Read on Twitter
I like the start of Phil Magness& #39;s response. He offers some great antiracist moments in classical liberal history. Then he criticizes intersectionality for being "banal." But it seems like you could make the same argument about antiracism generally. THREAD https://www.cato-unbound.org/2020/05/26/phillip-w-magness/does-classical-liberalism-need-intersectionality-theory">https://www.cato-unbound.org/2020/05/2...
Racial/gender equality are morally obvious. Aren& #39;t antiracism and feminism thus also "banal"? This sounds just like "Why do we need feminism? I& #39;m an *egalitarian*." Indeed many classical liberals and libertarians *do* object to the special need for antiracism/ feminism. 2
Opposing slavery & overt legal discrimination is easy for libertarians. It& #39;s harder for libertarians to offer solutions for priv. discrim. But libertarians collectively spend more energy supporting right of private discrimination instead of offering solns for racial inequality. 3
Comment section libertarians seem to believe racial well-being disparities might just be ... okay. The texts hardly discourage this. Hayek & Nozick warned against preconceived "distributional patterns" of wealth, and why wouldn& #39;t that include racial (or gendered) patterns? 4
On Hayek and Nozick on the "mirage of social justice", see my essay here: 5 https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-social-justice">https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/l...
Nozick was explicitly concerned that maintaining a patterned distribution of resources would require constant interferences with individual liberty to restore the pattern. This seems like an overstatement, but it& #39;s what he thought. 6
Since the distribution of wealth is so heavily skewed toward White men, you *could* (if you were nasty) speculate that libertarians had motivated theoretical lacunae in issues of racial justice. 7
You don& #39;t have to do this. You can be inspired by libertarians who got race questions right in the past and ask yourself if and how present day libertarianism fails to live up to that legacy. @jtlevy shows how intersectionality can be put to productive use by libertarians. 8
(I& #39;ve been talking mostly about general antiracism, but the same points can be made about intersectional analysis, only stronger because intersectionality aims at less obvious phenomena.) 9
On falsifiability. Data don& #39;t just fall out of the sky. You have to know what questions to ask. Qualitative inquiry is for figuring out good questions. Intersectionality as a heuristic to probe intersections is an *invitation*--not a closure--to quantitative analysis. /end
