Jason Riley

Is affirmative action over in America? An argument against racial preferences from a prominent Black conservative. This week on Firing Line. 

 

RILEY: These programs are not only, according to the Supreme Court, unconstitutional. They don’t work. 

HOOVER: They’re not doing the thing they’re designed to do. 

RILEY: They’re not doing the thing they were designed to do 

 

Jason Riley has been a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for twenty years. His recent book is titled, “The Affirmative Action Myth.” 

 

RILEY: Affirmative action has been credited with lifting Black people out of poverty. Black people lifted themselves out of poverty well before affirmative action policies…

 

Riley’s argument is based on his reading of history. He says a Black middle class developed before  racial preferences became widespread in the 1970s.

RILEY: I want more thriving Black college students. These schools want window dressing. They want a color-coded campus that is racially balanced // If these policies worked, that would be one thing. I see no evidence that they work. In fact, I see evidence that they do just the opposite, by setting up smart Black kids to fail.

With affirmative action ended as a legal matter since the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision – what does Jason Riley say now? 

 

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, The Tepper Foundation, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, The Meadowlark Foundation, The Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation and by the following… Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. 

 

INTERVIEW

HOOVER: Jason Riley, welcome to Firing Line. 

RILEY: Thank you. 

HOOVER:  It has been nearly two years since the Supreme Court ruled that in most cases, colleges and universities can no longer use race as a specific factor in college admissions. You have a recent book, The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed. What is the myth you’ve set out to debunk? 

RILEY: The myth is that they do. One of the reasons I wrote the book, in fact the impetus for writing the book was the discussion around that Supreme Court decision. There was all this apocalyptic talk coming out of some members of the media, some members of academia, some politicians, that this would decimate the Black middle class if affirmative action went away, that racial preferences had created the Black middle class, and that Blacks can’t get ahead without special preferences. And so that was the impetus for the book. I said to myself, wait a minute, that’s not what the history shows. There was a Black middle class in this country prior to the existence of these policies. Moreover, it was growing at a faster rate than it would grow during the era of affirmative action. 

HOOVER: you’ve made clear you’re not arguing that the American Civil Rights Movement has made Blacks worse off. But you still point to the fact that advances were being made prior to those reforms.

RILEY: If you go back to 1940, the Black poverty rate in this country was 87 percent. 87 percent of Black families were in poverty. You fast forward 20 years to 1960, that number is down to 47 percent, less than half. A 40 percentage point drop in Black poverty over a 20 year period. 

HOOVER: And you have—

RILEY: 1960 is not only before affirmative action policies, or DEI policies or what have you, or a Black president. It’s before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. My point is that affirmative action has been credited with lifting Black people out of poverty. Black people lifted themselves out of poverty well before affirmative action policies were put in place.

HOOVER: And you pointed those advances as partially due to the fact that Blacks were moving— 

RILEY: Oh yeah. 

HOOVER: —to more productive areas of the country— 

RILEY: Exactly.

HOOVER: —from south to north, from rural to urban. 

RILEY: Exactly, and both of those points are important. The great migrations of the 1930s and 40s were tremendously instrumental in Blacks lifting themselves out of poverty. And this was of course the post-World War II economy that we had that was lifting all boats. Whites were making tremendous gains as well, just not as fast as Blacks were making gains. So you not only saw Black uplift, Black upward mobility, you saw Blacks gaining on whites. There was a convergence occurring during this era of the 1940s and 50s and 60s, and we would see that start to peter out right around 1970, right around the beginning of Affirmative Action, of the era of Affirmative Action. 

HOOVER: You write, quote, “at best, racial preferences helped to continue something that was already happening. At worst, racial preferences did more to throttle than expedite Black upward mobility.”

RILEY: Yeah. And the data I point to has not only to do with leaving poverty, but also homeownership rates, incomes, educational attainment, entering the skilled professions. And on all of these indices, we’re moving in the right direction. 

HOOVER: So here’s my question. Is this a causation versus correlation question, or do you have specific evidence that you can point to that shows that affirmative action actually throttled upward mobility? 

RILEY: I’m making a more correlation argument. Causation is very hard to tease out. People can draw their own conclusions. What we do know, however, from looking at the data is that we saw certain trends taking place prior to the government deciding to put in place racial preferences in hiring or in college enrollment. That’s what we can look at. So I don’t think that the affirmative action policies themselves tell the entire story. There are other things going on, but I do think they’re a large part of the story. 

HOOVER: One of the arguments you reference with respect to affirmative action is the fact that it’s hard to shake, for Black Americans, the stigmatization—

RILEY: Oh yeah.

HOOVER: —that comes with affirmative action. You write about the downside of that stigmatization in your own experience when you received a job offer from a local paper and a former editor from your college newspaper said, quote, congratulations, I heard they were looking for more minorities. You wrote that that remark stung. 

RILEY: Oh yeah, it does sting. And to me, it’s evidence of the sort of psychological toll these policies have taken, not only on Blacks, but on whites as well, in terms of stereotyping. You know, this was referenced in the Supreme Court decision ending race preferences in the Harvard case, where, you know, if you’re a white student at an elite school and you look around you and most if not all the Black students at that school seem to be struggling, seem to pooling at the bottom of the class, seem to dropping out at higher rates or switching to easier majors, when you leave college, what is your impression of the intellectual capabilities of Black people based on your college experience? And that’s one of the downsides, I think, of shoehorning kids into schools where they’re over-matched academically. 

HOOVER: This is the mismatch theory. 

RILEY: This is the mismatch theory. But it has also taken a psychological effect on Blacks themselves. There are a lot of Black elite intellectuals out there saying, I only got where I got in life because of these policies. I was only able to get into a good college because of these policies. So this affirmative action has left a lot of Black people doubting their own capabilities. And I think that’s yet another downside of these policies. 

HOOVER: You know, it reminded me of a passage in Condoleezza Rice’s memoir. Where she acknowledges and writes about the fact that her hiring at Stanford went through the affirmative action process.

RILEY: Okay.

HOOVER: And her dad said to her, don’t worry about it. Their processes have been excluding us for years. Just go show them how good you are, which gave her the confidence to move forward and do it. How do you respond to having a different viewpoint about it? 

RILEY: Well, I just point to the data. And the data shows that the most important characteristic in admitting a student to a selective school is whether that student’s preparation –  entering test scores, entering grades – match those of the typical student at that school. When there’s a gap, the data shows that the student tends to struggle. It doesn’t matter if the student is Black, white. If there’s a gap in that objective criteria, that student tends to struggle. My point is that racial preferences, or preferential treatment is not only— it’s not doing these students any favors. Because typically at these elite schools, the Black students who are admitted, even with lower standards, have standards that are well above the national average. So these students could be hitting it out of the park at a less selective university. They could be thriving at another university where they met the credentials of the average student at that school. The best example of this we have is what happened at the University of California system—

HOOVER: I was just about to go there.

RILEY: —back in the 1990s. 

HOOVER: So let’s recap what it is, just to reset it for the audience. A ballot initiative, ballot initiative 209, was passed in the state of California, which eliminated race-based preferences for college admissions—

RILEY: Throughout the University of—

HOOVER: —throughout the University of California system.

RILEY: Right. On the elite campuses throughout the UC system – so we’re talking about Berkeley and UCLA – you saw an initial drop, sharp drop, in Black and Hispanic enrollment on those campuses. But you saw an increase in overall enrollment throughout the UC system. So fewer Black and Hispanic kids might have been going to Berkeley, but more were going to UC Santa Cruz or UC Santa Barbara. Moreover, more were graduating. They were graduating on time. They were graduating with higher GPAs. And they were graduating in the more difficult disciplines. So my point is that a program, Affirmative Action, that had been put in place to increase the ranks of the Black middle class had in practice been producing fewer Black doctors and lawyers and architects and engineers than we would have had in the absence of the policy. And that’s why I say these programs are not only, according to the Supreme Court, unconstitutional. They don’t work. 

HOOVER: They’re not doing the thing they’re designed to do. 

RILEY: They’re not doing the thing they were designed to do. And California is one of several examples of that. 

HOOVER: There’s another study by Zachary Bleemer of Princeton University that argues the opposite point. His study, which was conducted with 300,000 applicants to the UC system shows that after banning affirmative action, the measure caused 10,000 minority students to quote cascade into lower quality public and private universities, pushed some students entirely out of the university level education, and resulted in a 5% average lower annual wages. What is your understanding of that study?

RILEY: He seems to be making a version of the argument that even if you admit a slightly less qualified student to a better school they’re going to get a better education because they’re at a better school, and that will have ramifications throughout their career after they graduate. There have been studies, however, showing that that’s not necessarily the case, and I’ll tell you about one that I mentioned in the book. Law school students at Howard University, the historically Black school in Washington, D.C., were compared with law school students at George Mason University. And it turns out that Howard University Black law students passed the bar exams at much higher rates on their first try than George Mason University students who were Black. HBCUs do not use affirmative action, yet they punch well above their weight when it comes to producing Black professionals in this country and always have. 

HOOVER: So then with respect to the Bleemer study that suggests that actually underrepresented minorities ultimately suffered. Your response is? 

RILEY: Well, I don’t know if that’s a causal argument that he’s making. I don’t know which students went into which professions. I, it’s just, I haven’t looked at the study, so I can’t— 

HOOVER: Okay.

RILEY: —I can’t respond at that sort of granular level to it.

HOOVER: Okay.

RILEY: But what I can say is that I don’t see it, what his conclusion is, disproving the mismatch theory, which I think is what he’s trying to do.

HOOVER: When the Supreme Court was considering Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard the University of California president and all 10 chancellors submitted an amicus brief in support of Harvard and UNC’s affirmative action policies, writing that despite years of extensive efforts, quote, “UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity.” What do you make of the UC leadership arguing the opposite side of their own policies in that case.

RILEY: What is the point of a college education? I mean, I guess the problem here is that the schools have one agenda. They want to make their campuses look like America. They think it helps their reputation. I’m more interested in whether it benefits the students. I want more thriving Black college students. These schools want window dressing. They want a color-coded campus that is racially balanced for, I don’t know, their aesthetic sensibilities. But that to me is not what college should be about. And the reality is that not only in an era prior to these policies did we see college completion among Blacks rising, we have state after state after state example, prior to the Harvard ruling, of the same thing happening. In other words, better Black college outcomes in states that use race-blind admissions policies. And so I’m just following the data here. If these policies worked, that would be one thing. I see no evidence that they work. In fact, I see evidence that they do just the opposite, by setting up smart Black kids to fail.

HOOVER: The window dressing argument, I think in their defense, they would say it’s not so much about window dressing as about ensuring excellent outcomes for racially underrepresented minorities. 

RILEY: Well, at these HBCUs— I mean, go speak to a college administrator at Howard or North Carolina A&T and find out if the Black students on campus have difficulty learning mechanical engineering because there aren’t enough white students around to enrich their learning experience. I doubt you will find that. So again, this is an argument, I just don’t— this whole idea 

HOOVER: Is the argument—

RILEY: —that Black students need to be sitting next to white students—

HOOVER: Isn’t that about white people?

RILEY: —in order to learn, it just annoys me. And too often, racial balance seems to be the highest priority in our education system. And I see no evidence that it should be.

CLASS PREFERENCES INSTEAD OF RACE PREFERENCES

HOOVER: There’s an argument on the left that has come about since the affirmative action decision – that by the way, Clarence Thomas has also suggested is meritorious in his memoir – that we should not discriminate based on race, but class-based discrimination ought to be considered if we’re trying to create a more fair system. You’ve recently written a column in opposition to this approach. 

RILEY: Mm hmm.

HOOVER: Why do you not see class-based admissions as a viable alternative?

RILEY: Well, one problem, I think, is that they may not pass muster with the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roberts said in his majority opinion that the court would not accept using proxies for race. And I think class would be used as a proxy for race if that’s what proponents are trying to do here. 

HOOVER: But if we’re talking about upward mobility.  

RILEY: Well, you have sort of a quantitative problem and a qualitative problem. The quantitative problem is that there are way more poor white people in America than poor Black people or poor Hispanic people. So you could easily fill a class-based system with poor whites. So that’s not gonna get you the diversity you’re looking for. The other problem is that low-income white students outperform low-income Black students. Both on standardized tests and in terms of grades. So do low-income Asian students. So, again, you have a problem there where you will have to really fiddle with the definition of poor, or underprivileged, or needy to get the right racial mix that you’re looking for. What you’re gonna have to do is find proxies. So you’re going to have to say, okay, we have, we want more poor Blacks. We can’t just go on income because there are a lot of poor whites with the same income. So we’re gonna have to say, you know, do you come from a segregated neighborhood? What about your school? Was that segregated? What about family makeup? Did you come from a single parent? We’re gonna really have to stretch the definition of disadvantaged in order to get the right racial mix. And it’s not— you know, there’s some people that still have this sort of Yale or jail mentality where if you don’t get into the best schools in the country, or the most selective schools in the country, your life will be a failure. I just, I just don’t buy that. I don’t understand that. And most people don’t go to elite schools.

HOOVER: That’s right.

RILEY: Most rich people don’t go to elite schools. Most poor people don’t go to elite schools. You can get a very, very good education at other institutions and thrive in doing so. And that’s what I think should be the goal here. 

HOOVER: It’s true that most haven’t gone to elite universities. But of the Fortune 500 CEOs, 11% went to the elite universities. 25% of current U.S. senators went to elite universities. 41% of presidents since 1960 went to elite universities. 71% of Supreme Court justices since 1963 have gone to elite universities. So there is an argument that there is enduring cultural clout and power associated with having attended the elite universities. And that’s some detriment and risk to minority students if the numbers drop in the wake of the SCOTUS decision. That’s, I think, one of the arguments. 

RILEY: I think that if you are really concerned about more racial balance at our most selective schools, you should do something about the K through12 system in this country—

HOOVER: Fair.

RILEY: —where you have Black students, Black 12th graders, graduating at reading levels of white eighth graders. That is not something a few remedial classes are gonna make up freshman year in college. That is where the focus needs to be. And unfortunately, the powers that be at the K-12 level are very entrenched in keeping the status quo in K-12 in terms of having most of our students attend public schools based on their zip code. And all attempts to fiddle with that system – school vouchers, charter schools, tax credits – meets very strong resistance, namely from the teachers unions who benefit from the current K-12 status quo. But I think that should be the target of any attempt to fix what we see on college campuses in terms of racial balance. 

HOOVER: Jason, you’re also the author of a biography on the black economist Thomas Sowell. And Sowell, as you know, appeared on the original Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. many times—

RILEY: Yeah.

HOOVER: — individually and also in a debate format. And one debate was about education and the need for competition in K- 12 education. Take a look at this clip of Sowell making this point in a debate with Buckley. 

SOWELL: Forty years ago, I received a far better education in Harlem than the people living in Harlem today have available to them.// It is not a question of whether there is disorder, or this method of teaching or that method of teaching. If there is pandemonium in the schools, no method of teaching is going to work. As long as the public school system is a monopoly, they will act as other monopolies act toward their customers–with contempt. 

HOOVER: What do you make of Sowell then? 

RILEY: It shows that he’s been right for a very long time, very long time. If anything, all of his arguments have strengthened over the decades. Anyone familiar with the typical school that an inner-city Black child attends would not at all be surprised that there are so few Black students walking around Harvard campus. Black students are relegated to some of the worst K-12 schools in this country, with the least experienced teachers, the most violent schools in the country, and the ones that graduate the fewest percentage of students. Why is anyone surprised that more of them aren’t at Berkeley or UCLA? And again, if you want to address what’s going on college campuses. This is where you should start. 

TRUMP ATTACK ON ELITE UNIVERSITIES

HOOVER: This is how to fix the pipeline. In your recent columns in the Wall Street Journal, you have been critical of President Trump’s assault against universities like Harvard. But you have also said that, quote, “academia certainly had it coming.”

RILEY: Oh, sure.

HOOVER: But citing the administration’s attacks on scientific research and international students, you write, quote, “is the goal to fix what’s wrong with higher education or to destroy it?”

RILEY: Yeah.

HOOVER: What is your answer to that question? 

RILEY: I sympathize with President Trump’s dismay at the anti-Semitism we’ve seen on campus. I think that’s a legitimate concern. I’m not sure you address it by banning grants to these schools that are conducting research on Alzheimer’s and other debilitating illnesses. That’s good work that needs to continue. And I don’t think it has much to do with the anti-Semitism going on in other parts of the campus. And so I’m not sure how you address your concern by going after these research grants. 

HOOVER: Final question, and this relates to the theme of your book. Last month, Students for Fair Admissions, the group that sued Harvard over the affirmative action policies, sued UCLA’s medical school, alleging that it is still engaging in discrimination on the basis of race by asking questions that allow universities to glean the race of the applicants from their responses. Going forward, how confident are you that race really will cease—

RILEY: Oh, I’m not at all confident. 

HOOVER: —to be a deciding factor?

RILEY: I’m not at all confident that it’ll happen anytime soon. You know, I liken it, Margaret, to what happened after the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, which ended racially segregated schools. It’s not as if the Southern segregationists threw up their hands and go, you know what, we lost at the Supreme Court. I guess we’re just going to have to desegregate now. No. They fought and fought and fought for decades. There had to be dozens and dozens of follow-up lawsuits, follow-up court orders to get Brown enforced. I think you’re going to see the same thing happen in the wake of Students for Fair Admissions. I think Students for Fair Admissions and Edward Bloom, the gentleman who runs it, have their work cut out. They will have to continue to follow up with these schools who will try and cheat and do end runs around the decision, just as the Southern segregationists did. These are opponents of a universal standard for everyone, regardless of race and ethnic background. That’s what the Supreme Court said we should have. That’s what our Constitution says we should have. But we still have people in society today who do not want that and they’re going to fight. 

HOOVER: Jason Riley. 

RILEY:Thank you. 

HOOVER: Thank you for joining me. It’s been a pleasure.

RILEY: Thank you.