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I’ve been ruminating over the JPE situation since yesterday, and wanted to share my current thoughts in an effort to process them and find a constructive way forward. (thread)
As many have already pointed out, structural forces do a lot of work to exclude underrepresented minorities from our profession, including our fixation with the Top 5, access to clubs like NBER, and the way our whole profession engages with race in our research and classrooms.
Ousting Uhlig as lead editor would have been a largely symbolic victory. He would have likely been replaced by someone only marginally less bad than him. His ousting wouldn’t have addressed structural inequities or made our profession much more vibrant, diverse, or inclusive.
But his dismissal was low-hanging fruit. The fact that our profession is apparently not capable of taking even symbolic steps to address overt and well-documented incidents of racism does not bode well for us.
How can I, in good conscience, recommend to my Black students that they join a profession whose dominant conception of free intellectual inquiry is that one should be able to say the most inane, hurtful, racist shit imaginable, and that such behavior merits no consequences?
There are so many individuals and organizations doing the essential work of making this profession an intellectual home for Black economists, including the @SadieCollective, @AEAMP1, and @AEACSMGEP – in saying this, I don’t mean to discount their invaluable efforts.
And, of course, if any student came to me with a desire to pursue economics, I would offer every resource at my disposal to help them thrive. I’m not here to make that decision for them.
But it does feel sometimes like recruiting people from underrepresented groups into this profession means throwing them to the wolves. It feels like that today. (end)
