The following is an excerpt from Jason L. Riley's new book, "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks to Succeed."
Affirmative action is now approaching middle age. We are nearly five decades into this exercise in social engineering. And aside from the question of its constitutionality, there remains the matter of its effectiveness. Do racial preferences work? What is the track record? Have they in fact helped the intended beneficiaries? How much credit do they deserve for the minority gains that have occurred? Russell Nieli, a political scientist at Princeton, wrote:
While the first of the national "affirmative-action" initiatives--Richard Nixon's Philadelphia Plan for opening up jobs in the urban construction industry--did focus on the black inner-city poor, it proved to be the exception as recipients of racial preferences quickly came to be the better-off, not the truly needy.... Those who once occupied the preeminent place in public policy concern--those "hobbled by chains," as Lyndon Johnson called them in his Howard University address, or the "truly disadvantaged," as William Julius Wilson later described them--fell off of the national radar screen.
There is no question that black poverty fell and that the professional class swelled in the decades following the implementation of racial preferences. In 1970 blacks comprised 2.2 percent of physicians, 1.3 percent of lawyers, and 1.2 percent of engineers, according to census data. By 1990 those percentages had more than doubled. In 1967, just 5.8 percent of the black population earned more than $50,000 per year. By 1992 the proportion had climbed to 13 percent. Liberals automatically credit affirmative action, of course, but note what was already happening prior to the introduction of preferential policies in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"By 1970 over a fifth of African-American men and over a third of black women were in middle-class occupations, four times as many as in 1940 in the case of men and six times as many in the case of women," wrote Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, coauthors of America in Black and White. The authors note that between 1940 and 1970 the number of black schoolteachers nearly quadrupled, to almost a quarter of a million, while the number of social workers and registered nurses rose by even more.
Thus, there was a substantial black middle class already in existence by the end of the 1960s. In the years since, it has continued to grow, but not at a more rapid pace than in the preceding three decades, despite a common impression to the contrary. Great occupational advances were made by African Americans before preferential policies were introduced.
The drop in black poverty that preceded the war was even more dramatic. In 1940 the black poverty rate was 87 percent. By 1960 it had fallen to 47 percent, a 40-point drop that predated not only affirmative action but the passage of landmark civil rights bills that liberals would later credit with the steep decline in black poverty. Did affirmative action play a role in reducing the percentage of poor blacks? If so, it wasn't much of one. In 1970, 33.5 percent of blacks would be living below the official poverty line. In 1990, two full decades of affirmative action later, it would be 31.9 percent.
Affirmative action deserves about as much credit for the decline in black poverty as it deserves for the rise of the black middle class. In both cases, racial preferences at best continued a trend that had already begun. And in both cases the trend was considerably stronger in the decades immediately preceding affirmative-action policies than in the decades immediately following their implementation. If, as the NAACP claims every time someone spots a Confederate flag at a parade, white racism is a major barrier to group progress, how can it be that black people were rising out of poverty and into the middle class at a faster clip when racism in the United States was legal, socially acceptable, and rampant--none of which is the case today?
Blacks as a group, and poor blacks in particular, have performed better in the absence of government schemes like affirmative action. That's not an argument for returning to Jim Crow; civil rights are fundamental to a free society, and it was wrong to deny them to blacks. But it does suggest that there are limits to social engineering that arrogant politicians and public-policy makers continue to ignore.
Jason L. Riley is an editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal and a contributor to Fox News.
Interested in real economic insights? Want to stay ahead of the competition? Each weekday morning, e21 delivers a short email that includes e21 exclusive commentaries and the latest market news and updates from Washington. Sign up for the e21 Morning eBrief.
