The State Against Blacks

This past Thursday I attended a talk by Jason Riley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I must preface by stating that I was already reading some of Riley's book, "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed", in my Black intellectuals class and already had some issues with him and his argument, but nothing could have prepared me for the Ath talk. Though I could not sit at the head table, a friend of mine did and said that he got into a heated discussion with him right before his talk. During the talk, he gave a number of statistics to argue that: Black representation in politics, government programs/help, increased employment, lenient on crime policies, etc. within the same vein actually have no correlation to Black incarceration rates and often times can have a more averse affect on the communities. He argued that the government should butt out of issues withe Black community for that such was the case in a time of great economic prosperity and low incarceration rates for Blacks, pre- Civil Rights movement and Great Society programs. He also blamed Black behavior for these trends and flirted with the concept of a shift in Black culture being necessary to change the behavior and how Blacks are perceived by the rest of society. This was proposed as opposed to using racism as a cop out for community trends. Naturally, this was met with a lot of animosity and the question and answer section of this talk was often characterized by bickering, nitpicking of data, disrespect, and raising of voices. A number of fellow attendees said that this was probably the wildest Ath talk they had been to.