Blacks To Dems: "Please Stop Helping Us"

                                                               

In the summer of 1865, as America was still licking her wounds over Lincoln's assassination, the North was giving serious considerations about what this country would do with those tens of millions of Blacks they had just fought a war to free from slavery.

The greatest Black spokesman of his day, Fredrick Douglas, would provide an answer to the question "What shall we do with the Blacks?"..."Do nothing with us!", he said.  With those four simple words, Douglas was saying Blacks should be treated no better nor worse than any other man.

Almost exactly 149 years later another Black man has written a book called "Please Stop Helping Us".  Jason L. Riley, a once liberal, now independent thinker, postulates that liberals have done Blacks great harm with their grossly expensive and wasteful social programs.

I recommend the book highly to anyone who wishes to gain an insight on how liberal Democrats have kept Blacks down on the liberal plantation for nearly four decades.  The book is only 184 pages and hits on five or six hard truths about misguided equal opportunity and poverty programs.  Riley seems to equate those programs to training wheels on a child's bike; perhaps once needed but are now confining and enslaving.

Riley cites the liberal's extreme efforts to go soft on crime that perpetuates the urban ghetto.  He says liberal laws and liberal judges passing out probations and liberal sentences for some of the most heinous Black crimes only fouls the cesspool of the ghetto even more.

He says the liberals embracing of a failing public school system, combined with their incestuous relationship with the unionized teacher's lobby only insures that Black education will continue to be a failing proposition.  He argues that charter schools and real school choice is the only way to make the public school system an honest broker, and spur reform for a failing system.

The author also presents the best argument yet as to why the mandatory minimum wage crowds out opportunities for Black youth and why the Black youth unemployment rate exceeds 30%, five times higher than the overall unemployment rate, and more than twice as high as the next highest ethnic group jobless rate.

And in the "you learn something new everyday" vein,  I learned how minority quotas actually result in fewer Black college graduates.  

A Black conservative columnist, Walter E. Williams had this to say in reviewing the book (excerpt):

While reading the first chapter of Jason Riley's new book, "Please Stop Helping Us," I thought about Will Rogers' Prohibition-era observation that "Oklahomans vote dry as long as they can stagger to the polls." Demonstrative of similar dedication, one member of Congress told Vanderbilt University political scientist Carol Swain that "one of the advantages and disadvantages of representing blacks is their shameless loyalty. ... You can almost get away with raping babies and be forgiven. You don't have any vigilance about your performance." In my opinion, there appear to be no standards of performance low enough for blacks to lose their loyalty to their black political representatives.

Riley says that between 1970 and 2001, the number of black elected officials skyrocketed from fewer than 1,500 to more than 9,000, but black poverty has remained roughly the same. Between 1940 and 1960, when black political power was virtually nonexistent, the black poverty rate fell from 87 percent to 47 percent. Riley points out that there has been significant achievement among the black middle class but that wide black-white gaps remain with respect to income, educational achievement, unemployment, labor force participation, incarceration rates and other measures. Despite political gains, there have been dramatic reversals in teen unemployment, crime, out-of-wedlock births and family stability. Political power is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for socio-economic progress..........

Liberals are already jumping all over Jason Riley.  Cries of "Uncle Tom" and "White Man's mouthpiece" are being heard all over the liberal kingdom.  It doesn't appear that liberals are willing to learn a new thing under the sun.

Sad.  Damned Sad.