How black Americans were on the rise before affirmative action, author Jason Riley explains in fascinating new book

Jason Riley makes his living by his pen — and wastes no ink or time in mincing words.“There’s a lot of intellectual cowardice going on in the country right now, and it’s a product, I think, of the ascendance of progressivism,” he tells The Post in an interview about his new book, “The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed.”The book’s title alone is sure to spur debate.Its author, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, is somewhat bemused by his position as a provocateur.“I find it annoying that I have to make what I consider commonsensical points that others deem controversial, to say, ‘No, police are not a bigger problem than the criminals.’ This is something that’ll get your head handed to you today to say,” he declares.“ ‘Black kids should spend more time studying and less time playing video games, and that will go a long way toward closing the achievement gap in schools’ is a very controversial thing to say.”Riley, who grew up in Buffalo, set himself a huge task with his latest work: show how affirmative action slowed previous trends of black upward mobility.This could be the definitive book shattering the myth.The reaction to the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v.

Harvard, which found affirmative-action college-admission programs violate the 14th Amendment, prompted Riley to write it.“There was so much doomsaying up to the decision on how the black middle class would be impacted if the court banned racial preferences.And the argument seemed to be that racial preferences had created the black middle class, and so blacks would be devastated if these policies go away.

And I wanted to say that is not what the historical record shows,” he says.“This idea that black advancement in this country is contingent on special treatment, set-asides, quotas and what have you is just something not supported by the facts,” he adds.�...