One of the messages in this book is that blacks ultimately have to help themselves. There may be some residual racism out there, but that is not what is producing the unemployment rates. That is not what is producing the achievement gap in schools. That is not what is producing the black arrest and incarceration rates.

“Uncle Jason, why do you talk so white?”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Jason Riley says this question from his niece is indicative of the collapse of black culture. In his latest book, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed, Riley argues that bad public policies have contributed to the breakdown of the black family. Late last month, I spoke to Riley about his faith, black culture, and why blacks don’t need another Martin Luther King, Jr.

RealClearReligion: What inspired you to write this book?

Jason Riley: I saw a need for a new generation of blacks to be saying these things about the impact of black culture — particularly in our inner cities and our ghettos — on these black outcomes that we’re seeing. I’m not breaking any new ground here. There are people like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Walter Williams, and others who have been saying these things for decades. I thought it was necessary for a younger generation to continue saying these things for a younger generation of readers.

RCR: What is your faith background?

JR: I grew up in a very religious household. My parents were divorced when I was very young and I grew up living with my mother, although my father was still a very big part of my upbringing. My mother was born a Baptist and later converted to become a Jehovah’s Witness. I was baptized a Jehovah’s Witness when I was fifteen or so, but I voluntarily left the faith in my late teens.

It was a pretty strict religious upbringing. We attended services three times a week. It was certainly an experience that shaped my thinking on a number of issues. I grew up in a home where my father didn’t live, but I also had a lot of male role models in the church. It was a racially integrated congregation, but it was mostly black. I was exposed to any number of black men who were role models in the sense that they took care of their families, dressed a certain way, spoke a certain way, didn’t drink to excess, didn’t smoke, didn’t curse. That was my idea of what it meant to be a man. I was surrounded by those types, not only within the congregation, but my extended family on my mother’s side were all Jehovah’s Witnesses.

RCR: Do you think the role models you found in church are missing today?

JR: I don’t know that they’re missing. I’m not sure that they carry the sway with today’s young people that they did with me. But they’ve been there. The church is still there. It’s still a very important institution in the black community. More broadly speaking, you have a family breakdown issue going on. I don’t know that the church can compensate entirely for that.

The real problem is the breakdown of the black family. One of the statistics I like to remind people of is that as late as 1960, two out of three black children were raised in two-parent homes. Today, more than 70 percent of black children are not. In some of these ghettos, it runs as high as 80 or 90 percent of black kids living in single-parent homes. I think that has a lot to do with those bad outcomes we see in terms of school completion, in terms of involvement in the criminal justice system, drug use, and teen pregnancy, and so forth. It’s the lack of fathers in homes raising boys, teaching them what it means to be men, and teaching them what it means to be black. I think the breakdown of the family has been extremely detrimental to black culture.

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