The Famed Conservative Scholar Who Recognizes the Persisting Problem of Race

James Q. Wilson

Over the years JBHE has had limited respect for racial conservatives such as Dinesh D’Souza and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom who take the right wing line that racism is an attitude of the past. Data collected by JBHE and its sister newsletters The Race Relations Reporter demonstrate that they are indisputably in error.

But Pepperdine University professor of public policy James Q. Wilson, a staunch conservative intellectual, continues to believe that America still has a major problem with race. Writing in the National Review, Professor Wilson says, “To me the largest domestic question is how to make sense of the civil rights revolution. The main domestic concern of policy-engaged intellectuals, liberal and conservative, ought to be to think hard about how to change these social weaknesses of the black family. We have learned next to nothing about how to develop two-parent families. Many blacks have made rapid progress, but we are not certain how.”