Top 40 Jason L. Riley Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Crime began rising precipitously in the 1960s after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, started tilting the scales in favor of the criminals. Some 63 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll taken in 1968 judged the Warren Court, in place from 1953 to 1969, too lenient on crime; but Warren’s jurisprudence was supported wholeheartedly by the Michelle Alexanders of that era, as well as by liberal politicians who wanted to shift blame for criminal behavior away from the criminals.”

— Jason L. Riley

2. “A culture that takes pride in ignorance and mocks learnedness has a dim future. And those who attempt to make excuses for black social pathology rather than condemning these behaviors in no uncertain terms are part of the problem.”

— Jason L. Riley

3. “The NAACP’s agenda is about deflecting blame away from blacks and maintaining the relevance of the NAACP. Lemon’s agenda is about personal responsibility. The social science, of course, overwhelmingly supports what both O’Reilly and Lemon are saying, even though many liberals want to ignore it and attack the messengers.”

— Jason L. Riley

4. “The black homicide rate is seven times that of whites, and the George Zimmermans of the world are not the reason. Some 90 percent of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Why should we care more about black criminals than their black victims?”

— Jason L. Riley

5. “The most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home,” concluded William Comanor and Llad Phillips after examining data from a national longitudinal study of young people. Black boys without a father were 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father.”

— Jason L. Riley

6. “And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it’s been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior – behavior too often celebrated in black culture.”

— Jason L. Riley

7. “Black culture today not only condones delinquency and thuggery but celebrates it to the point where black youths have adopted jail fashion in the form of baggy, low-slung pants and oversize T-shirts. Hip-hop music immortalizes drug dealers and murderers.”

— Jason L. Riley

8. “And he concluded that black culture, more than anything else, explained the academic achievement gap. The black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books. “A kind of norm of minimum effort appeared to exist among Black students,” wrote Ogbu.”

— Jason L. Riley

9. “The intentions behind welfare programs, for example, may be noble. But in practice they have slowed the self-development that proved necessary for other groups to advance.”

— Jason L. Riley

10. “No matter what policies he pursues, the president’s racialized embodiment stands as a symbol of triumphant black achievement,” asserts MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry.4 Black politicians have long played off of the notion that blacks owe allegiance to “their own.”

— Jason L. Riley

11. “The irony is that these efforts to go beyond the original intent of the Voting Rights Act in the name of helping blacks politically have almost certainly hampered blacks politically by limiting their appeal to nonblack voters. By creating “safe” black districts, racial gerrymandering has facilitated racial polarization and hyperpartisanship.”

— Jason L. Riley

12. “The poverty argument is especially weak. In the 1950s, when segregation was legal, overt racism was rampant, and black poverty was much higher than today, black crime rates were lower and blacks comprised a smaller percentage of the prison population. And then there is the experience of other groups who endured rampant poverty, racial discrimination, and high unemployment without becoming overrepresented in the criminal justice system.”

— Jason L. Riley

13. “Today Asian Americans are the nation’s best-educated and highest-earning racial group. A 2013 Pew study reported that 49 percent of Asians age 25 and older hold bachelor’s degrees, versus 31 percent of whites and 18 percent of blacks. The median household income for Asians is $66,000, which is $12,000 more than white households and double that of black households. Yet Asians have little political clout in the United States.”

— Jason L. Riley

14. “Divorce helped to drive these numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the 1980s unwed parenthood was largely to blame. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. Only 16 percent of black households are married couples with children, the lowest of any racial group in the United States, while nearly 20 percent are female-headed with children, which is the highest of any group.”

— Jason L. Riley

15. “In theory these efforts are meant to help. In practice they become barriers to moving forward. Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but time and again the empirical data show that current methods and approaches have come up short.”

— Jason L. Riley

16. “In the days following the Zimmerman verdict, Bill O’Reilly used his Fox News program to call attention to “the disintegration of the African America family,” which he identified as the ultimate source of “so much violence and chaos” in black communities. So long as 73 percent of black children are born to single mothers, said O’Reilly, blacks will find themselves overrepresented among delinquents.”

— Jason L. Riley

17. “The temptation is to insist that black men ‘choose’ to be criminals,” she wrote. “The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted.”9 What Alexander and others who buy her arguments are really asking us to resist are not myths but realities – namely, which groups are more likely to commit crimes and how such trends drive the negative racial stereotypes that are so prevalent among blacks and nonblacks alike.”

— Jason L. Riley

18. “Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement,” wrote Sowell. “Nor has eager political participation or outstanding success in politics been translated into faster group achievement.”21.”

— Jason L. Riley

19. “Instead, as a consequence of racial gerrymandering, “elections nationwide have become more or less permanently structured to discourage politically adventuresome African American candidates who aspire to win political office in majority-white settings.”

— Jason L. Riley

20. “Bositis is a liberal who holds conservatives in low regard, but he is correct in noting that GOP outreach to blacks in recent decades has ranged somewhere between inadequate and nonexistent. In the main, black voters don’t choose between Democratic and Republican candidates; they vote Democrat or they stay home. Many liberals are quick to assume that racial animus explains the lack of any serious GOP effort to woo blacks.”

— Jason L. Riley

21. “One reason that returns on black political investment have been so meager is that black politicians often act in ways that benefit themselves but don’t represent the concerns of most blacks.”

— Jason L. Riley

22. “In addition, the black-white income disparity that widened under Obama actually narrowed in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan also inherited a weak economy from his predecessor.”

— Jason L. Riley

23. “Moreover, in those instances where the political success of a minority group has come first, the result has often been slower socioeconomic progress.”

— Jason L. Riley

24. “By 2013 Mississippi had more black elected officials than any other state, but it also continues to have one of the highest black poverty rates in the nation.”

— Jason L. Riley

25. “To his credit, Don Lemon, the black host of a program on CNN, applauded O’Reilly’s remarks, and then added that O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough.” Lemon went on to make five simple suggestions for black self-improvement: pull up your pants, finish high school, stop using the n-word, take better care of your communities, and stop having children out of wedlock.”

— Jason L. Riley

26. “The economist Thomas Sowell has spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups in the United States and internationally. And his findings show that political activity generally has not been a factor in the rise of groups from poverty to prosperity.”

— Jason L. Riley

27. “Perceptions of black criminality aren’t likely to change until black behavior changes. Rather than address that challenge, however, too many liberal policy makers change the subject. Instead of talking about black behavior, they want to talk about racism or poverty or unemployment or gun control.”

— Jason L. Riley

28. “There have been a handful of prominent Asian American politicians, like Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, but Asians have tended to avoid politics, compared with other groups.”

— Jason L. Riley

29. “The political left, which has long embraced identity politics, encourages racial and ethnic loyalty. It is manifest in liberal support for multiculturalism, hate-crime laws, racially gerrymandered voting districts, affirmative-action quotas, and other policies. “Stick together, black people,” says popular black radio host Tom Joyner, an Obama booster.”

— Jason L. Riley

30. “Black America “isn’t just as fissured as white America; it is more so,” wrote Gates. And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor’s guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism – something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.32.”

— Jason L. Riley

31. “High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans – and of African American control of city governments.”15.”

— Jason L. Riley

32. “The stark racial differences in crime rates undoubtedly impact black-white relations in America. So long as they persist, young black men will make people nervous. Discussions about the problem can be useful if they are honest, which is rare. Liberals don’t help matters by making excuses for counterproductive behavior. Nor does the media by shying away from reporting the truth.”

— Jason L. Riley

33. “Between 1940 and 1960 – that is, before the major civil rights victories, and at a time when black political power was nearly nonexistent – the black poverty rate fell from 87 percent to 47 percent.”

— Jason L. Riley

34. “Even allowing for the existence of discrimination in the criminal justice system, the higher rates of crime among black Americans cannot be denied,” wrote James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in their classic 1985 study, Crime and Human Nature. “Every study of crime using official data shows blacks to be overrepresented among persons arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for street crimes.” This was true decades before the authors put it to paper, and it remains the case decades later.”

— Jason L. Riley

35. “Liberals want to blame the “legacy” of slavery and racism for the breakdown of the black family and subsequent social pathologies. But the empirical data support Bill Cosby.”

— Jason L. Riley

36. “Yet liberal policy makers and their allies in the press and the academy consistently downplay the empirical data on black criminal behavior, when they bother to discuss it at all. Stories about the racial makeup of prisons are commonplace; stories about the excessive amount of black criminality are much harder to come by.”

— Jason L. Riley

37. “The spectacle of a black president’s black attorney general pretending that the black franchise is in jeopardy in twenty-first-century America struck many people as intellectually dishonest political pandering.”

— Jason L. Riley

38. “Whatever else the election of Barack Obama represented – some have called it redemption, others have called it the triumph of style over substance – it was the ultimate victory for people who believe that black political gains are of utmost importance to black progress in America.”

— Jason L. Riley

39. “But any candid debate on race and criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has been the case for at least the past half a century.”

— Jason L. Riley

40. “We are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and a black man has twice been elected president in a country where blacks are only 13 percent of the population. Yet liberals continue to pretend that it’s still 1965, and that voters must be segregated in order for blacks to win office.”

— Jason L. Riley

41. “The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the United States today are run by blacks.”

— Jason L. Riley

42. “When Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked black talk-show host Tavis Smiley in October of 2013 if black Americans were “better off five years into the Obama presidency,” Smiley responded: “Let me answer your question very forthrightly: No, they are not. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”2.”

— Jason L. Riley

43. “Today’s civil rights leaders encourage blacks to see themselves as victims. The overriding message from the NAACP, the National Urban League, and most black politicians is that white racism explains black pathology.”

— Jason L. Riley

44. “Supporting Obama regardless of his job performance is therefore seen by many blacks as not only the right thing to do but the “black” thing to do.”

— Jason L. Riley

45. “But in the past, the black approval rating of a president had tended to correlate with the jobless rate. Yet black unemployment was lower under George W. Bush than it had been at any point during the Obama administration.”

— Jason L. Riley

46. “Yet between 1972 and 2011 – that is, after major civil rights gains, as well as the implementation of Great Society programs – it barely declined, from 32 percent to 28 percent, and remained three times the white rate, which is about what it was in 1972.20.”

— Jason L. Riley

47. “So while multiculturalists are busy complaining about teaching methods and civil rights leaders are busy complaining about standardized tests, the Asian kids are busy studying.”

— Jason L. Riley

48. “History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility.”

— Jason L. Riley

49. “Boettke cited Sowell’s remark that the first rule of economics is scarcity – there’s never enough of anything to placate all those who want it – and the first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.”

— Jason L. Riley