Stop helping us
Author Riley to kick off new speakers’ series.
Jason Riley, author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed, will headline the first of a new series of quarterly luncheons sponsored by Center of the American Experiment. He will appear 12-1:15 pm Thursday, February 18 at the Hilton
Hotel Minneapolis. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where for 20 years he’s written opinion pieces on politics, economics, education, immigration and race, among other subjects. He’s also a frequent commentator for Fox News.
After joining the Journal in 1994, he was named a senior editorial page writer in 2000 and a member of the editorial board in 2005. He joined the Manhattan Institute in 2015.
Please Stop Helping Us examines how so many efforts by liberals to lift the black underclass not only fail but often harm the intended beneficiaries. Among its topics are how:
- minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force;
- affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist;
- soft-on-crime laws make black neighborhoods more dangerous; and how
- policies that limit school choice actually harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.
Charles Krauthammer, nationally syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator characterized the book as “a thoughtful, lucid, and often restrained account of the wreckage produced by racial politics (that) marks Jason Riley as one of the nation’s rising political writers.”
Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, called the book “a much-needed fundamental education on the facts about race in America. It is an honest discussion of race in plain English, without the evasive rhetoric and outright cant that have become the norm in these politically correct times. I cannot think of any book that has said so much in so few pages since Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom back in 1962.”