Black civil rights leaders have long supported ethnic identity politics and prioritized the integration of political institutions, and seldom has that strategy been questioned. In False Black Power?, Jason L. Riley takes an honest, factual look at why increased black political power has not paid off in the ways that civil rights leadership has promised.

Introduction / 3

Part 1: False Black Power

1: The Civil Rights Distraction / 11

2: The Limits of Politics / 31

3: False Black Power / 51

Part 2: Dissenting Points of View

4: Keeping Up With the Leftists
New Observations for Variations on the Theme
by John McWhorter / 87

5: Black America
Changing Rhetoric into Remedies
by Glenn C. Loury / 95

6: A Response to McWhorter and Loury / 105

Notes / 109

About the Contributors / 121

Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Insti­tute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and a commen­tator for Fox News. He lives in suburban New York City with his wife and three children.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and professor of economics at Brown University. His books include One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America; The Anatomy of Racial Inequality; and Race, Incarceration, and American Values. Among other honors, he has been elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.

John McWhorter is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Doing Our Own Thing, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move, and, most recently, Talking Back, Talking Black. He is a regular columnist on language matters and race issues for Time and CNN and writes for the Wall Street Journal Taste page. McWhorter also writes a regular column on language for the Atlantic and hosts the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate.