The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed
… As we were, we can be…
—“Follow Me,” from the musical Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe (1967, film version)
1. Class act
In one of the sessions of my African Americans’ and Children’s Literature class of spring 2025, two Black students (the class was mostly Black) mentioned in passing something called the Imposter Syndrome. I had never heard the expression and asked them to explain it. They said it was a fear among many Black students, including themselves, as it were, that they were frauds. (I learned later that the concept is not racial in origin and is indeed commonly known.) In this instance, Black kids, or least ones like themselves, had no business being at a school like Washington University, and their struggles to keep their heads academically above water were proof of that. I told them that this was not necessarily unique to Black students, that many students felt this way entering a research university, where the level of academic competition and the preparation of many of the students far exceeds anything they faced in high school, even a superior high school.
My Black students did not dismiss this assertion out of hand, but did insist that it was different, unique, the way Black students saw themselves as imposters. I knew this to be true from experience, but felt a bit uneasy about confirming it, at least in quite the way they expressed it. I knew it to be a commentary on affirmative action, on being made a special case of some sort because of your race. This is how you feel as a charity case, the orphan adopted by the kindly, wealthy family. Ah, for the kindness of strangers who want to help you make up for what you were unfairly denied, for what you lack. Praise be to those who want you to catch up through an odd ritual of compensation. But, of course, under these circumstances you become a walking billboard of, shall we say, a socially-constructed inadequacy that everyone else who is not Black is supposed to feel sorrow and guilt that you suffer from, a sort of politically-made disability. I knew what it was like to sit in that wheelchair! You prayed for a faith healer to come up to you and yell, “I command you to get up and walk!”
College graduation for Blacks is harder than it needs to be. If being mismatched is true, how can one help but be an imposter? You are pretending you belong somewhere that you really do not belong.
These students are, I suppose, mismatched, to use the term of affirmative action critics. My Black students were likely attending the wrong school. “One tragic legacy of the affirmative action era,” writes Jason L. Riley in The Affirmative Action Myth, “is that the number of black college graduates is almost certainly lower today than it would have been without racial preferences that mismatch students with schools for diversity purposes.” (193) College graduation for Blacks is harder than it needs to be. If being mismatched is true, how can one help but be an imposter? You are pretending you belong somewhere that you really do not belong.
I made a gesture to racial solidarity by simply saying that Black students at schools like Washington University are not the only Black people who may feel that way. “Some Black people in various professions may feel that, even some of your Black professors,” I said. My Black students did not say any of this, engage this subject, with any sense of self-pity or self-contempt or political outrage. As they were close to graduating and were, thus, over the “hump,” so to speak, of surviving at Washington University, they spoke with a sense of relief. They had proved something to themselves, even if they were not the world’s greatest students. They “got over,” to borrow a spiritual phrase from gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Affirmative action, for many of its recipients, is about not getting killed with shame. I was rather proud of them for that. I knew what it was like not to die on that particular hill, to dodge that dire disgrace, to, as James Bond put it, live to die another day.
2. The art of imposture
At the end of The Affirmative Action Myth, Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes, “The race scholar Shelby Steele calls them ‘poetic truths.’ They are racial narratives that minimize or even ignore objective facts for the purpose of advancing a political agenda. Social justice advocates and others who traffic in poetic truths typically don’t do so out of ignorance. Rather, they know a given narrative is false, or misleading at best, but they believe themselves to be acting for the greater good.” (215) In short, what Riley is arguing, the true subtext of the Black conservative argument, is that Black people have become, in effect, imposters of their own experience because they have so distorted it.
Riley almost suggests that Blacks are trying to make the specious claim that they are more traumatized by slavery now than they were in the period following when they were actually freed from it.
For instance: According to Riley, many Blacks and much of the Black leadership elite insist that a past of slavery has injured the group and is the cause of their current problems, including a lack of wealth. They have been victims of an unconscionable theft, their labor stolen as it enriched the country. Riley counters that Black leftists, liberals, and antiracists who support reparations refuse to put American chattel slavery in a larger context of global slavery, including slavery in Africa, and wish narrowly and conveniently only to implicate Whites in the practice, who become the biggest criminals in history. Moreover, Whites were the first people to mount a global anti-slavery movement and put an end to the practice as much as they could. They fought a war over it in this country and so were willing to die to end it (and, on the other side, to perpetuate it). Further, these Blacks ignore the facts of Black life when slavery ended, which reveal higher instances of marriage and two-parent households than would exist after World War II and Black people, after slavery, energetically engaged in improving themselves. Riley does not buy the argument that Black people today are traumatized by the memory of slavery: “Inherited trauma makes no more sense than inherited guilt, and no reasonable person would apply such a standard consistently across all groups,” Riley writes. Riley almost suggests that Blacks are trying to make the specious claim that they are more traumatized by slavery now than they were in the period following when they were actually freed from it. (168, chapter 6, “The Reparations Ruckus,” 125-172) (For me, that idea is not as preposterous as it may appear on its face. The spate of movies and television programs by both Black and White filmmakers over the last thirty or more years dramatizing American slavery, reveal that the collective memory of a people may process history as more painful the further they are removed from it as it takes on the characteristic of being utterly unbelievable.) For Riley, reparations is making an imposture of the Black slavery experience that seems perilously close to extorting money from Whites in a massive wealth redistribution scheme.
This level of cognitive dissonance can only be explained if one accepts that Blacks are imposters not only about the meaning of their experience but are willful manipulators of the very facts of their experience, all in a misguided attempt to leverage their ability to win concessions from Whites by simultaneously playing on White guilt and White fear by making themselves seem sympathetic victims while displaying enough anger not to appear supplicants but as rebels, a vanguard. This is hardly a novel observation of the aim of the Black conservative’s critique of the Black leftist and the Black liberal: to say that the latter have “faked” Black life, made a pseudo-life with just enough that is real as to make the whole concoction of complaint seem genuine, even heroic.
But Riley’s thorough argument against reparations, which he sees as another dimension of affirmative action or the idea that Black people deserve special treatment in recognition of the horrors of their past treatment, is just one segment of his book. “The main purpose of this book,” he writes, “is to explain how affirmative action has failed.” (9) Later, he explains, “The era of affirmative action didn’t occur in a vacuum. It overlapped with a tremendous expansion of the welfare state that began in the late-1960s. Ever-growing government assistance programs became a lure and multigenerational trap for the black poor, while preferential policies fed racial resentment in the workplace and on campus, stunted the growth of the black middle class, and left the most disadvantaged blacks behind.” (229)
To say that Sowell feels that affirmative action has been a destructive policy might be putting it mildly. And Riley shares the same abhorrence. Affirmative action, they feel, has been a nightmare.
So, affirmative action was emblematic of the American age of affluence, the American Cold War age of dominance and optimism, of White American hubris. If, for the Black leftist, America in the 1960s was COINTELPRO, secret Black internment camps, and a general White backlash against Black activism; for the Black conservative, the American 1960s, was liberal Whites using Blacks as social guinea pigs, the creation of ill-advised and poorly conceived social programs that hurt Blacks more than helped them by making them dependent on aid and stereotyping them even further as inferior, more racially self-conscious than ever. This, in turn, made them interpret their situation entirely in racial terms, as they became more insistent that their authenticity was less oriented toward the west and more related to something explicitly anti-western. For the Black conservative, the worst thing that happened to many Black Americans, especially Black intellectuals, in the 1960s, was being infected with Third World underdog-ism and the anti-colonialist, anti-capitalism bug, eaten up with Bandung-ism. (To be sure, measures of this infection predate the 1950s.)
The Affirmative Action Myth is a natural sequel to Riley’s Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (2014)—the title speaks for itself—and Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, (2021), about the life and work of the famed Black economist who is considered the father of modern Black conservatism, which can date its origins back to 1981 and the Reagan administration. Indeed, Riley’s anti-affirmative action discontents are very similar to Sowell’s, which can be found in Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (1984), Discrimination and Disparities (2018), Social Justice Fallacies ((2023), and especially Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (2004). To say that Sowell feels that affirmative action has been a destructive policy might be putting it mildly. And Riley shares the same abhorrence. Affirmative action, they feel, has been a nightmare.
Riley defends “respectability politics,” which the Black left denigrated as assimilationist, and because it failed to produce racial equality. Riley’s argument is that “respectability politics” was never meant to produce racial equality but to provide social stability for Black communities and prepare Black people to live in a competitive, capitalist society. The first pillar of Black conservatism is personal responsibility.
He dismisses as a political delusion the idea of racial disparities as necessarily an indication of racial bias and discrimination. No society has ever had the various segments of its population proportionately represented across the range of its occupations and endeavors. And no society can do that, even if it wanted to, because people are not that malleable or easily engineered.
Unsurprisingly, he rails against affirmative action in college admissions, it having led, in his view, to Black students performing worse in college than they would have had affirmative action not existed and being further stereotyped as intellectually inadequate as a result. Graduating from Yale or Princeton does not give the Black student prestige, as everyone suspects he or she did not meet the admission standards and probably finished in the lower half of the class. He defends the results of standardized tests as actually working in the favor of Black students rather than against them because they are not at the mercy of the subjectivity of admissions officers guessing about their abilities and wanting to do their idea of good. And he excoriates colleges for their secretiveness surrounding their admission process and the grading of their Black students.
He praises Black marriage, which is the best way for Black people to escape poverty, and the presence of the Black father, whose absence, he laments, is the source of a great number of social ills that afflict Blacks. He targets some rap lyrics as emblematic of Black social degeneracy in how they speak of Black women as sexual objects. In this regard, it is interesting to note how much the Black popular music, rhythm and blues, from the 1940s through the 1960s, emphasized marriage and commitment. Consider doo-wop tunes like “When We Get Married” by the Dreamlovers, “Tonight (Could Be the Night)” by the Velvets, a song about a marriage proposal, “So Much in Love” by the Tymes (with the line, “As we walk down the aisle together/ We will vow to be together till we die”), “United” by the Intruders, “Our Anniversary” by Shep and the Limelites, “With This Ring (I Promise I’ll Always Love You)” by the Platters, and “I’m Gonna Get Married” by Lloyd Price. And these are just some songs from my youth I can think of from the top of my head. This would seem to support Riley’s view that before the wide expansion of the liberal state in the 1960s, which disincentivized Black marriage, getting married was an intensely promoted and highly accepted idea among Blacks, not the popularization of baby mamas. But Black popular music took a marked turn in the late 1960s into the 1970s. Probably no song was more frank about the absent Black father and the dissolution of commitment than the Temptations’ huge 1972 hit, “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”
Riley’s main thesis, as was Sowell’s in dealing with affirmative action, is showing how much Blacks advanced economically and socially in the United States from 1940 to 1960 before affirmative action or indeed the passage of any of the major 1960s civil rights legislation. He provides a great deal of data and anecdotes to support his point about how the formation of the Black middle-class predates affirmative action, how Blacks moved into the professions, and how their incomes increased even though many parts of the country remained staunchly racist and segregated. It is on this cornerstone that he builds his argument that Blacks have never needed racial preferences to succeed in America and that since their introduction, Black progress has slowed considerably, despite the fact that we now live in the age of “diversity,” that magical word that Justice Lewis Powell bestowed upon affirmative action and America in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).
There are some points of contention that can be raised about Riley’s views:
He ignores the real concern of the Black leadership of the late 1960s and early 1970s that White-dominated companies and unions would avoid genuine outreach to Black applicants if they were not pressured to show results, not merely intentions. Blacks had little reason to think that Whites would necessarily act in good faith in a colorblind society without the government making them good actors. Whites could always say, “Well, we tried.” Ralph Ellison’s theme of Black invisibility in his 1952 novel, Invisible Man, is profoundly significant and true. Affirmative action, in one sense, was a mechanism to make Whites truly see Black people.
What the Black conservative argues is why are Blacks so identity-fixated that they think any kind of accommodation to Whites makes them less authentically Black. This is not a rhetorical question but quite real with no obvious answer.
He valorizes HBCUs more than he should. These schools, by and large, have terrible graduation rates, especially so with Black men. Most of their students are very weak academically and probably should be doing something else with their lives rather than attending college. And how devoted Black people might be to them would be reflected in alumni giving, which is rarely, if ever, talked about in relation to these schools. When I taught at an HBCU in the mid-1990s, Black students there told me they thought their counterparts at White-dominated schools probably worked harder because they had something to prove. Most told me that they did not work as hard as they could at this particular HBCU because they were comfortable and had nothing to prove. In other words, I think Sowell and other Black conservatives need to take a more nuanced look at HBCUs and the all-Black school experience generally, which, I think, is sometimes romanticized. Also, it should be remembered that when the military integrated in 1948, Black soldiers generally performed better in integrated units than in all-Black units during the Korean War. My daughter, who has been a junior high school teacher for over ten years, has found Black students actually perform better when they are with White students. This is merely anecdotal. But the question of whether Blacks typically or usually perform better when around other Blacks does not necessarily have an obvious or consistent answer.
The idea of reparations was, in some respects, popularized in the 1960s by Oscar Brown, Jr.’s humorous song, “40 Acres and a Mule” (1964) and the notion was built less on the persistence of racism and the memory of trauma than on the notion that Black people were promised a stake when they were freed that the federal government reneged on and that their descendants are indeed entitled to something as a result. It is not merely a cry of victimhood, although the case for it now may have principally become that, and, on this basis, the idea of reparations is really not dependent on how Blacks were treated during slavery, nor on the question of the amount of wealth their unpaid labor may have generated. No doubt this idea of America’s promise to Blacks was intensified by the failure of the Freedman’s Bank, launched in 1865, which collapsed in 1874 through mismanagement that was in no way the fault of its Black depositors, who were never made whole for their loss.
It is not entirely true that the Black left mainly pushes victimhood. It also pushes resistance and tends to see Black history as a tale about resistance rather than merely victimhood, and that it has only been through costly resistance that Blacks have made gains in this society. What the Black conservative argues is why are Blacks so identity-fixated that they think any kind of accommodation to Whites makes them less authentically Black. This is not a rhetorical question but quite real with no obvious answer.
One does not have to ask Blacks to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, an idea that the Black left finds offensive, unfair, and unrealistic; Blacks have already done it from 1940 through 1965. The real story of Black triumph is not the civil rights era but the years that preceded it.
The Affirmative Action Myth is certainly worth reading, if only to get a comprehensive, accessible account of what annoys Black conservatives about affirmative action and why affirmative action has never lived up to its promise by any Black person’s measure, whether left or right, and why affirmative action has almost never in its history had the full, uncritical support of everyday Black folks. But The Affirmative Action Myth is, in fact, more important than that. It is, in essence, a defense of a golden age of Black bourgeois culture, Black bourgeois morality, Black bourgeois striving, indeed, Black bourgeois reality. And being bourgeois here is not about a class, but an aspiration. Riley’s book is an account of how Black people made themselves American. And why not? America is the land of self-invention.
This leads to my final concern about the book: Riley, as the Black conservative, may be pushing a view that is, in its way, as much of an imposture as the leftist view of victimhood and resistance. What Riley wants to show is a sort of Ellisonian hero narrative that Blacks pulled themselves up by their bootstraps through the strength of their own stoic diligence, of their own cultural resources, a tale of heroic accommodation before they were infected by the White liberatory decadence of the 1960s, which undid their moorings. One does not have to ask Blacks to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, an idea that the Black left finds offensive, unfair, and unrealistic; Blacks have already done it from 1940 through 1965. The real story of Black triumph is not the civil rights era but the years that preceded it. In this sense, Riley is giving Blacks another kind of jeremiad about falling away from the glories of the past with, now, their wretched popular culture, their obsession with victimhood, and their insistence that their authenticity is rooted in anti-Americanism and some kind of global Afrotopia. But this is simply another instance, whether left or right, of Blacks believing, finally and persistently, “as we were, we can be.” Our future is the golden age just behind us, when we made an independent life without Whites. Perhaps this is so. Imposture can be poignant, I suppose, even sentimental, and it is doubtless uniquely American, as Black leftists and rightists know, as they plead against each other, “Weep no more. Follow Me.”
