Beyond fried chicken

Last Thursday the president of Wright State University, along with the school’s dining hall vendor, apologized for a Black History Month menu that featured fried chicken and collard greens. Liberal groups used social media to decry the lunch choice and Wright State President David Hopkins sent out an email apologizing, adding, “[T]he larger question remains: Why was it done? I will find out. We will take steps to prevent this kind of behavior occurring in the future.”

Whew! Glad that’s taken care of. But if Hopkins really wanted to fight racism, he could invite to campus Shelby Steele or Jason Riley. Both African-American writers have recently come out with books that question why blacks continue to vote overwhelmingly for liberal politicians who have done things far worse than offering fried chicken—which I suspect was popular among the Wright State students.

In Shame (Basic Books, 2015), Steele defines 21st-century liberalism primarily as “a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequality in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs.” Steele says, “We can mark up the black underclass, the near disintegration of the black family, and the general decline of public education—among many other things—to liberal social policies.”

Steele notes, “Welfare policies beginning in the 1970s incentivized black women not to marry when they became pregnant, thereby undermining the black family and generating a black underclass. … Affirmative action presumed black inferiority to be a given, so that racial preferences actually locked blacks into low self-esteem and hence low standards of academic achievement. … And so on. Post-1960s liberalism—on the hunt for white American innocence—has done little more than toy with blacks.”

In a wonderfully named book, Please Stop Helping Us (Encounter Books, 2014), Riley describes “how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed.” Riley writes about African-American students who don’t take schoolwork seriously because they know they’ll be passed to the next grade; better students didn’t sweat because they knew with minimum effort they could get college scholarships. According to Riley, in an affluent, suburban Cleveland school district “black kids readily admitted that they didn’t work as hard as whites, took easier classes, watched more TV, and read fewer books.”

Riley dedicated his book to Steele and Thomas Sowell. They’re both beyond official retirement age but aren’t retiring, which is good news—and I’m glad members of a new generation, with Riley as a prime example, are writing about more than fried chicken.