49 Quotes by Jason L. Riley

The black homicide rate is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90 percent of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Why should we care more about black criminals than their black victims?

A culture that takes pride in ignorance and mocks learnedness has a dim future. And those who attempt to make excuses for black social pathology rather than condemning these behaviors in no uncertain terms are part of the problem.

The irony is that these efforts to go beyond the original intent of the Voting Rights Act in the name of helping blacks politically have almost certainly hampered blacks politically by limiting their appeal to nonblack voters. By creating “safe” black districts, racial gerrymandering has facilitated racial polarization and hyperpartisanship.

The intentions behind welfare programs, for example, may be noble. But in practice they have slowed the self-development that proved necessary for other groups to advance.

We are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and a black man has twice been elected president in a country where blacks are only 13 percent of the population. Yet liberals continue to pretend that it’s still 1965, and that voters must be segregated in order for blacks to win office.

Black America “isn’t just as fissured as white America; it is more so,” wrote Gates. And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor’s guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism – something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.32.

Divorce helped to drive these numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s unwed parenthood was largely to blame. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Only 16 percent of black households are married couples with children, the lowest of any racial group in the United States, while nearly 20 percent are female-headed with children, which is the highest of any group.

The most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home,” concluded William Comanor and Llad Phillips after examining data from a national longitudinal study of young people. Black boys without a father were 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father.

Bositis is a liberal who holds conservatives in low regard, but he is correct in noting that GOP outreach to blacks in recent decades has ranged somewhere between inadequate and nonexistent. In the main, black voters don’t choose between Democratic and Republican candidates; they vote Democrat or they stay home. Many liberals are quick to assume that racial animus explains the lack of any serious GOP effort to woo blacks.