Will Cain Country - From the Vault: The Affirmative Action Myth: Does It Hurt More Than It Helps? (ft. Jason Riley)

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Affirmative Action programs were meant to help minority communities, so why did they end up hurting them instead? In this "Best Of" edition of ‘Will Cain Country,’ Author of ‘The Affirmative Action Myth,’ Jason Riley joins Will to break down how the welfare state built up over several decades incentivized unemployment, tore apart families, and overall created perverse incentives that led minorities into a lifestyle which prevented them from building a better life for themselves. Subscribe to ‘Will Cain Country’ on YouTube here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch Will Cain Country!⁠⁠⁠ Follow ‘Will Cain Country’ on X (⁠⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠⁠), Instagram (⁠⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠⁠), TikTok (⁠⁠⁠@willcainshow⁠⁠⁠), and Facebook (⁠⁠⁠@willcainnews⁠⁠⁠) Follow Will on X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@WillCain⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Wilcane. Welcome to Wilcane Country. We're taking a little time away, but that doesn't mean the conversation stops. Today we pulled together a best-of show, moments that cut through the noise, sparked real debate, and made you reach out. It's a solid snapshot of what we've been doing on this program. Let's get to it. Jason Riley is a Fox News contributor, a Wall Street Journal columnist and the author of this brand new book, The Affirmative Action Myth. Jason, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me on, Will. Glad to be here. Talk to me about the myth. What myth are you attacking, are you tackling in this book? Well, the impetus for the book was the 2023 Supreme Court decision and Students for Fair Admissions, the Harvard, that outlawed race-based college.

admission, said they were unconstitutional. And there was a lot of chatter around that decision. I mean, it was not unexpected. People said, the makeup of this court suggested that those policies were going to go away. But what struck me was all the doomsaying coming, particularly out of the left, and elites on the left, who argued that if these policies go away, they will devastate black America, particularly the black middle class, that these policies had in fact created the black middle class. And that without them, there would be no more upward mobility. College campuses would be whitewashed and on and on. And I said, wait a minute, that is not what history shows here. History shows that there was a significant black middle class

before these policies came into effect, particularly in the 1970s. And in fact, in the era of affirmative action, that middle class has grown more slowly than it was growing in the pre-affirmative action era. And so I tried to make my case that these policies are not necessary to upward mobility, that blacks were upwardly mobile well before these policies came into effect. And that's the story I'm trying to tell. Let's talk a little bit about that history, Jason, of the black middle class before affirmative action. I think we would also have to say before the modern American welfare state, the war on poverty under Lyndon Baines Johnson, and a few other potential contributing factors to the decline of the black American middle class, starting, as you pointed

out, in the 1970s or late 1960s. I lived in New York for 15 years, Jason. And New York's an interesting petri dish to see changes over time. I lived on the Upper West Side. I spent a ton of my time in Harlem. One of my sons went to school in Harlem. They both played soccer in Harlem. So my social life took me to Harlem a lot. And for example, neighborhoods like Hamilton Heights. Hamilton Heights is a famous neighborhood in upper Manhattan that was historically a black middle class neighborhood, beautiful brownstones, townhomes, big, nice area. Today, Hamilton Heights, while it has that history, has either been gentrified or it's rough. It's one of the two, you know.

it doesn't represent the historical tie to the black middle class today. Now, I'm just bringing up Hamilton Heights as a little illustration, right, of what the black middle class looked like before the mid-1900s. Sure, sure. You're absolutely right. Black life looked a lot different in the first half, in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. And what's remarkable about that is that there was discrimination at the time. There was much, much more racism, legal racism at the time. You could put a sign in your window that said, we don't hire black people. Yet the black labor participation rate was higher than the white labor participation rate. And you saw, again, blacks climbing out

of poverty into the middle class. You saw them increasing their years of education, both in absolute terms and relative to whites. You saw them entering skilled professions between 1940 and 1970, the number of people entering, the rate at which blacks were entering the middle-class professions was tremendous. I mean, the number of middle-class blacks between the 1940s and the 1970s, something like went up by a factor of five. I mean, affirmative action has never replicated those gains. And people don't know this history.

And one of the reasons they don't know the history is because. it's not in the interest of black leaders today, whether you're talking about black politicians or civil rights activists, to tell this story. Instead, they want to credit whatever progress. What's that? They want to credit whatever progress they've achieved through to their social programs that have been implemented since 1960. I'm sorry, I knew where you're going. But how was that happening, Jason? I think anybody listening is like, wow, okay, so labor force participation, climbing out of poverty, educational attainment. going up from 40 to 70, but it was obviously in a very racist environment, as you mentioned.

So how was that happening? Well, a few things were going on. One was the great migration out of the south. And it was not only a migration from south to north. It was a migration from rural areas, which tend to be poor to wealthier areas in the cities, urban areas. And so blacks were leaving the south in large numbers and leaving rural areas in large numbers. And simply moving from Alabama to Ohio, doing a job in Cleveland is going to pay a lot more than doing that same job in Mobile, Alabama. So simply physically moving was one way that we saw upward mobility.

The other thing you had back then, and I think that this was also a very big factor that doesn't get enough attention, is you had much more stable black families, which are conducive to upward mobility as well. You had higher marriage rates among blacks in the early decades of the 20th century than you did among whites. In fact, as recently as the early 60s, two out of three black children were being raised in a home with a mother and a father. Today, three and four are not, or something close to that. And in some of our inner cities, it's upwards of 80%. That has been a tremendous factor in stunting upward mobility among blacks. What you saw when I was talking about those numbers of blacks entering the middle-class

professions, what you saw in the 1940s and 50s and 60s were black-white incomes converging. Blacks were not only making more in absolute terms, they were gaining on white. You saw what we call today a reduction in income inequality taking place. That starts to stall in the late 60s. And one of the reasons it starts to stall because in the late 60s you begin to see this proliferation of single-parent homes. And of course, single-parent homes are going to be making less money than dual-parent homes. And so right there, that breakdown of the family had economic consequences in terms of blacks catching up to whites. And so the breakdown of the black family has been a tremendous factor.

And one of the problems you mentioned, the War on Poverty and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, they exacerbated the breakdown of that black family because they subsidized antisocial behavior. subsidize the types of habits and attitudes and practices that are not conducive to upward mobility. So you saw less labor participation rates. You saw more school dropout rates and so forth. And, of course, that all leads to lower incomes for blacks. And so affirmative action could not make up for those things. And that's what we lost and when we lost the black nuclear family.

We'll take a quick break. More of this best of Wilcane country coming up. This is Ainsley Earhart. Thank you for joining me for the 52 episode podcast series, The Life of Jesus. A listening experience that will provide hope, comfort, and understanding of the greatest story ever told. Listen and follow now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. I want to get back to the affirmative action element in a minute, which is more about education. But the breakdown of the family, so as you described the gains made from 40 to 70,

the physical movement from south and north or rural to urban, I think it can almost be as an argument used against you. in that, well, that's a one-time gain for the black population. In other words, once that is completed, once that migration has completed, you need to see the ability to continue to gain in real wages and labor force participation. It's a singular one-time boom because you're going from extreme poverty to employment in urban centers. But the family element is going the opposite direction. It's cutting the other way.

And I've always been curious, like, what happened? like you gave us the stats what happened in the 60s now the left kind of dominates the narrative on this and they say it's due to the war on drugs the imprisonment of the black male um that broke up families destroyed families you're pointing to the great society and what you the word you used was subsidizing antisocial behaviors i think what speaks to me is incentive you know people work according to incentive so it put a lot of incentives in to what to to to take, what, welfare checks? Explain to me how the 60s and public policy

destroyed the black family. Well, if you pay people not to work, you're going to get more people not working. If the government is going to give people so much money, more money than they can earn in the workforce, they are going to make the rational choice to not enter the workforce. We saw a bit of this under COVID.

When people stayed home refused to go back to their jobs because we were subsidizing them staying home. They were getting more money than their former employer was going to give them if they went back to work. But this isn't something new. This is an ongoing issue with the size of the current welfare state that we have. And there can be a tipping point where basically the government is providing so much money to individuals who are unemployed that they have no incentive to go find work. And that is what we saw to a great extent under Lyndon Johnson's policies, this great expansion of the welfare state

putting in place disincentives to work. It also, when I say it's subsidized antisocial behavior, it also told single women, if you have more children, we will give you more money. And if we catch the father of that child living with you, we will cut you off, which gave an incentive for the father to be absent. He'd be costing his mother's, his children's mother, as well as his children money if

he stuck around. And so that's what I mean by perverse incentives that were put in place. But the earlier point you made about the migration being a one-time game doesn't quite compute because what blacks were also doing, and by the way, even with the great migration, most blacks lived in the South. Today, most blacks still live in the South. South. So it's not like the South emptied out of blacks, but blacks were also increasing their years of education. And traditionally in America, when you increase education, you increase

your earnings. So these are not one-offs. So increasing years of education was a huge, huge deal. But one point to make about affirmative action here is that the benefits have mostly flowed to those blacks who were already better off. And that's why some of the most vehement uh... opponents of getting rid of race preferences are upper class blacks after the decision came down against harvard uh... everyone from brock obama on down it came to black elites denounced this decision but it's that class of blacks of the benefit of the most

from a firm of action even though it's been sold in the name of helping the black poor just to give you a quick statistic on that if you look at uh... the uh... earnings of uh... of uh... the highest earning blacks which be in the top 20% bracket. Their share of income, between the late 60s and the early 90s, the first 25 years of affirmative action, their share of income went up at about the same rate

as whites in the top 20%. But blacks in the lower 20% of earnings saw their share of income decline at more than double the rate of whites in the bottom 20% over the first 25 years of affirmative action. So those benefits, whatever benefits the firm action was providing, It was providing them to blacks who were already better off.

And that is why you see this sort of class distinction and who cares about racial preferences going away and who doesn't because they haven't really benefited from them. We'll take a quick break. More of this best of Will Kane country coming up. All right. Let's talk about the pros and cons of affirmative action for just a moment. It's, I can't remember the story we were doing the other day, Jason. It was actually, I think the story was about women in the world. workplace. We were talking about this and the idea of the pros and the cons of giving someone

an advantage and then the reputational harm that has on that person once they're in the environment. The stigma of it. You know, this is a Clarence Thomas has talked. Yeah, Clarence Thomas has talked about this, right? It cast a shadow of doubt over every black high achiever. Hey, are you meritoriously at the same level of everyone else that had to get here? Or did you get an exception, did you get a pass in some way? That's one obvious con, which I think the left dismisses is racist, but it's actually, again, human rational. It doesn't matter if it's black, women, or anybody else. Everybody's going to look at, hey, if there's a policy that gives this person preference, I'm going to wonder if their true meritorious, you know, resume got them here

in the same way I had to. It's interesting that the left does want to dismiss the stigma, of this debate. But it's a selective dismissal. I'll give you a quick example that I'm sure your audience will be familiar with. I remember a few years back when Elizabeth Warren was called out for claiming to have Native American heritage and using that to advance her professional career. And I remember an interview she did with the Boston Globe where she said, you know, I got here on my own. Don't tell me I got any of it. She grew indignant that someone would suspect her of not being qualify to have the accomplishments that she's had in her life, being a Harvard professor in total.

And any self-respecting person would, of course, no one wants to be the token on campus or the token in the workplace. Yet Elizabeth Warren will turn around in support affirmative action if you say to her, what about the stigma, how it taints the accomplishments of blacks? She'll wave that away. So it's a very selective use of stigma on the eyes of love.

But it's very true. And the Supreme Court got into this, and their majority opinion in the Harvard case where they talked about how a firm reduction reinforces negative stereotypes. So if you're at a selective school and it's full of black kids or the black kids who are there are mostly black kids who have been let in with lower standards and you see them pooling at the bottom of the class, you see them dropping out at higher rates, you see them switching to easier majors and then you leave school. What is your impression of the capabilities of black people that you've gotten from school? So yes,

This is a problem in that it does taint the accomplishments of blacks, and it's one of the reasons I'm a big opponent of these policies. And that leads you to your mismatch theory, right? Yeah. Meaning what you just said, that dropout rate or that, and that what reinforces in the negative stereotype, is inherently part of the mismatch theory. Yes, absolutely. What we know from a large body of research is that one of the most important things in where a student goes to school, and is successful there is whether their academic credentials match those of other people at the same institution. Where there's a gap, you're going to see that student struggle. And so it doesn't matter

if it's a gap in race. It doesn't matter if the gap is coming from the child of alumni or a donor. It doesn't matter if the gap is an athlete, a star athlete. If there's a gap, that student, if Harvard gave people Hold on real quick. Left-handed redheads. You brought up legacies. You see left-handed redheads pooling at the bottom of the class,

dropping out at higher rates. That's just the way it works. You need to go to school to be successful. You need to go to school with people that somewhat matched your academic credentials because that is going to determine

the pace at which the material is taught in class. Professors teach to the middle. And so if you're behind in credentials, We've seen this also play out, to your point, with legacies and with athletes. So an athlete that gets into a better school, not on his academic credentials. Right. It depends on the size.

So an athlete, if he goes to a school that's a hard academic school and he got there on an athletic scholarship and he has trouble academically, then what we've seen is what you described earlier, potential washout rate, failure rate, and so forth. And the same thing with legacies. I got in because my daddy and my granddaddy did, but I'm really not good enough to be here. Then he struggles to stay in school. And the real problem here, or the real tragedy, I should say, is that if you look at a school like a Duke or a University of North Carolina, these very selective schools that take black students who haven't met the average score of the average person at that school, their test scores don't match that. That child, typically, that student, that young person, has test scores that are well above the national average. They're just not as high as the average student at Duke.

So they've set this kid up to fail. This kid could be hitting it out of the park at North Carolina State or at Michigan State. But instead, they've been funneled into the University of Michigan or the University of North Carolina or Duke for window dressing purposes so that these schools can show a catalog that, you know, is racially balanced. And these schools care less about the actual outcomes after that student is admitted. I mean, I don't care what the freshman class looks like so much as what the graduating class looks like. And they are setting up kids to fail and never make it to graduation, kids that would be hitting it out of the park at a less selective institution. So affirmative action doesn't do any favors for the intended beneficiaries.

And that's one of the points I try and stress in the book. We'll take a quick break. more of this best of Will Cain country coming up. When the weather cools down, Golden Nugget Online Casino turns up the heat. This winter, make any

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my own thoughts and probably everybody listening like, well, we all believe in rigor and a strenuous environment and sort of, you know, the whole maximum, Jason, like, if you're the, what is it, if you surround yourself with four idiots, if you're the smartest person, then you become the fifth idiot. If you surround yourself with five geniuses and you're the dumb. then you become eventually the fifth genius, right? In other words, surround yourself with high achievers is sort of what's in and put yourself into a rigorous environment. But I guess, so the balance is, okay, in a school environment, if you take an underqualified kid, either based upon racial preferences, legacy admissions, athlete, whatever, red-headed left-handers,

like you said, the risk is that he quits. And you're seeing it play out in the data, that he washes out, he fails out, he doesn't rise to the standard. He doesn't achieve to the level of everybody else. The risk is he quits, and he's in a worse position. And if he had gone to a more matched institution, you use the example of NC State, he'll actually continue to strive, maybe middle of the pack, maybe top of the pack, wherever he ends up, and he ends up graduating from that institution, and is a better place in his life than struggling at the higher institution?

Absolutely. And we have not only do we have academic studies that show this, We have real world experiences that show this. Because before the Supreme Court decision on Harvard, several states had already banned race preferences in college admissions, big, diverse states, California, Florida, Texas, Arizona. So we know what happened in those states.

So after California banned racial preferences back in the mid-1990s, you saw decline in black enrollment at the top schools in the system, Berkeley and UCLA. But in the overall University of California system, black enrollment went up. So did Hispanic enrollment. So did GPAs. And most importantly, so did graduation rates.

So a system, affirmative action that had been put in place to increase the ranks of the black middle class in practice left you with fewer doctors, fewer lawyers, fewer physicists than you would have had in the absence of the policy. And this illustrates the mismatch. Those kids that were mismatched at Berkeley were better matched with UC Santa Cruz, where they went on to earn their degree and earn them in more difficult disciplines and graduate with higher GPAs. So yes, that is what happens. And that is the kind of, now the studies we have, because I like the illustration used earlier about surrounding yourself with smarter people. Unfortunately, the academic studies we have Don't support that the lowest performer in the group will catch up. And so I'll give you a quick example.

There was a study done of law school students who were admitted to Howard University, the historically black school in D.C., which does not use affirmative action, and George Mason University, a higher-ranked law school that does use it. Black students from Howard passed the bar on their first try at much higher rates than black students who had been admitted under affirmative action at George Mason University. So did those kids at George Mason University, the black kids who were admitted under affirmative action, get a better education than the kids who went to Harvard where they met the same standards of their fellow students? So again, we have real world experiences

and we have academic studies that show the harm that affirmative action is done. All right. Lastly, I want to talk to you about culture because what we talked about happening in the 60s and then with the advent of affirmative action in the 70s, Jason, was the beginning of the decline of the family for one element that we were talking about. But we're now, what, 50 years removed from the beginning of those policies. And so a lot of things that were incentivized back then, while they remain with incentives, over a 50-year period, you can ingrain some of that into culture. And you talk about culture in this book.

And you talk a lot more about, like, respectability politics, and it's about culture instead of race. Yes, very much so. Pull up your pants, finish school, take care of your children. But it's become taboo to say those things. You get your head handed to you when you say those things. The focus has to be capped on white racism as the all-purpose explanation for inequality, racial inequality in our society. And then that has been drilled in to people, particularly lower income blacks, by politicians and by activists. And it's a very, very dangerous thing. And mainly because it is untrue. Imagine if Martin Luther King or Thurgood Marshall or those civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks had had that attitude that, you know, well, people are racist, guess we'll just throw up our hands and wait for white people to get their act together. No, these people have the attitude that blacks must perform, blacks must lift themselves up, notwithstanding what whites are doing. We cannot let that stop us. And yet today, you go to your black elites, your Ibram Kendi's, your Tanahisi Coates's,

your Nicole Hannah-Jones' with their 1619 project. It's the exact opposite. Don't ask anything of black people until we have vanquished white racism from America. And so long as I see a Confederate flag out there somewhere, so long as someone's out there using the N-word, you can't talk, I can't talk to you about black behavior. That's irrelevant. And that's the attitude that is in great. and in a sort of subculture of blacks, it's very, very, very damaging.

And I think we need to do what we can to move away from it. How damaging, Jason, do you think popular culture is? You know, it was a story the other day. It was a free speech-based story. It was like, will the Trump administration do something to outlaw narco-coritos? That's songs in Mexico that celebrate and sort of deify drug cartels and drug cartel leaders. And look, that's a free speech argument that that's, waiting to be had. However, I do think there is real impact on popular culture on how people

see themselves in the wider society. And, you know, whether or not it's, whether or not even just music, you wrote about this, acting white, so many different things that disincentivize or discourage, or I don't, if I'm trying to think, if I had somebody disagreed with me, Jason, they'd say no, trying to encourage a different form of success. Well, I'll tell you this, if Trump did push for outlawing gangster rap, I think there'd be a lot of black moms and dads out there who would cheer him on in doing that. I certainly know that my parents tried to shield me from that subculture. And I find it unfortunate that some of the most popular hip-hop acts out there, these guys have become millionaires and even billionaires, trafficking in the worst stereotypes about black people.

Trafficking and misogyny and violence and glorifying. And materialism and glorifying it. And living it out. Look at where Sean Combs is right now. They weren't just rapping about it. So, yes, this has been hugely damaging. But again, it is something that our cultural elites look to and say, you know what? Jason is the sellout.

He's the one acting white. You know, Snoop Dog is the authentic black person. You know, what this really, where this really came to with that. By the way, Jason, do you think Malcolm X? The thing is, interestingly, I think black leaders who were the proto, pro-nationalist black leaders from the 60s would actually agree with you. Like, what would Malcolm X think of, like, you know, Snoop Dog? We know, we know he said it. Martin Luther King, Thurgoer Marshall, those guys were.

were very much into respectability politics. They believe that it mattered how blacks carried themselves. They said, yes, there's racism out there, but we can't blame all of our problems on racism. We have to address some of these issues within our community in terms of our behavior, our conduct, our attitudes, and habits. We need to be in a position to take advantage

of these civil rights we're fighting for once we have them. And so, yes, they would very much agree with me, I think. And I think I cite some of their work to that effect in the book, that the attitudes in the black leadership have changed dramatically on this front over the past 50 years and for the worse. Yeah. Really fascinating stuff. The Central Tent is talking about affirmative action, the myth of affirmative action in Jason's new book, which I encourage you to check out the affirmative action myth, Jason Rowley, Fox News contributor and Wall Street Journal columnist.

It's out now, Jason. It is out now and available on Amazon and in bookstores. Okay, awesome, and an awesome conversation. I'm glad to have you on. Thank you so much. I could go on for another half hour, but Jason has a hard out, so I'll let him go here. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. Thank you. Take care of welcome. That wraps up today's best of Wilcane Country. Appreciate you being here, and we're going to see you next time. Listen to ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcast, and Amazon Prime members. You can listen to this show, ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Thank you.