Hello and welcome to another special episode of the City Journal podcast.

I am so delighted to be joined by one of my most brilliant colleagues, Jason L. Riley.

Welcome to the show.

Glad to be here, Ralph.

So you are one of the scholars at the Manhattan Institute that I have been reading for a long time since long before I joined the Manhattan Institute.

And it's always been refreshing to read your work.

And in part because of what you've had to say on an issue that I think is embedded

throughout the entirety of the public policy discourse, and that is race.

For as long as I can remember, things like racial disparities have informed how we talk about

everything from health care reform to criminal justice reform to immigration and

welfare. And it just seems like getting a proper understanding of what the role of race and

society is is actually really key to developing the ability to navigate public policy debates

in an effective way. And when I was kind of coming up as a young man and thinking through

my own politics, race was the issue that really kind of introduced me to the ideas of the

American right in part because it seemed to me from where I was at the time, you know, my late

teenage years, that really what distinguished left and right on race was the

following. On the right, you were kind of racial conservative if you believed that life

outcomes were largely determined by personal actions, by personal choices. Whereas if you were

on the left on race, life outcomes were largely explained

by this broader phenomenon of racism or racial discrimination. Do you think that's a kind of

accurate way to frame this thing? And how did you kind of come to this issue?

I do think that's one way to do it. And I think it is fairly accurate, this idea of agency that racial and ethnic minority groups are somewhat helpless in the face of society and society's impact on them, that they don't have the freedom to sort of

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