[August 25, 2014] Being a leader means reading articles and books that can go against your upbringing and training; or challenging what you already think you know. The book reviewed today is about race and the failures of programs designed to help minorities in America, particularly African-Americans. It challenges our senior leaders to open a realistic dialogue and to reconsider the programs that have failed them. The book may be about race but it is really about leadership and, sadly, the failure of leadership that has created a culture of race that destroys families.
Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Jason L. Riley, 2014
This new book by Jason Riley takes some of America’s best solutions to reducing poverty and failure of the African-American population and turns it on its head. Want to read something that goes against everything you were taught in school and read in newspapers every day? Read this book. The book boils down to this: all the special welfare, job training, and supporting programs for the poor are like bicycle training wheels that never come off a bike. Those on these programs will never take off the training wheels and others will look upon them as dependent on them for success. Thomas Sowell does a review of the book (link here). Sowell says that the theme of the book by Riley is that “policies designed to help blacks are in fact harmful, sometimes devastatingly so.” His measurement of the ability of government programs is simple: do they work? His answer is that while they have helped some, overall the programs have failed despite billions of dollars spent. The book is also about the lack of moral courage in senior political leaders over the past 50 years and the destruction it has wrought on families for generations.
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