistributing wealth, passing out checks to poor people false poverty we would have solved it a long time ago. it doesn't. what these folks need is development of human capital, learn about wealth creation. i think the progressives are too focused on wealth redistribution as a solution and it is not. it is not going to be the solution and bernie is all in on wealth redistribution and that is essentially my problem with this program. >> host: you wrote about michael bloomberg who apologize for stop and frisk and you defend by saying do we want to go back to treating criminals like victims and police officers like criminals? is that a fair assessment? >> guest: i have a problem with

michael bloomberg and i did when he was mayor of new york city but one of the things i liked was his staff on policing. he had the backing of the police, basically because he continued a lot of policies of his predecessor, rudy giuliani who put a lot more cops on the street in these communities and people talk about tensions between police and the black community but no one calls the police more than black people in this country which is a funny way of saying you don't like us. that is where the 911 calls originated mayors like bloomberg and giuliani were responding to those calls and i appreciated that. the stop and frisk policy bloomberg was walking back or apologizing for, i would argue

saved a lot of lives. if you go back to the early 90s in new york city were looking at 2200, 2300 homicides a year in the early 90s, 70%, 80% were black people being murdered. you fast forward to last year you are down to a couple hundred. if we had maintained the rate of homicide we had in the early 1990s for the next quarter century, do you know how many more dead black people we would have today? i was appalled that bloomberg would apologize for a policy i would argue saved not only black lives but kept black people out of prison as well and he is walking it back because that is where the party is now and if you want to run in this democratic party you have to talk about policing as the problem and not criminality. >> host: we are in the second hour of "in depth" conversation

with otter and columnist jason riley. more of your calls, comments in just a moment. who was your role model? >> guest: my role model was my father first and foremost. no one has replaced him since then. there are people who have influenced me intellectually throughout the course of my career and among those folks i would name shelby steele, glenn lowery is another one, walter williams, people i started reading back in college and agreed with. >> host: are you where you envisioned he would be in buffalo? >> guest: that is a good question. i haven't had a whole lot of

jobs, i got interested in journalism after joining the school paper. i read something in the paper, went to complain and they said why don't you join the staff and write about this whenever you want and that got me interested in newspapers and after i completed that college internship at usa today in washington i knew i wanted to be a journalist. six months after college i found myself at the wall street journal and stayed for two decades and continued to write for that paper. i still look forward to getting out of bed every morning and getting started whether i'm going to get a column or work on a book or speech or what have your prepare for interviews on c-span. i am very much enjoying it. >> host: your wife is a journalist. who is the toughest editor?

>> guest: i don't burden her with editing me but i her up with ideas. >> host: cameron from detroit, michigan, you are next with jason riley. >> caller: how are you doing today? [inaudible] i have like three questions like is the first question was, a little while back he said something about -- [inaudible] under jim crow. i was wondering if you could provide any references or any comments just to flesh that out more? i always had the impression -- >> guest: what i was talking about there is, for instance, between making 40-1960 the black

poverty rate in america fell by 40 percentage points in this country. you're talking a 40% decline before civil rights act of 64, of 1965.g rights act in the decade of the '60s alone, black household incomes doubled in this country. so that's prior to the era of affirmative action that often receives the credit for increasing black incomes. if you look at the tie between 1930-1970, you had a number of blacks entering skilled professions, social workers, teachers, lawyers and doctors, a number of blacks entering this middle-class professions quadrupled during this period. again, the point here is what was going on in the rest of the country during this period? i would argue the folks that were making those gains were

experiencing a great deal more racism in american society than what we have today. yet it was not able to stop them. them. and the question then begins, what did stop? what happened? why did we see a slowdown inn these gains, a reversal in some cases, in what was happening? i would argue w as i did in "please stop helping us" that the government interventionist policies or expansions of the great society programs is one thing that got in the way. we started to see the disintegration of that black family, and we started to see all kinds of other government efforts to help blacks that sort of interfered with the self-development that was taking place in this country. and we saw this political shift in the civil rights arena. we saw the shift from a focus on the development of that human capital that we saw in the qing era too focus on last illness

black officials and that became a primary focus. i think that, too, proved problematic in the long one. >> host: would take your emails as e-mails as well at book to get c-span.org. jamaican dr. martin luther king. wiki be satisfied with where we are today 50 years after his assassination? >> guest: no, i don't think he would be satisfied. i think -- >> host: would he say when they course. we had? a black president. senators and congressman and mayors and governors and all the rest. on a certaind level certainly e would be proud of progress but in terms of the black floor, there's been, there's still quite a bit of work to do there. among the black poor in this country. a situation that is in some ways regressed as the days of king.

but that is where we are. that's where he'd be most disappointed. >> is a voting right requirement need to be kept in place? >> i don't think so. i think people have been willing to cross racial lines to vote for some time. they don't have a problem with keeping it in place, you get kindreds that don't need to make any appeals and i think it only fuels polarization. it probably hurts candidates who aspire to run statewide at some time. you're just running in that one area but if you want to be a

senator or governor and you spent all your time only making these narrow appeals to a certain group and want to run statewide, that's a much more difficult leap to make. i think it puts in place perverse incentives and it ignores the fact that we have come a long way in terms of black candidates. >> who is responsible for racism in our country and why? >> i don't think any one individual is responsible racism. it predates america. it's a human condition, i would argue. it's not about one group being responsible for perpetuating it. or one group being able too and it. it predates all of us and i believe it will still be here when i am long gone. i think it's just part of the

fact of human nature. >> welcome to book to be. >> thank you so much. i really appreciate them stating facts and i want to check a statement, everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts so it's like they're always stating facts, i'm a whistleblower, i was in the "wall street journal" back in 1983, which triggered an investigation and eventually led to the resignation to the speaker of the house. i told them factual information. the article is offered by jonathan, he's aware who he was but bring in solutions, that's

what we should be focused on. let's get together and stop the racial polemic. we have indigenous people in concentration camp reservations that need our help, too. it all starts with stopping arguments and bringing solutions. thank you. >> thank you for the call. >> i didn't hear a question there, but -- [laughter] >> i thank him for the call as well. >> john panten, who is he? >> he died recently, an eye doctor from michigan who also was a political activist, he started out as environmental activist actually, places like the sierra club and moved into

reproductive rights, started maybe the first -- or one of the first planned parenthood in michigan. worked with his concern about population growth in the u.s. he was concerned there were too many people and this was detrimental to nature, to the ecology, to the earth and so forth which explains interest in abortion and also placed interest in immigration ultimately that america was becoming overpopulated with immigrants and so he started any number of -- of organizations to fightan for lower levels of immigration and they expanded quite rapidly and some of them have become pretty popular, i

think it's the federation for immigration reform. center for for immigration studies is another one and the reason i wrote about it in the book is because many republican restrictionists have joined the common cause with the organizations over this year and even though on many -- for different reasons, so you had people who got in bed together even though they came from very different places and joined forces to reduce immigration and what i was trying to explain is the history of some of these groups in the book because i think there are many republicans who didn't realize who they were,ca who they were in bed wi. >> let's talk about the republican party, in the first two years of the trump administration, donald trump is a candidate, used immigration as a key issue in his campaign, he

brought it up again in 2018 when they ultimately lost control of the house of representatives but they had the white house, the house and the senate, for two years the chance to get something on immigration on an issue that republicans ran on, what happened? >> i think here ran in the same problem thatnk obama ran into wn he controlled, his party controlled all 3 branches for the first two years in office and it's a complicated issue and ndeven within the party, within each party there are different factions with different beliefs on immigration. clearly most republicans are not with the president when it comes to some of his more extreme views. more recently he's -- we've had the dreamer issue, kids -- people who were brought here to the country illegally as

children and what to do about them and obama had passed something tond executive action, trump wanted to undo it, the mpmajority, however, of republicans not just americans, majority of americans, large majority of republicans want to give amnesty to the dreamers and not -- and not deport them so there you have an issue where trump is at odds with the members of his own party, a lot of the members of his party aren't on board with expanding the border wall to the extent that trump wants to do it. so that's the reason, it's a complicated issue and it's hard to get even all of one party to act in agreement on something let alone something bipartisan done. >> and you took the president to task on that issue? >> on a number of issues, i mean, one of the -- i was not a trump supporter, mostly on grounds of temperament and -- and fit for the job but also on

some of the policy issues and one was immigration and another one was trade, those are two issues that i disagreed with him on. on other issues i have agreed with him on and written approvingly, i like his education policies, i like his education for secretary, betsy devos, vouchers, charter schools and tax credits and all the rest and she's spent her professional life supporting those causes and i like the fact that trump appointed her and he too has been vocally supportive of education choice. when people talk about where i see this country going or where i see black america headed going forward i think it's all going to come down to getting a decent education for kids in these poor communities. i have no faith that the traditional public schools in the country can do that and i don't believe that they're

acting primarily in the interest of the children these days. i think they arent acting primarily in the interest of the adults that public education has become a job's program first and foremost, not an education program and i think the best way to fix that is to give it some competition, whether it's alternative public systems like public charter schools or vouchers that allow people to take their kids out of schools and send them to private schools or schools and need competition and form within. so for me trump has been a mixed bag. i don't reflectively criticize him and i don't reflexively praise him, if he does something i like, i will say something nice about it and if he does something i don't like i say so. >> you can listen on free c-span radio app, the next call from california, jim, youan are next, good afternoon. >> thank you very much for

taking my call. mr. riley, where i live there's a lot of white poverty, rural, primarily rural, a lot white, descendants of the immigration from the dust bowl area in 1930's and there seems to me as i look at it a lot of systematic poverty that's been here for generations now. is there a fundamental difference, do you think, between what i see in certain communities and black poverty versus white poverty and i also have seen examples of the police, the sheriffs, basically, you know, it's not so much color, it's poverty that's why people are discriminated against to a very large extent i think,

least where i live, so what -- what do you see as a difference, similarities, any fundamentals there, thank you? >> jim, thank you. >> i don't see fundamentally a lot of difference. i think the -- the same human capital will lift blacks and whites alike out of poverty, authors more recent like jdvance has written about the situation in white america. i think it's received less attention because the white poor are smaller percentage of whites than the black poor are blacks, but in a fundmental level, no, i don't see any difference in how you go about helping these groups or what they need to do to change their situation.

>> black politicians often act in ways that benefit themselves but do not represent the bconcerns of most blacks. >> that is not unique to black politicians. >> that seems like a generalization. >> perhaps, but i -- i would argue there are enough examples to make it relatively accurate generalization. politicians act in the interest of getting reelected no matter what, what color they are, so i will give you an example, president obama comes into office and blacks overwhelmingly voted to put him well, one issue that polls very well in black community and long has is school choice, both charter schools and

voucher programs have polled very well among blacks, far ahead where they polled among whites and other groups, in fact. one of the first things obama tries to do is shut down the dc voucher program which is do proportionately helping blacks, why would he do this? why would the first black president take an issue that is overwhelmingly popular among blacks and -- and try and shut down the dc voucher? because now he's president and part of the reason he's president is that teachers unions helped make him president, special interest groups and they don't like school vouchers because many of the schools with vouchers are used are not unionized so they want these kids in traditional public schools, not in voucher programs, so obama has to make a decision, do i act in the interest of the special interest that t helped elect me or my

fellow blacks, and he made his choice. and i think other politicians have made -- faced with the same dilemma have made a similar choice, that's what i mean about looking to politicians to address some of these basic needs in the black community, politicians have their own political interest to be preoccupied with and they are not always going to align with the interest of the black, poor in the case of black politicians. >> our next caller from connecticut, charles, welcome to the conversation. >> hi, thanks for taking my call. i was wondering do you say that there's a silent majority within the black middle class and if you think so how would you describe it? >> well, there's an interesting book, an excellent book written

by scientist at university of new york called the black silent majority and he makes the argument about the black political elites have not always acted in the interest of the black boor,ct even the majorityf blacks and i think he makes a pretty strong, pretty strong argument, if you take something like crime, polls will tell you, when pollsters ask people in the black community whether the criminal justice system is too easy on criminals or too hard on them, the black general public tells pollsters that the general public system was too easy on criminals, that's not what you're going hear coming out of the mouth of black politicians or black civil rights groups or black activists and that's what your average black person on the street is going to tell you. i just mentioned the example of education where -- where the interest of black elites differ from the interest of average

blacks and that goes all the way back to the days of busing when the ncaap supported it but most blacks did not, so there's a long history here of what will advanceer someone's political career versus what the black community actually -- actually wants and what a lot of people on the black left counting on and this goes back to what a caller mentioned, blacks will vote democrat or they will stay home but they do not fear that and that is one thing they can count on not happening and that is an example of when, which is often said the democrats take the platform for granted . that's what they're talking about their and one way to fix would be for the republicans to make a play for this vote and that way, blacks could use our

two-party system the way other groups in america use the two-party system. to get what they want. but right now you don't see a lot of that happening in black america >> have you looked at the divorce rate among black men versus poor white men and if it's the same, similar disproportionately different, do you know where we were in the 1960s and where we are today i don't know those numbers off the top of my head. if i had to guess, i just don't know. i don'tknow the numbers . i don't want to speculate on that . >> but i asked the question because to go back to your earlier point, the roots of poverty are those who grew up insingle-parent homes and i wonder why the women get the children and not the men . is that just part of society ? >> yes, i think that's the sociology of it and others

that have looked at this i think say that's inthe welfare , that's for thebest interest of the child . but that would be my guess. yes, family breakdown. when you control forfamily breakdown , you often get very, very different results. i'll giveyou an example i came across recently . there was a study done by a political scientist atthe university of virginia looking at school suspension rates broken down by race among kids . he found thatwhen you controlled for broken families , whites were actually suspended at higher rates than blacks and in the schools which is very interesting finding because again, this is one issue where liberal activists have looked at racial disparities in an outcome, this one being school suspensions and automatically attribute it to racism.

and here we have someone who looks at it as less control for the home environment and you get a very different outcome. >> about the book please stop helping us, let's put some numbers that you cite. washington'stime study cutting census data among blacks , nearly 5 million children said live with only their mother versus 12 percent of poor black and households have two parents present compared to 41 percent of poor hispanic households where there are two parentsand their families . >> yes, it gets back to attitudes towards marriage, attitudes towards child crearing. and again, this is all post great society. in terms of trends. this is not what we were seeing prior to that. and it matters. the nuclear family matters and it's become almost taboo

to say that out loud. that this matters. and when you have a child coming from an intact family, all kinds of life outcomes improve for that child. the chances of them getting involved in the criminal justice system, the chances of them becoming teenage parents. the chances of them graduating from school. all increase, going in the right direction. and yet, we don't often have honest discussions about the importance of the nuclear family. >> were going to norwalk connecticut, maurice your .ext with jason riley >> good morning. good afternoon and just thank you so much for this dialogue that you've got going here. this is right up my alley. i'm an african-american, i'll be 40very soon . i was a sociology student back in 1998.

i grew up myself in the criminal justicesystem . i have so much on my mind right now that i want to share with you . so let me get this out. i have christian values, i have christian views and i was raised to believe in the respect of authority and the bible it says god put us in this place for a reason they are appointed by god. so we're supposed to respect them so since i voted for obama i've become interested in politics for the first time after i cleaned up my record, got off probation, started reintegrating into society red working, getting back to the beginning of what i wanted to do when i was a kid. those dreams and those visions before i got thrown off and distracted . by everything that black men face out here, young black teenagers,education was big . but one thing that sustains

me is growing up rthrough the justice system and through gangs and through everything that a black plight of the black man. it's my education area education, my mom was an educator andi'm not from norwalk connecticut, it's norwalk california. i wanted to make that correction . my mom wasan educator for the long beach unified school district and she's well-known . she was very strict and she always came home and instilled that me with my education and my dad worked for mcdonnell douglas and aircraft aerospace industry in the 60s and whatnot when they were rolling out the end the 11th or whatnot so i saw that work on my father. as a black man, but when i went to school, i i had my own struggles at school. my teachers, it was hard to get the attention that i needed in school so i had to figureit out on my own . i was kind of a class clown.

i would always want to be seen and want to be heard and do things forattention because that's all i really needed . i was creative and artistic and i'm also an aspiring journalist myself . so to fast forward to today, i wanted to say that the black community is very beautiful and we contribute very much to society. we've come so far. i've heard it all. i've seen it all. as far as our past and what our ancestors did to pave the way for where we are today. and it's just a beautiful thing where we contribute to society and icy poverty, icy crime but education like you gentlemen mentioned earlier eris very cheap. teachers need to pay more attention to the black students and like the gentleman said earlier, trump is a mixed back. i've seen him tackle and confront many viable issues

in the black community, the white asian mexican, every community , every issue that past presidents didn't really get a chance to get to. i see him confront that . and i've always been under dog, the black community has always been under dog ourselves so i believe in trump. i like what he's doing and i gave him his props and a pat on the back for saying strong. through all the adversity. with all the impeachment inquiries and everything. and so my question is to the gentleman on here. is from your perspective, as a intellectual black man, i really admire and respect the way you speak and are how articulate you are. i admire that. we don't get to see that much of that here.

so i just want to know from your perspective as a black man , as a black vote for the black community, do you honestly believe that donald trump has our best interests at heart and do you think that we should as a black race, i'm ademocrat , i voted democrat. >> you put a lot on the table so we're going to get a chanceto respond and thank you for sharing your story andjoining in on the conversation . how do you answer that ? >> i think donald trump as donald trump's best interests. and i think donald trump always does . .now the question is whether that matters in terms of black progress in the country. can a president who doesn't necessarily have the interest of blacks or is indifferent

facilitate black upward mobility? and i think that there's no doubt that that is true. and i would point to the advances that blacks had have made under previous administrations area when a person in the white house was best indifferent to what was going on in black america and we saw the games i cited earlier in the first half of the 20th century. so blacks can prosper under donald trump. i have no doubt about that. but it doesn't necessarily mean it's because he has there interests. >> this final question iswhat did you hear from maurice, what was your take away from his story ? >> he seems to have turned his life around, that's partly area and he seems to think that education had a

lot to do with it. he didn't take it seriously as he should have when he was younger and now he understands important it is area and i would agree with that. and it's why it's so painful to listen to black civil rights organizations and some of these politicians running for president. turn their back on charter schools. which have just a tremendous record of success. particularly in helping low income, poor inner-city blacks. we have example after example after example of kids in schools that are 90 percent plus black, all free and reduced lunch in terms of income. testing, hitting it out of the park.outscoring the

white suburbs and the idea that we would not be replicating these education models is completely absurd to me. here you have a bernie sanders and an end it naacp and elizabeth warren saying m they want a moratorium on charter schools that are producing these kinds of ho results in the black inner-city. and this guy i think is a testament to how important education is. it certainly was in my case. and the idea that there is a connection in these inner cities to the high dropout rates were for test scores and all the other social ills that are going on in these places in these communities. there is a connection, our jails and prisons are not full of college graduates read or even high school graduates. so i, it really pains me when i want people attack school reform. the way i hear some of these attacks.

>> our next color from washington state, norm. good afternoon. >> gentlemen, good day to you. link and a lot of us should remember the quote that he talked about leaders appealing to the angels of our higher nature. and the change that the current occupant address, 1600 pennsylvania avenue area right away coming down the escalator he talked about immigrants coming across the southern border being murderers and rapists. and then there was a judge who was hearing his case at the university of his downin arizona . being hispanic, excuse me and therefore could not be fair to obvious example of racism. so it's obvious that some

politicians perhaps including the president are not appealing to the angel of our higher nature on the issue of immigration among other things. so the question is sort of what's in my mind was he's got all these evangelicals so-called, 81 percent i believe that support him. and i'm wondering how the, because they've got to know the statements of jesus, the sermon on the mount among others where it's just the opposite of a christian viewpoint so i'm wondering jason, what's your opinion on back about how people who claim to be christians can back a political leader that is so blatantly a racist and that's my question. >> i think an evangelical or would turn around and point to a reverend jesse jackson,

or reverend sharpton who says abortion, which both of them do. so both sides by play this game and obviously what's going on is that there are voting on other issues. and if you ask people on the evangelical community, why they support this president, despite his all of his personal baggage that goes along with that, don't talk about his pro-life stance. or they'll talk about the judges he's appointed they'll say those are the litmus test and i've used and i'm going to let everything else go because i decided those , this is what most important to me and all voters do that. you're not going to get a candidate that likes everything you like, agrees for you to like it and you're going to have to pick and

choose your issues. >> send us a text message at 202 8003 and this is from chuck in island hills ohio, making reference to a not so recent 60 minute interview with mike wallace in which he interviewed morgan freeman saying what can stop racism and his response was morgan freemansaid stop talking about riyadh . >> your reaction to that. >> i agree with that to some extent. and it's to thisextent . that again, for the civil rights industry that i mentioned earlier, in that racket, keeping race front and center is good for business. and it means that it gets dragged into discussions or doesn't really belong. or is at best a side issue. and maybe that's what morgan freeman was getting at. everything isn't about race and racism and yet seems to

be the direction we're tilting in. >> anthony in york pennsylvania, welcome to the conversation . >> hello. yes, i've seen mister riley several times in a few other things over the last few years and i can tell he's a conservative and i have positions that he has not held in terms of government i was a part of affirmative action in terms of black professional life and he knows quite well the statistics you given in this interview pretending to iamong the blacks who have entered other professions and professional schools and graduate schools, it increased immensely from the late 60s into now read but that has not been extended as much during the previous period during the early 60s and 50s made progress but nothing compared with affirmative action or in one of the statistics he's

quoting that come from conservative groups. as relates to the black politicians, there are politicians that don't serve their communities well but many do when you ask them , that was one of the statements he made those are middle conservatives, what he says about school, charter schools i fully support charter schools andpublic schools . many of the teachers unions don't support charter schools and they put their unions out the business and charter schools, most of them don't have the same kind of standard that public schools but i respect him of his conservative views area in reference to affirmative action and the increasing black professional life and graduate schools, he's totally wrong and he knows that's not true. thank you very much. >> anthony in pennsylvania, your response. >> like i said before, the track record of affirmative action is not something we need to speculate about.

i mentioned the situation at the university of california system in terms of what happened after racial preference ended but you could point to florida and texas and see the same results after they also passed similar policies put in place. the and in terms of the data on what was going on in the first half of the 20th century, that's government data. coming from any quote unquote conservative organization, that's looking at data on its widely available to anyone who cares to look area again, it's not very well known and i understand why it's not very well known that doesn't mean it's not true read the rate at which blacks were increasing theirlevels of education , the rate at which blacks were entering middle-class mprofessions, the rate at which blacks were leaving poverty, all of those rates were far higher in the period's prior to the 1950s and they were in the decades immediately following in1960s

. and before affirmative action policies were put in place, but in terms of higher education , we have particularly strong data sets to show what's going on here. harvard was recently taken to task by a group of asian students who sued because they said that harvard was putting in place quotas on who could enter the school. so we have tons of data on the races of people who have entered, the years they have entered and so forth . affirmative action is harmful in another way as well . you could talk about the equal protection clause and whether it's reverse discrimination. you can talk about whether it just makes sense to be picking and choosing favored groups in an increasinglyho

global society . or you could say it doesn't work. just does it work as intended ? we experienced what the opponents said we would experience if we put these policies in place? there was a study done at mit some years ago about blacks who had been admittedto that school . highly selective schools and blacks had been admitted to mit, had scored in the top 10 percent on the math portion of the sat as all kids in the country and you're talking about some very smart kids. but they were in the bottom 10 percent among their peers at mit. and as a result, more of them were dropping out. switching to easier majors and so forth. you have taken some extremely smart black kids and set them up to fail.kids who would

be hitting it out of the park at an institution are struggling at mit because mit wanted to make its freshman class look like america. regardless of whether or not those kidswere going to graduate . so affirmative action has had the harmful byproducts that nobody foresaw or very few people foresaw at the outset and some did which is interesting reading if you go back and look at some of those articles but by and large, it's been accepted as this universal good. it increased the ranks of black middle class and it may blacks better off and so forth but that is just not the track record. >> in one point you write about is daniel patrick moynihan who before he became a us senator from new york eaworked in the nixon and before that in the johnson administration, part of the great society , what is legacy ? >> one of his legacies, you were several different and later became a senator.

is the so-called moynihan report that he released in the 1960s about the black families. and the trends that he saw. in their situation. and he was looking at increases in homes and he said this will not bode well in terms of going forward to these communities. lower workforce participation and so forth. and he came under tremendous amount of attack for his conclusions but at which point by the way were based on the work of black sociologists in the 1940s like e franklin fraser and moynihan was the consensus view among people look at this material. but he becamethe face of it . and he was attacked. he was attacked as a racist, attacked as someone was blaming the victim and you have to remember at the time as was the dawn of the civil rights act and the voting rights act and he was getting in the way with this rhetoric

, it was a distraction and what ended up happening is the way he was treated would not go unnoticed by sociologists, political scientists. anyone else whowanted to look into this situation . in fact, they were scared off for many years. it didn't make professional sense to godigging around here unless you wind up like moynihan did with all the racists and everything else . so there was a long period of relative neglect in this area of what was going on, socioeconomically among blacks in this area. and more recently, you had some sociologists that have decided to look into it and i rlmean a more recent decades, people like william julius wilson and orlando patterson have looked at this and they said you know, we have to talk about this culture stuff, if the elephant in the

room that we can't talk about all these disparities that are going on, all these racial disparities that we see going on in american society today without talking about culture and its ridiculous to even try doing this. yes it plays a role in these outcomes and we need to talk about it but were decades, many sociologists pretty much feared dear clear up to this area and i think it was to the detriment of people that needed the most help. that is lack cultures. >> the books of jason riley including the following radically stop helping us, liberals may be harder for blacks to succeed and alsolet them in , the case for open borders area and falls black power. jim is next, martinez california. >> hello jason. i want to follow up on the comments you made a little bit earlier. you know, my understanding regarding the dreamers was that president trump did in

fact allow about 800,000 to become permanent residents or citizens but he tied it to also then building the wall, to prevent uncontrolled border crossings. he didn't just cancel out president obama's executive order, but he actually was trying to make it even more so but also make it a law that it would be more permanent and not temporary so i'm just wondering how you your would reflect if you can speak a little bit easier of president trump because that's the way i see it and i may new citizen here. that means i came and got educated here in college and i got actualized so to me as an immigrant, i don't see this uncontrolled border

crossings, 1 million a year. it's actually sort of effecting the culture and so i thought it i had a wall to allowing dreamers to stay doesn't seem unreasonable so why is thatnot a good thing ? >> iq. yes, the president was trying to tie the fate of the dreamers to funding for his wall. the democrats consider this a poison pill because they were not going to compromise on funding the wall and the president knew that they were going to budge on that issue or he should have known that they were going to budge on the issue . whether or not it was a good faith proposal, who knows but hathat was what he was attempting to do. the problem is that president trump could do this in a standalone measure area he wouldn't. and i think he had enough democratic support to get this done.

i think it would help him politically as well given that there's such bipartisan support for doing something about the dreamers area and taking them out of this limbo. but the president brings an interesting mindset to the topic of immigration. which is why i was explaining the statistics in the termsof economic outcome in america . notwithstanding the fact we shave so many people here illegally . the president see this as a zero-sum game, an immigrant coming here to take a job means one fewer job for you and me which is as most economists will tell you is not how our labor market works in this country but that is the mindset that president trump brings to this issue. color also whether immigrants

are having too large of an impact on our culture which is a time honored concerned that we had in this country every new wave of immigrants the same reaction. it even predates america read benjamin franklin was complaining about too many germans coming to pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. he says they'll never learn our language. they're going to germany by us before we magnify them so this is an old concern and german immigration, the germans were coming at a much higher rate than the mexicans and to a much smaller country and the mexicans would be years later the same would be true of the irish and many other groups so this is a time honored concerned and it's one of the reasons it's very difficult to get things done on immigration in this country and you call that

with what you had in the obama years which was slow economic growth. he inherited this recession from george w. bush that he was dealing with her most of his presidency and you have a very toxic blend there of let's scapegoat immigrants for the economic problems that we have today, yet now that we've come out of that recession, now that we've seen the growth, now that we've seen the increased wages and so forth without the wall and without the deportation of all these people here illegally it makes you wonder whether they were the problem to begin with but if you blame the mindset trump does into this, he thinks it was a winning issue for them. whether or not it's true, whether or not it makes economic sense, rally after rally railing against illegal immigration he thinks really gins up his face and helps him at the polls. so i don't expect him to change his tune no matter how many nefacts are put before hi

. >> a text message from paul in north jersey thingwhat will take for democrats , black democrats enslaved in the plantation which is to stop their upward mobility to the one percent? in other words to get to the wealthy? >> what will it take for black democrats to leave the plantation to reach one percent ? >> i think if republicans want to, what blacks to stop voting in such high percentages, for democrats , they need to go make a play for this vote and again, today, too few make that effort. for whatever reason.it is you're still something of a republican outlier when you venture into an inner-city and actively go after the black vote and that's got to change. this, if you expect black

voting patterns to change.'s richard, your next. >> mine are more a comment. i can understand why the african americans made progress from after 1945 cause the programs of fdr in the 30s and the industrialized nations of the country, everybody improved . but if you look back, i just want his opinion on republican ideology versus democrats ideology in regards to all kinds of rights. not just civil rights for african-american rights or black rights women's rights, workersrights, unions rights . the rights. sexual rights read all the way around. now, it was lbj a bunch of old white guys to vote for the civil rights laws read you got to remember that what happened and at that point, when the south saw that the

democratic party was going towards full rights, they always republican they were segregationists. so i guess my idea is that if you look at who's been supporting rights for everybody including afro-americans, it's been the democratic party all along area and the republicans almost resigned themselves just trying to buy for the white vote and no matter what cost it is other people i don't know peripheral economic whatever trump has done whichi don't really see it . i have not improved economically and i don't think that many other people in the middle-class half. our iteration area. >> we're short on time, you sbegin your book please stop helping us by remembering what lyndon johnson spoke in the class of 1965 howard university inwashington dc . >> e, was a 90 minute for preferences that he made that

speech. he says you can't avoid, give people equal rights, you have to give them special rights because of what blacks had gone through in the past that what he attempted to do and we had 50 years of trying to give special rights to groups you look at these racial disparities persist and you have to wonder if these efforts have been counterproductive. i do want to correct something the previous color made about everyone did better in the postwar period and post new deal. he's right. most people didn't do better but not at the same rates. in other words, black incomes and black education levels rose not only in absolute terms but also relative to white incomes and white education levels and so forth read in other words, blacks ngwere closing the gap. they were just making games in absolute terms that an

important distinction so yes, when the economy was doing well and the postwar period, almost did rise but some rose higher than others and lacks were made significant progress in catching up or were making significant progress in catching up and these trends would later slow down or sometimes in some cases reverse course. >> linda, you'll get thelast word on this conversation, joining us in germantown maryland . >> for taking my call. i agree with mister riley. we were just talking about the games games that blacks made during the post-world war ii period . i grow up in baltimore in a place called cherry hill. only community blacks at the federal government built and i wrote a book about it called cherry hill, raising chsuccessful black children in jim crow baltimore. mister riley's states that he feels that the johnson program killed our progress

but i want him to comment on how did the nine benign neglect and the reagan budget cuts affect our progress? pr>> thank you. >>. >> i'm having trouble with audio but she said what? benign progress. benign neglect on the part of , i don't think it was benign neglect read i don't think the great society programs could be called benign neglect read these were huge government expansions. we spent trillions of dollars since the 1960s on s, anti-poverty programs, tyliterally trillions ofdollars read the war on poverty , housing programs and so forth . the show is the limits of government largess. there's only so much that the government can do. and we also know what it can't do. if you take away the

policing, if you take away good schools, if you take away stable holds, there is nothing the government can do to replace those things. >> you take the other side of your title, how can black succeed these days. >> i think two things need to happen. one is we need to have honest conversation about the problems that we face. we need to talk about black crime rates for example when we're talking aboutblack incarceration . the basic things like that need to take place. honest conversations about what the studies say of the impact of families and the importance on outcomes later in life and so forth read secondly, what i want from the government is simply to k, stop doing things we know don't work area affirmative action in terms of higher education is not working on the track record of affirmative action.these anti-poverty rams that this incentivized work mean that a group will not develop the

work ethic they need to get out of poverty and to stay out of poverty. don't keep kids trapped in schools that are failing them. let them attend the schools where we know and model has been successful in teaching kids from the most difficult backgrounds read let those models proliferate read don't put a moratorium on them so it's more of a about what the government should stop doing then what should start doing. but in terms of the commentary and the intellectuals and academics and the rest, etlet's just have some honesty, honest conversation about what's actually happening out there and what are the causes and what are not the causes? >> 2.0 questions, what are you reading right now -mark. >> i like biography. the biography by ron churn out of john drockefeller comes to mind . hayden is a book i really enjoyed red because it shows not only what how wealthy

rockefeller became how much he improved american society in the process whether it was building block black schools or making things like kerosene sheet. so that everyone could enjoy them, not just the rich and he didn't have to stop working when the sun went down at night written little things and i really enjoyed the history lesson i got out of that area in addition to learning a lot about rockefeller. so a lot of the books i'm reading nowadays are in for the research for my intellectual biography of console. so that's taking up a lot of my time but the rockefeller book comes to mind. i'm also reading a book called the warmth of other sons by a believe a former new york times reporter who wrote about black migration out of the south.

my wife recommended it, i just started that one but i'm enjoying it. >> listeners want to follow you can theydo so ? >> i am on twitter at jason riley. that's probably the best one. >> but not on facebook. >> author, columnist at the manhattan institute, jason riley joining us onin-depth . iq for this conversation. >> thank you. >> senate majority leader mitch mcconnell gave an update on providing moremoney for small businesses, hospitals and testing . senator maria cantwell transportation committee ranking member also spoke about situations with theda pandemic . >> is now the 4 days since paycheck protection program ran out of money.