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Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome to Potomac Watch, the daily

podcast of the Wall Street Journal Opinion Department. I'm Paul as you go, the editor of WCA

Opinion. And today we have a special guest, special show, as we're going to talk to

Wall Street Journal columnist,

Jason Riley, about his new book. It's entitled The Affirmative Action Myth, Why Blacks Don't

Need Racial Preferences to Succeed from Basic Books. So welcome, Jason. Good to see you. How are you doing?

Good to see you, Paul. I'm doing well. Okay. Let's talk about the core argument of your book that will let you define it.

Sure. The core argument of the book is that blacks were progressing at a faster rate, both

educationally and economically in the decades leading up to affirmative action, which began in earnest in the 1970s.

Then they were in the era of affirmative action, which the Supreme Court, in a sense, finally brought to an end in its 2023 decision,

Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard.

So the book is an attempt to sort of do a comparison of before and after trends among blacks.

And so that was the point in writing the book. And the lead up to that Supreme Court decision, which many people were expecting,

there was all of this doomsday discussion on the left in particular among elites that this would spell the end of the black middle class if we got rid of racial preferences.

And I wanted to push back on that narrative because the data does not show that affirmative action or racial preferences created the black middle class.

There was a black middle class in this country prior to

1970, and it was growing at a nice clip. And if anything, the growth of the black middle class has

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