Thread: It blows my mind that Gary Becker’s Nobel-prize winning accomplishments include arguing that racial discrimination could be effectively reduced by market competition. In 1957. Three years after Brown v. Board. The year of little rock.

In the midst of violent opposition to integration. In a region of the country that excluded black people in every facet of society. Denied their humanity. No one with a brain could look at the South and honestly believe that a lack of competition was the problem.

Of course, the political context was that cowardly Northern liberals finally seemed poised to commit to federal action to combat Jim Crow. There could not possibly be any ambiguity about the ideological purpose that the work served. It suggested that that effort was not necessary

Meanwhile in the 1950s and 60s Friedman was arguing in favor of school choice. Right at the same time as segregationists were arguing for school choice and privatization to get around mandated integration in the wake of Brown v. Board. But surely the timing is coincidence, right?

At best, the two men were woefully ignorant about the ideological purpose they served here. But I think that’s generous. They were smart enough to realize it. It was propaganda for White Supremacy.

And yet, these ideas have been hugely influential in how economists approach issues of race. Why did it take this piece of White Supremacist apologia to get economists to care about discrimination? It was the biggest issue of the day! There was no shortage of perspectives.

Even to this day one of our primary models of discrimination is “statistical” discrimination. Which boils down to “maybe people aren’t racist it’s just black people are worse on average and we can’t tell apart the good ones”

It is not racists that are the problem. Not political and economic exclusion of black people at every turn. Not structural racism. It’s just a product of low information. Impersonal, accidental market forces. Why is this the conception of racism that is appealing to us?

This is, of course, ahistorical nonsense. White Supremacy was an intentionally structured economic and political system. And the death of legally permitted segregation did not kill Jim Crow. Segregation and exclusion are still pervasive in the system.

The form of exclusion has changed. School Choice and residential segregation achieve de facto segregation of schools and nbhds. The drug war has been used as a tool for maintaining economic and political control. The Right opposes investment in meaningful poverty reduction.

This is no accident. It is a function of the most persistent force in American economic and political life: White Supremacy. It is time that our theory matched the reality of our world. Economists either get behind justice or we continue to protect the status quo.