TGIF:
What an Honest Conversation about Race Would Look Like
by Sheldon Richman
July 19, 2013
Ever since George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of
Trayvon Martin hit the national headlines last
year, calls for an “honest conversation about
race” have been heard throughout America. (Up
until then, apparently, we’ve had only
conversations about having a conversation about
race.) However, one need not believe that the
Zimmerman shooting and verdict were about race --
I watched the trial and I don’t -- to think that
an honest conversation about race is indeed long overdue.
First on the agenda should be the many ways that
government policies -- either by intent or by
palpable effect -- embody racism. Let’s call them
vehicles for official racism. I have in mind
things like the war on certain drug
manufacturers, merchants, and consumers; the
crusade against “illegal” guns; the minimum wage
and related laws; and the government’s schools.
All of these by far take their greatest toll on people of color.
Private racism, whether violent or nonviolent, is
evil and abhorrent; it is also unlibertarian --
yes, even nonviolent racism is unlibertarian, as
I point out in “Libertarianism = Anti-Racism.” There I wrote,
What could be a libertarian reason to oppose
nonviolent racism? Charles Johnson spelled it out
in The Freeman. Libertarianism is a commitment to
the nonaggression principle. That principle rests
on some justification. Thus it is conceivable
that a principle of nonviolent action, such as
racism, though not involving the initiation of
force and contradicting libertarianism per se,
could nevertheless contradict the justification for one’s libertarianism.
For example, a libertarian who holds his or her
philosophy out of a conviction that all men and
women are (or should be) equal in authority and
thus none may subordinate another against his or
her will (the most common justification) --- that
libertarian would naturally object to even
nonviolent forms of subordination. Racism is just
such a form (though not the only one), since
existentially it entails at least an obligatory
humiliating deference by members of one racial
group to members of the dominant racial
group. (The obligatory deference need not always
be enforced by physical coercion.)
Seeing fellow human beings locked into a servile
role -- even if that role is not explicitly
maintained by force -- properly, reflexively
summons in libertarians an urge to object. (I’m
reminded of what H. L. Mencken said when asked
what he thought of slavery: “I don’t like slavery
because I don’t like slaves.”)
Another, related, libertarian reason to oppose
nonviolent racism is that it all too easily
metamorphoses from subtle intimidation into
outright violence. Even in a culture where racial
“places” have long been established by custom and
require no coercive enforcement, members of a
rising generation will sooner or later defiantly
reject their assigned place and demand equality
of authority. What happens then? It takes little
imagination to envision members of the dominant
race even if they have professed a “thin”
libertarianism to that point -- turning to
physical force to protect their “way of life.”
It should go without saying that a libertarian
protest of nonviolent racist conduct must not itself be violent.
But as bad as private racism is, official racism
is worse, since it is committed under color of
law and leaves its victims all the more vulnerable.
No one with open eyes can possibly believe that a
black or Hispanic male walking down the street at
night -- or even during the day -- faces the same
hazards presented by the police that a white
person does. The criminal justice [!] system --
from the police to the courts to the prison
complex -- is far more entangled in the lives of
men of color than of white men. Blacks and
Hispanics are stopped disproportionately under
New York City’s abominable stop-and-frisk policy.
(See David D’Amato’s article in the forthcoming
August issue of <http://fff.org/subscribe/>Future
of <http://fff.org/subscribe/>Freedom.) What are
the cops looking for? Drugs and guns. Police can
stop virtually anyone because the official
standard for suspicion is low and subjective --
and that gives racist cops plenty of scope to
harass (and worse) people they dislike. It’s a vehicle for official racism.
The drug laws were originally inspired by racial
and ethnic animus against blacks, Mexicans, and
Chinese. (See Thomas Szasz’s books Ceremonial
Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs,
Addicts, and Pushers and Our Right to Drugs: The
Case for a Free Market.) Since drug prohibition
is a crime by the standard of natural law and
justice, and since it was motivated by racism and
is racist in effect, those who passed and those
who now enforce those laws are arguably guilty of hate crimes.
Prohibition -- and the violent black markets and
gang culture it spawns -- makes the inner cities
barely livable, while chasing legal businesses
and jobs away. (Other government regulations
contribute to this devastating result.) The cost
to young people in terms of their futures is incalculable.
What about the war against “illegal” guns? It’s
much the same story. As gun historian Clayton E. Cramer writes,
The historical record provides compelling
evidence that racism underlies gun control laws
-- and not in any subtle way. Throughout much of
American history, gun control was openly stated
as a method for keeping blacks and Hispanics “in
their place,” and to quiet the racial fears of whites.…
It is not surprising that the first North
American English colonies, then the states of the
new republic, remained in dread fear of armed
blacks, for slave revolts against slave owners
often degenerated into less selective forms of
racial warfare. The perception that free blacks
were sympathetic to the plight of their enslaved
brothers, and the dangerous example that “a Negro
could be free” also caused the slave states to
pass laws designed to disarm all blacks, both
slave and free. Unlike the gun control laws
passed after the Civil War, these antebellum statutes were for blacks alone.
While the drug and gun laws today may not be
racial in intent (though they may be), they are
such in consequence. Again, they are vehicles for
official racism. Whose neighborhood has more to
fear from a local militarized police SWAT raid?
The government’s schools for decades consigned
black children to ramshackle custodial
institutions misleadingly called “schools,”
where the kids’ future choices were
systematically narrowed to a demeaning few. With
white-controlled elitist school boards depriving
minority communities of resources (through
taxation), it took heroic family and neighborhood
action to help kids to overcome these official
barriers. Things are little different today. Even
though a great deal more tax money is spent on
inner-city schools now than previously, the results are not much better.
These handicaps on minority children are
reinforced by the minimum wage and related laws,
such as the Davis-Bacon Act. By pricing
low-skilled, poorly educated workers out of the
market, these laws make getting a first job
especially hard if not impossible. For many
unfortunate victims of the law, their lives are
stifled in ways that cannot be reversed without herculean effort.
Tragic coincidence? No. The laws were racially
motivated -- intended as barriers against black
workers aspiring to compete with exclusionist
white unions. (See “Eugenics: Progressivism’s
Ultimate Social Engineering” by Art Carden and Steven Horwitz.)
And to this list of offensive interventions let
us add zoning laws, occupational licensing, and
restrictions on street vendors and taxi drivers,
all of which impose their heaviest burdens on
people of color, who are thwarted at every turn,
as my account here indicates. Most tragically,
all these government inventions, which serve to
create dysfunctional communities, feed the
private racists’ poisonous narrative.
This hardly exhausts the discussion of official
racism. So, yes, let’s have that honest
conversation about race. And let’s begin with the
biggest enabler of racism of all: the state.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-conversation-about-race/
--
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PoliticalForum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
