Jason Riley Tells It Like Is

"My beef with the black left is that they want to keep the focus on what government or Washington or politicians or whites in general can do for blacks, instead of what blacks can do for themselves," says Jason Riley, author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to 

Succeed and editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal.

Watch the video below. From it I learned that between 1940 and 1960 poverty among blacks in the US fell by 40%. This was before the War on Poverty, after which poverty fell much less steeply.

JR is a very articulate and intelligent man. He happens to be black.

[I have just been speaking to Kevin on the phone. I told him about JR and his video. He wanted to know about Riley’s background. I couldn’t tell him anything. But, and I was waspish about this, I accused him of having a Marxist point of view. Marx’s whole analysis is based on ‘the class struggle’. He believed that people’s beliefs are class conditioned.

The only thing worth knowing about beliefs is whether or not they are true (or, at least, have truth content). One’s upbringing may well have an influence on one's beliefs. Obama was brought up by radical leftists and became a radical leftist. But it is insulting to say to someone, ‘you only say that because you are wealthy/poor/white/black/a man/a woman’. Do them the courtesy of addressing what they say.

I may return to C S Lewis’ essay, Bulverism. He says that you need to show that a man is wrong before there is any point at all in showing why he is wrong. Bulverism is the fallacy of attacking beliefs by explaining how they came to be held.]

Jason Riley