Do capitalism and racism go hand in hand?
I hear it all the time.
“Racism is intertwined with capitalism,” says renowned Marxist Angela Davis. “It is a mistake to assume that we can fight racism by leaving capitalism in place.”
“Anti-racist” activist Ibram X. Kendi says: “To be truly anti-racist, one must also be truly anti-capitalist. »
It’s just stupid.
In my new video, Swedish historian Johan Norberg explains how free markets to discourage racism.
Capitalists make profit by serving their customers. The more their customers like them, the more money they can make. It hurts the bottom line to exclude groups.
“Look at the whole world,” says Norberg: “the least racist and least racist societies are the most capitalist countries. »
Norberg’s new book, “The Capitalist Manifesto,” highlights a Journal of Institutional Economics study that found a correlation between economic freedom and “tolerance toward ethnic groups.”
“Capitalism,” he says, “is the first economic system in which you only become rich by opening opportunities to others. It pays to be colorblind. It pays to be open to willing customers and workers who could enrich your business, regardless of religion or race. …This does not mean that everyone will be colorblind. There will always be idiots. But in capitalism, being stupid is expensive.”
It reminds us that in the Jim Crow South, companies They fought racism because the rules denied them customers.
“It’s often forgotten that bus, railroad and streetcar owners in the American South didn’t really do systematic segregation until the late 19th century,” Norberg says. “It probably wasn’t because they were less racist than others in the South, but they were capitalists. They wanted money, they wanted customers, and they didn’t want to engage in some kind of expensive, brutal police operation of splitting up buses.
Even when segregation was mandatory, some streetcar companies refused to comply. For several years after the passage of Jim Crow laws, black customers sat wherever they wanted.
Norberg adds: “Public transportation owners fought these discriminatory laws because they imposed a terrible cost. … They tried to get around them secretly and fight them in court. They were often fined. Some were threatened with imprisonment.
The Mobile, Alabama streetcar company only obeyed Jim Crow laws after its drivers began being arrested and fined.
These business owners may have been racists – I can’t know – but they were fighting against segregation.
“We adopted Jim Crow laws,” Norberg explains, “because free markets were unwilling to discriminate.”
Capitalists cared about green, not black or white.
Free markets around the world coordinate and cooperate. Many don’t know each other’s existence and if they met, they might not get along. But they work together in pursuit of profit.
It is strange that socialists today call capitalism racist, when the opposite is more often true.
The Soviet Union invited African students to study science in big cities. But “Soviet citizens often treated the Africans among them with disdain and hostility,” describes New Lines magazine. Russian children’s books depict black people in animalistic ways. Insults were common.
Today, China and Cuba claim to have “zero tolerance” for racism, but during the Covid pandemic, authorities have subjected black people to force testing and ordered strict isolation. Landlords evicted African tenants. Businesses often refused to serve them.
In Cuba, Castro insisted he would eliminate racism. But “racism persists,” reports France 24, saying it is “prohibited by law,” but “living in the streets… In local jargon, a white woman with a black boyfriend… “holds back the race.” institute programs to “fight racism.”
It’s capitalism that makes people less racist.
Every Tuesday on JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed the Hucksters, Cheaters, and Swindlers and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”
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