Black Americans Don’t Need Racial Favoritism

Groups like the NAACP have long worked to get more black officials in public office. They assumed that more representation would mean more upward mobility for black Americans.

This hypothesis didn’t pan out. While middle-class blacks did fairly well, “low-income minorities in Carl Stokes’s Cleveland, Coleman Young’s Detroit, and Marion Barry’s Washington fell further behind,” Jason L. Riley observes.

The career of Sharpe James, the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey who died last week, illustrates this unfortunate reality. When he left office in 2006 after five terms, the city’s unemployment rate was twice the national average, and median household incomes were half the state’s average.

“Black mayors like James often used racial appeals to build unbeatable political machines, promising to uplift the black poor—yet the poor became even more impoverished on their watch,” Riley notes. Read why he maintains that colorblind policies are what’s needed to help blacks climb the economic ladder.

Marijuana legalization in the United States will come with many consequences, most notably for those who are seriously mentally ill. “Researchers have found that the conversion rate from an acute psychotic episode to chronic schizophrenia is higher for users of cannabis than for any other substance,” Stephen Eide notes in our Spring issue. And the government estimates that almost half of all adults with serious mental illness smoke weed—nearly three times the rate of those with no mental illness.

Read Eide’s deep dive on the problem here, and the policies and solutions he thinks could have a positive impact.

In his new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, David Zweig looks back at the litany of disastrous judgments made during the pandemic five years ago. James B. Meigs observes that Zweig’s thorough reporting shows how policies on masking, closing schools, and staying six feet apart were all based on assumptions and sloppy studies. Read Meigs’s review.

Shortly after the Department of Health and Human Services released its report on best practices for treating pediatric gender dysphoria, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) condemned it. The irony here, Joseph Figliolia writes, is that the AAP’s continued endorsement of gender medicine in the face of low-quality evidence serves only to confirm the report’s findings.

Read more about the report here, and why medical associations continue to back “affirming care.”

“Great suggestions. Similar to the legalization of marijuana, the legalization of gambling will harm many young people who would have never tried it if it were illegal.”

Photo credits: mark peterson / Contributor / Corbis Historical via Getty Images