Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Jason Riley. Jason's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He's a columnist for the Wall Street

Journal and a commentator on Fox News. He was awarded the Bradley Prize in 2018, and he's the author

of a brand new book that will be the topic for our discussion today.

It's called The Black Boom.

So, Jason, thanks very much for coming on.

Glad to be here, Brian.

Your book is, it's a short kind of punchy look at the economic policies implemented under the Trump administration

that had led, at least in the pre-pandemic period, to economic gains among black Americans,

from employment, you note wages, poverty, inequality.

So I wonder if you could just, for our listeners,

sketch out the basic argument of the book,

why you wanted to write it, and just how significant

were some of the gains that you detail?

Sure.

So I wanted to write the book because I thought it was a very underreported story.

Those black economic gains were tremendous. We hadn't seen them in a long time, if ever, in some cases.

And they didn't get a lot of play in the press and that's because the establishment media had

largely decided that Donald Trump was a bigot and that his policies were going to harm the

economic prospects of low-income minorities in particular and And so reporting this news, this data,

would have undermined that narrative.

And so they largely downplayed it or ignored it altogether.

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