How Not to Help Black Americans - Riley

How Not to Help Black Americans

Failed poverty programs have tried to do what blacks can only do for themselves.

By

Jason L. Riley

June 16, 2014 7:24 p.m. ET

'The concept of historic reparation grows out of man's need to impose a degree of justice on the world that simply does not exist," writes Shelby Steele in "The Content of Our Character." "Blacks cannot be repaid for the injustice done to the race, but we can be corrupted by society's guilt gestures of repayment."

Mr. Steele's words come to mind after reading a much-discussed argument for slavery reparations in the June issue of the Atlantic magazine. "The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound," says the essay's author, Ta-Nehisi Coates. No disagreement there. But the enslavers and the enslaved are long gone, and Mr. Coates presents no evidence that what currently ails the black poor will be addressed by allowing them to cash in on the exploitation of dead ancestors.

Ironically, Mr. Coates spends most of the article detailing how previous government efforts to narrow black-white social and economic disparities—from Reconstruction to the New Deal to the Great Society—have largely failed. Yet he concludes that what's needed is more of the same—namely, another grand wealth-redistribution scheme in the guise of slavery reparations.

This year we are marking the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and next year we will do the same for the Voting Rights Act. These landmark pieces of legislation, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, outlawed racial discrimination and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote. But Johnson wasn't satisfied with these victories. He was convinced that government could and should do more.

"You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair," Johnson said in 1965 at the start of his Great Society. The "next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights" was "not just freedom but opportunity" and "not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result."

Like Johnson, liberals today remain convinced that government has the ability to produce equal outcomes, though history repeatedly shows that intergroup differences are the norm rather than the exception. The reality is that social policy, however well intentioned, has its limits, and when those limits aren't acknowledged the results can be counterproductive.

Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute reports that since 1964 "the U.S. welfare state has devoted considerable resources to assuring or improving the public's living standards—something like $20 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars through antipoverty programs alone." Notwithstanding this government largess, the official poverty rate in 2012 was higher than it was in 1966, and the black-white poverty gap has widened over the past decade. The racial disparity in incarceration rates is also larger today than it was in 1960. Black unemployment, on average, has been twice as high as white unemployment for five decades.

One reason that Uncle Sam's altruism has not been successful is because the government is attempting to do for blacks what blacks can only do for themselves. Until those in the black underclass develop the work habits, behaviors and attitudes that proved necessary for other groups to rise, they will continue to struggle. And to the extent that a social program, however well-meaning, interferes with a group's self-development, it does more harm than good.

Upward mobility depends on work and family. Government policies that undermine the work ethic—open-ended welfare benefits, for example—help keep poor people poor. Why study hard in school if you will be held to a lower academic standard? Why change antisocial behavior when people are willing to reward it, make excuses for it, or even change the law to accommodate it, as in the Justice Department's current push for shorter sentences for convicted drug dealers? 

The Obama presidency is evidence that blacks have progressed politically. But if the rise of other racial and ethnic groups is any indication, black social and economic problems are less about politics than about culture. The persistently high black jobless rate is more a consequence of unemployability than of discrimination in hiring. The black-white learning gap stems from a dearth of education choices for ghetto children, not biased tests or a shortage of education funding. And although black civil rights leaders cite a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it has been obvious for decades that the real culprit is errant black behavior too often celebrated in black culture.

Black leaders today are convinced that they are helping blacks by helping the party of bigger government, Democrats. But a previous generation of black elites understood the perils of such reasoning. 

"Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What should we do with the Negro ?' " said Frederick Douglass in 1865. "I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall. . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!"

Douglass was stressing the primacy of black self-development, a not uncommon sentiment among prominent blacks in the decades following the Civil War. Booker T. Washington, who like Douglass was born a slave, said that "It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges."

Douglass and Washington didn't play down the need for the government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were optimistic that they would get equal rights eventually. But both men also understood the limits of government benevolence. Blacks would have to ready themselves to meet the far bigger challenge of being in a position to take advantage of opportunities, once equal rights had been secured. The history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of ignoring this wisdom.

Mr. Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and author of "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed," just released by Encounter.