Tag Archives: Racism

Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Another miss by libertarians

Featured

Posted on by
Reply
Cover of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America By Rachel S. Ferguson and Marcus M. Witcher

Previous readers of this content may recall my main argument: the libertarian “freedom movement” failed to address racism in the post-World War II United States and often used libertarian arguments to hinder progress for African Americans. However, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, these freedom advocates surprisingly became focused on issues of racism, particularly “affirmative action” and “quotas.” In an attempt to reconcile their past, libertarians have since attempted to rebrand their “classical liberalism” as always being opposed to racism. These efforts never succeed because the stories they tell are simply unsupportable.

Comes now Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, a book by libertarians, Rachel. S. Ferguson and Marcus M Witcher (FW). It is published by Emancpation Books, which announces itself in this way:

A spectre is stalking American newsrooms and publishing houses: the spectre of angry woke leftists aggressively seeking to dictate the range of acceptable viewpoints on a wide range of issues. This campaign of mob censorship not only runs counter to our cherished national traditions of free thought and speech, it especially limits the expression of independent views by writers of color who may dissent from the majority opinion of their group.

OK then….

FW assert that classical liberalism’s principles of individualism, property rights, free markets, and the rule of law are inherently antiracist, while accounts of the rise of racialized chattel slavery and capitalism are mistaken. But they grapple with little of the enormous literature on these subjects. FW write as if the 1619 project is the last word on these subjects rather than a project meant for public consumption. and Ed Baptist’s decade-old The Half that Never Was is the only book on the topic. The authors assure us that the thesis of “the inextricable association of capitalism with slavery has been roundly criticized by experts as being woefully unfamiliar with the economic literature on slavery” (p. 32). Well, sure. and those experts’ work has been rebutted in turn: historical inquiry is complicated and FW misleadingly write as if this were a settled controversy. More worryingly, they simply act as if some sort of economic calculation has settled the matter rather than even attempting to address the enormous literature on racist ideology and how many classical liberals, John Locke pre-eminently, justified racial conquest and slavery in the language of property rights and freedom.

FW correctly notes that at the beginning of the 20th century, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois were both striving for Black liberation, albeit through different paths (p. 174). Both leaders sought emancipation from American racial oppression, with Washington believing that economic advancement would lead to white Americans acknowledging Black financial power, thereby granting full legal and political rights to Black citizens. Du Bois, on the other hand, believed that political and legal rights were essential for economic advancement, as without them, Black citizens would be powerless to protect their gains.

While FW argues that the market can lead to Black liberation, they overlook the fact that full political and legal rights are crucial for this to happen, and, more tellingly never tell the reader that the “classical liberals” in the post-World War II US opposed extending those political and legal rights to Black Americans. FW’s own evidence proves that even with economic advancement, the market cannot eradicate racism on its own. Between the end of the Civil War and World War I, FW tell a tale of enormous economic advancement. “Simple competition” meant that “White planters had to choose between their preference for wealth and their preference for discrimination” and found that choosing discrimination had severe economic costs. But wait, then FW tell us that “market forces forced whites to turn to the political realm to maintain supremacy” (p. 79). This means that even though “Black Americans tripled their per capita income by 1914” (p. 80), political and legal equality never emerged through market mechanisms to protect those gains as Washington argued they would. This is the problem with thinking that the market would “solve” racism: there is never any timetable offered, no indication of how long Black citizens would have to remain disenfranchised and suffer discrimination when that happy day arrives when white people will finally recognize them as fellow human beings because, now, they are finally rich enough to be granted full citizenship. This is hardly good enough.

FW highlights the brutal violence experienced by Black individuals during the first half of the 20th century. However, they fail to mention that several devastating massacres against Black people were motivated by the economic progress that was supposed to guarantee their safety in a market economy. In the 1906 Atlanta massacre, the white “mob destroyed Black-owned businesses and homes and targeted the historically Black colleges and universities in the area. A barbershop owned by Alonzo Herndon, one of the nation’s first African American millionaires, was vandalized.” The Tulsa race massacre specifically targeted “Black Wall Street” an important hub of Black economic success. Far from protecting Black people, economic power often made them targets for white violence precisely because Black people lacked the legal and political protections that economic advancement was supposed to bring in its wake. Libertarians frequently assert that the state’s primary function is to safeguard private property. Nevertheless, historical evidence demonstrates that it only defends the property of those who already possess the legal and political clout to demand protection. The market and property, absent the mechanisms of government, cannot survive, contra libertarian claims to the contrary.

In 1955, at the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, FW note that “all previous attempts to use Black economic power to end segregation and discrimination had failed” (p. 192). Many things had changed since Washington’s death four decades earlier. The growth of Black wealth in Black social spaces such as churches and lodges had, as FW note, meant that there was a “powerful foundation” for Black protest “built over the preceding seven decades, of Black businesses” (p. 192).

But wait, does that mean that Booker T. Washington and FW are right? That the market did, indeed, make strides toward getting Black legal and political rights. No, not really. It isn’t that the market forced white people to finally concede that Black people were real people. It was that Black people stood up and demanded their full rights as citizens. Nothing was given, it was taken. That Black economic advancement, and tight social networks, made it possible for such demands to be made does not equate with “the market” eliminating Jim Crow.

Du Bois, the NAACP, and the Civil Rights Movement supported of Black economic advancement, but the opposite was not the case. Libertarians, who advocated for market solutions to racism, opposed any political or legal solutions to racism. Libertarians believed that Fair Employment Practices were an unjustified infringement of property rights, and they opposed any requirement for owners of public accommodations to stop racially discriminating. They also argued that the federal government had no business interfering with states administering public education, even if that meant maintaining racial segregation. Libertarians sometimes even supported segregationists who claimed that the 14th Amendment was illegally adopted, thereby relieving state governments of their obligation to provide equal protection of the law. When Virginia proposed a voucher system to maintain racial segregation in private schools, libertarians like James Buchanan and Milton Friedman were eager to provide their support for the project.

The core of the libertarian opposition was what Albert Hirschman called the “perversity thesis” which holds that any attempt to cure a social ill will only exacerbate the very problem it is meant to solve. Of course, if the perversity thesis were true, Jim Crow should have eliminated racial discrimination rather than viciously enforce it, something libertarians never considered. Libertarians consistently argued that implementing a Fair Employment law would intensify racial tension. Libertarians believed that to combat racism, it was necessary to change the minds of racists through persuasion, rather than relying on legal action, holding this belief even as mountains of social scientific evidence against it accumulated. The entire civil rights movement held that legal and political changes could precede attitude change, a view that libertarians simply view as “coercion” rather than freedom and equality. No matter how much retrofitting libertarians attempt to make to their central ideas, the record is clear that their “freedom movement” inhibited this country’s battle against its own racism.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

F.A. Hayek and the False Promise of a Racially Just Libertarianism

Featured

Posted on by
2
The cover of Andrew Koppelman's book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed

In his new book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University attempts to rescue libertarianism from itself by centering the work of Freidrich A. Hayek, one of the most distinguished economists of the twentieth century. Toward the end of the book, Koppelman discusses Barry Goldwater “who admired and sometimes quoted Hayek…After he had the [1964 Republican] nomination [for the Presidency], Goldwater (himself no racist) voted against the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds: ‘the freedom to associate means the same thing as the freedom not to associate.'” (p. 188). On the following page, he writes, “Reagan succeeded in shifting American politics–and American understandings of liberty, in Hayekian direction. He used the word freedom in his speeches more than any president before or since” (p, 189). Nestled between those two sentences is this one: “Libertarianism in all the forms we have examined is firmly opposed to racism. We have seen no trace of it in any of the arguments we have surveyed” (p. 189). That Koppelman cannot see any “trace of racism” in Goldwater parroting standard segregationist lines to oppose the Civil Rights Act or in Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” environmental racism, and generally throttling any antiracism in the Republican party underscores the flaws of his analysis of the history of libertarian ideology and racism.

In some respects Koppelman tells a story that parallels Matt Zwolinksi & John Tomasi’s The Individualists. Both books tell a story of libertarian ideas that, somehow, lost their way. What was once a philosophy that championed freedom for all became, or is in danger of becoming, a philosophy of reaction and repression. For Zwolinski & Tomasi it was a reactionary turn the movement took in the second half of the twentieth century. For Koppelman, the problem is similar: it is that libertarianism has misunderstood its own founding ideas; for him, libertarians are too entranced by the views of Ayn Rand and Murray N. Rothbard instead of F.A. Hayek, libertarianism’s true founder because “American libertarianism began with Hayek” (p. 7).

One reason Koppelman argues that Hayek is properly viewed as the founder of libertarianism is that Koppelman believes that nearly every viable option in today’s political landscape opposes the planned economy that Hayek feared. “Excerpt for a politically impossible fringe, the American left aims for a generous welfare state–more generous than the present one–in the context of capitalism” (p. 4-5). Yes, even Bernie Sanders (p. 5, 35). According to Koppelman, “The ideas of Hayek, valuing markets because they promise a better life for everyone are today commonplace in the Democratic Party” (p. 13). For Koppelman, the enemies of libertarianism come from the right, not the left. Libertarian ideas are threatened by Republican embrace of “Christian fundamentalism and Trumpian racist, xenophobic nationalism” (p. 12).The question then becomes, does Hayekian libertarianism give Koppelman the tools he needs to combat racism? To answer that question, I will examine how Hayek fits into the history of the relationship between libertarian thought and racist thought. Despite attempts at “revisionist” history from twenty-first century libertarians, the libertarian tradition they’ve inherited was either an active participant in building a racist society or passive observers of it. Looking to libertarian ideology to somehow be an active warrior against racism at this late date might be possible, but to do so libertarians need to honestly evaluate their own past.

Page Two will explore these difficulties.

Pages: 1 2

Another Distorted History of Libertarianism and Racial Justice

Featured

Posted on by
3

Some religious traditions, most famously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, practice the Baptism of the Dead. In this practice, the Church baptizes a living person who is acting as a proxy for a deceased person in order to ensure that that deceased person gains entry into Heaven. Often this practice has met with vigorous objections from leaders of other faiths who find the practice disrespectful to their own faiths.

When libertarians write the history of their ideology in matters of race they tend toward a similar practice. Historical figures are torn from their contexts and declared “libertarians” in order to, metaphorically, get libertarians into the Kingdom of Free Market Heaven. Often the historical figures are a bizarre hodgepodge of folks, usually chosen more for their appealing views on racial justice than on their advocacy of views normally thought of as the centerpieces of libertarian thought such as the non-aggression principle, capitalism, property rights, or strict individualism. The most egregious example of libertarians trying retroactively baptize a historical figure as one of their own is when they try to claim that Martin Luther King, Jr., noted socialist, was a libertarian (examples: here, here, and here).

In their new book The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi know better than to try to retroactively enroll MLK as a libertarian, indeed, they point out that many libertarians object to MLK’s ideas (pp. 220, 358). These are real scholars publishing with Princeton University Press, not some blogger on the internet like some people around here. On the other hand, Zwolinski and Tomasi cite a whole lot of bloggers in their chapter on “Racial Justice and Individualism” which is my focus, so perhaps the playing field is more even than I thought.

Zwolinski and Tomasi seem well aware of philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s adage that “Definitions are like belts. The shorter they are, the more elastic they need to be. A short belt reveals nothing about its wearer: by stretching it can be made to fit almost anybody…Yet the hope of hitting on some definition which is at one and the same time satisfactory and brief dies hard” (p. 18). They opt for “satisfactory” rather than “brief” and devote their first chapter to answering the question, “What is Libertarianism?” and draw careful distinctions among “classical liberals,” “neoliberalism,” and “Strict libertarians.” That last category is itself comprised of deontic libertarians, who are guided entirely by inflexible principles and consequentialist libertarians who “evaluates the consequences not of specific policies but of general principles and retains its commitment to those principles even if they (seem to) fail in particular instances” (p. 16). As an aside: keep an eye on that parenthetical “seem to,” it will become important later. Zwolinski & Tomasi often label failures of libertarianism, no matter how big or well documented as seemings. Libertarianism can only “seem” to fail, not actually fail.

Their summary of libertarianism gives us this:

Libertarianism is best understood as a cluster concept. We see libertarianism as a distinctive combination of six key commitments: property rights, negative liberty, individualism, free markets, a skepticism of authority, and a belief in the explanatory and normative significance of spontaneous order. (p. 6)

It is the jockeying among those various elements that make libertarianism so slippery a concept: just which element should be weighted the most, for example? It is also these differing commitments that seem to open the door to reactionary libertarianism. In Zwolinski & Tomasi’s history, libertarianism grew out of an absolute commitment to individualism and negative liberty first embaced by certain 19th century figures’ opposition to slavery. In the twentieth century libertarianism took a reactionary turn in defense of the status quo, and is now embroiled in controversy over which path the “Liberty Movement” will take here in the 21st century: radical or reactionary? (Spoiler alert: they don’t tell you).

I will focus on Chapter 7, “Racial Justice and Individualism” since that is the chapter that is most relevant to my work and expertise. Buckle up and go to page 2.

Pages: 1 2

South Carolina wants to ban genetic science

Featured

Posted on by
Reply
A poem published right after South Carolina started the Civil War declaring they did it for “freedom.”

South Carolina, despite their claims to contrary, has never been a state eager to embrace racial justice. The latest example of the state’s regressive racial thinking is Proposed Bill SC S0424. Like many states ruled by conservatives, the Palmetto State’s legislature is in a tizzy about what they think Critical Race Theory (CRT) is. Because those spreading the moral panic about CRT lie about it and the white legislators who listen to them don’t really care about what CRT actually, many legislatures are proposing the “banning” the teaching of CRT. South Carolina has proposed legislation that is the perfect exemplar of the deep and eagerly embraced ignorance of the anti-CRT crowd. Proposed Bill SC S0424 reads, in part:

(9) an individual must be compelled to affirm, accept, adopt, profess, or adhere to concepts, forms of language, or definitions not firmly and widely established, empirically or scientifically accurate, or that are controversial or theoretical, such as:

         (a) gender theory, including nonbinary pronouns or honorifics;

         (b) unconscious or implicit bias; or

         (c) that race or biological sex are social constructs;

I’m going to leave aside the gender issues in the post and focus on the idea that race is a social construct. It would seem that South Carolina wants to ban ideas like this one:

In one word, the term race is only a product of our mental activities, the work of our intellect, and outside all reality. Science had need of races as hypothetical limits, and these “products of art,” to use Lamarck’s expression, have become concrete realities for the vulgar. Races as irreducible categories only exist as fictions in our brains. They exist in us but not outside us. We can never sufficiently insist on this fact, which is elementary and undeniable to all truly scientific minds and to those desirous above all of ascertaining the truth.

That quotation is not from some wild-eyed “Cultural Marxist” but from French writer, Jean Finot’s book Race Prejudice published in English in 1907. In the subsequent century, Finot has been proven correct, “truly scientific minds” know that “races as irreducible categories only exist as fictions in our brains.” If South Carolina had its way, its schoolchildren would not be taught the best genetic science of the 21st century.

On the next page, I’ll explain why.

Pages: 1 2

The Survival of the Unfit: Darwinism, Race, and Eugenics in the United States

Featured

Posted on by
3

This is a paper that I first presented at a workshop at the University of Mississippi in 2012. I submitted it to a journal soon after and got a “Revise and Resubmit.” I then moved, switched computers and it got lost somewhere in all that. When I re-discovered it recently, I realized that it was really too late for me to bring it up-to-date with current work on eugenics given my other writing commitments. Therefore, I decided to post it here for anyone interested in these historical issues. I still like the paper and think it has something important to say.

Abstract: The historical relationship among Darwinism, eugenics, and racism is notoriously difficult to unravel. Eugenicists worried about the “survival of the unfit,” a phrase that should, prima facia, be nonsense for those with a Darwinian worldview in the early twentieth century. To be “fit” in a Darwinian sense meant adapted well enough to the environment to out-survive (and out-reproduce) one’s competitors. For eugenicists, the measure for “fit” could not be those best adapted to the environment in this way because they were concerned with the opposite situation: those who thriving and yet were “unfit.” Additionally, historians now reject the idea that eugenics was necessarily founded on racist assumptions. We can address these problems by examining the different forms of Darwinism adopted by early twentieth-century notions of “fitness” and how the term was interpreted in the context of American debates about immigration restriction and race. For some eugenicists, the idea of panmixia allowed them to argue that the unfit were outcompeting the fit. For others, notably Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn the idea of organic selection provided them with a Darwinian mechanism that solved the problem of the “survival of the unfit.”

Keywords:  Darwinism; Eugenics; Racism; Fitness; Panmixia; Organic Selection

CONTINUED ON PAGE TWO

Pages: 1 2

Libertarians and Holocaust Denial

Featured

Posted on by
11
Photo by MARCIN CZERNIAWSKI on Unsplash

After a long covid delay, my paper, “The Pre-History of American Holocaust Denial” is finally published at the journal, American Jewish History. It is part of a special double issue on American antisemitism. The roster of authors is distinguished and I’m honored and delighted to find myself in their company.

Holocaust denial is the idea that the Nazi genocide of European Jews has been greatly exaggerated or, in its most severe form, never actually happened. It is, quite correctly, labeled an extreme form of antisemitism. In the United States, the Institute for Historical Review, founded in the late 1970s. My paper focuses on the decades before that, from the end of World War II to the founding of the IHR.

Here are some of the highlights of my paper:

There is more, all fully documented from archival sources. All of this is not in spite of libertarian ideology but a consequence of it: they were isolationists and were perfectly willing to distort the history of World War II to suit their ends. They made active alliances with overt antisemitic, right-wing activists and, in many cases, shared their antisemitism. It is time the libertarians stopped denying their ugly history regarding Holocaust denial and started taking responsibility for it.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Anglo-Saxon Democracy

Posted on by
5
British Library, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms The Eadwine Psalter, Canterbury, ca 1150 On the left Christ freeing Adam & Eve from hell; center, an angel announcing Christ's resurrection to the myrhhbearing women.
British Library, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
The Eadwine Psalter, Canterbury, ca 1150
On the left Christ freeing Adam & Eve from hell; center, an angel announcing Christ’s resurrection to the myrhhbearing women.

The rump faction of Pro-Trump America Firsters in Congress have announced a bold, new America First plan to rescue us all from strictly imaginary dangers like election fraud, immigration, solar power, public health lockdowns, the Chinese Commies, and, my personal favorite “progressive indoctrination and enrichment of an out-of-control elite oligarchy,” which I’m pretty sure is me and my friends. Except they spelled “progressive” as “progessive” so maybe they are talking about someone else entirely.

The whole agenda is the unappetizing meal left under the heat lamps on the buffet table of the Trump administration. This, however, caught my eye:

The America First Caucus recognizes that our country is more than a mass of consumers or a series of abstract ideas. America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions. History has shown that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country.

That whole “Anglo-Saxon political tradition” has an interesting history. I’ve touched on some of this before when I wrote about W. Cleon Skousen, right wing “scholar” beloved of neo-Confederates, right-wing paramilitary troops, and Charles Koch (who says conservatives don’t have a big tent?). His terrible book, The 5,000-Year Leap is filled with references to the Anglo-Saxon traditions upon which this country was supposedly based. As it happens, there is an interesting history in American political thought being invoked here and, of course, it is a racist one. Let’s dig into the Angles and the Saxons and how Americans have abused their name!

Pages: 1 2

Pedigreed Bunk: The Right Wing Media on the Hsu Controversy

Posted on by
Reply

Cover of Capt. Billy's Whiz Bang Magazine advertising

I promise this will be short, but I need to keep track of the long line of falsehoods and omissions surrounding the Hsu controversy (background here). Apparently the right wing thinks repeating the same story over and over makes it more true. They are wrong, their account is nothing but “pedigreed bunk.”

The latest of Hsu’s defenders is physicist Lawrence Krauss, who, predictably, is wrong about pretty much everything he wrote in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that Hsu reprinted on his own blog.  Krauss’s piece is wrong in entirely predictable ways.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: On the intellectual dishonestly of recent hereditarian papers, Part Two

Posted on by
12

This is the second of three guest posts by Professor Jonathan Kaplan of Oregon State University (see Part One here).  Professor Kaplan is a noted philosopher of biology who has published extensively on biological race and IQ among other topics.

Part II. A paper about policy that doesn’t engage with policy

Cofnas’s recent piece,1 published in journal Philosophical Psychology, is problematic for a different reason than Winegard, Winegard, and Anomaly – it simply fails to do what it claims. The very title of the paper “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry,” points towards its absurdity. As many people immediately pointed out, research on group differences in intelligence has been pursued and published regularly, and there are no limits on “free inquiry” around it.2 At least, no more so than there are limits on “inquiry” surrounding climate change skepticism or claims about the dangers of routine childhood vaccinations. In each case, what there is, instead, is a broad consensus among experts who actually engage with research of the relevant kind that the claims being made are too often wildly ill-supported (often already having been shown to be wrong), and the implications drawn by supporters on the basis of these ill-supported claims are often far too strong. When researchers argue that reasonable people of goodwill should not pursue bad research that purports to support certain kinds of conclusions about group differences in intelligence, or certain kinds of conclusions about anthropogenic climate change, or certain kinds of conclusions about the safety of vaccine, they are not arguing against “free inquiry,” but rather in favor of not pursuing grossly irresponsible research.

Continue reading →

Stephen Hsu and the Ethical Responsibility of Scientists

Posted on by
9

Sign reading:

Hsu gets nowhere in his attempted defense of his actions

Stephen Hsu, my university’s Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation, has posted a response entitled “Twitter Attacks, and a Defense of Scientific Inquiry” to the Graduate Student Union’s long Twitter thread exposing his eugenicist beliefs. He did not respond at all to my previous post about his relationship with Ron Unz and Unz’s promotion of antisemitism. Perhaps that is coming in the future. Let’s examine his attempted defenses of some of his actions Continue reading →