The leaders of Negro thought in America have done the members of their race one substantial service and one much greater disservice. The service was to arouse discontent with the pace at which the social, political, and economic status of the Negro was rising. That the Negro has been becoming wealthier, better educated, more fully enfranchised, and less improperly treated by his white brethren is not seriously arguable. But the distance still to be covered is immense, and no man may say that the pace of 1940 or 1950 is the maximum that should be aimed at in raising the Negro's status.
Nor is the raising of discontent an easy or an uncourageous act. Long slumbering inequities become almost foreordained in their persistence, and a conscious and sustained and even dramatic challenge to the inequities is required. Nor will the leaders of the challenge, who disturb the comfortable flow of customary events, be treated with civility or respect—they are indeed deliberate trouble-makers.
For trouble is apparently the threshold of progress. A society does not respond quickly, or sometimes even at all, to calm rational arguments or to powerful ethical principles. The drama of personal injustice, the presence of devils (or at least of villains or prejudiced holders of privilege), full membership in the righteous, marching columns— these seem to be essential in any basic reform in the United States today (and perhaps in all countries always). So indignation must be produced, and remedies provided in catechism form.
Wrong Target
The great disservice of the leaders of Negro opinion was to direct the discontent at the white population. It was proper to demand political rights that only a majority could confer. It was proper to ask the white population to assist in the rise of the Negro—a small enough restitution for the unreversible [sic] mistakes of the past. Rut [sic] it was a terrible disservice to identify the white man as the main obstacle to the rise of the negro.
It was a disservice because it must lead to hatred, and hatred to violence, and violence to the retardation of the mounting compassion and assistance of the white mean. [sic] Could the stream of demonstrations, growing in size and in insolence, approved or at least tolerated by the political, intellectual, and religious leaders of the nation, have any other message for a semi-literate Negro teenager in a slum, than that evil prejudice of the white man was the fundamental cause of his low estate? Was he to be a metaphysician, distinguishing carefully the demonstration of the principle of the dignity of all men from the proposition that every inadequacy of his life was due to white opposition?
But the disservice was terrible for a more dreadful reason: it was false as a guide to improvement. The past is not for us to relive, and no amount of restitution for past injustice by the white man could solve the basic problem of the Negro in America. That problem is that on average he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end. The task of our time has been to make the Negro discontented with himself, not with the white man.
Educational Needs
Consider education. It would be easy to vote a Ph.D. for every young Negro in America—such a handsome restitution for past denial of educational rights! Good educational facilities, better facilities than whites have, are indeed a moral responsibility of the community to the Negro. The real task, however, is not to provide good schools and good teachers, but to create an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the Negro youth. Schools beyond any need can be built in a few years: the love of knowledge and the willingness to work hard and achieve it are the product of cultural evolution. The Negro leaders should be helping the emergence of this cultural tradition, when instead they are diverting Negro energies to better school buildings.
Inferior Workers
Consider employment. The Negro boy is excluded from many occupations by the varied barriers the prejudice can raise, and these must and will be struck down. But he is excluded from more occupations by his own inferiority as a orker, again on average. Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers' competition. What leader of Negro thought is fostering the ancient virtues of diligence and honesty and loyalty? It is so much easier to seek quotas for Negroes,
Consider the Negro as a neighbor. He is frequently repelled and avoided by the white man, but is it only color prejudice? On the contrary, it is because the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax, group, and brings with its presence a rapid rise in crime and vandalism. No statutes, no sermons, no demonstrations, will obtain for the Negro the liking and respect that sober virtues commend. And the leaders of Negro thought: they blame the crime and immorality upon the slums and the low income— as if individual responsibility could be bought with a thousand dolllars a year.
It is not easy or popular to place the Negro's discontent upon himself. People will insist upon speaking of the previous or present faults of the white community, which numerous and deplorable—and now unimportant to the Negro problem. People will denounce any talk of the Negro's cultural and economic inferiority as racism, thinking no doubt that to ignore the heritage of past ignorance and vice and folly of the white man and the black man will eliminate the heritage.
One would think that the lesson of the Jews in America would have been taken somewhat more to heart. The Jewish immigrants were on average poor. with meagre education. and confronted by a vast panoply of prejudice. They brought with them precisely the virtues that should be instilled in the Negro: a veneration and irrepressible desire for learning; frugality; and respect for the civilization of the western world. They have prospered amazingly, not only economically but educationally and socially and culturally, and in the process have enriched and adorned our society., They are in the rapid process of losing their identity—at the present pace in a few generations wee shall all have a little, but only a little Jewish blood.
The leaders of Negro opinion are benevolent men, caught in the belief that the only arm of social improvement is the state. The Africans are poor and ignorant? Out with colonialism! The American Negro ids a lesser citizen? To the barricades! No—to the home and church and school.--G.J. Stigler (1965)* "The Problem of the Negro" New Guard, [HT Calvin Ter Beek via Brad deLong]
I am unsure when I first decided to try to face squarely the racist and eugenic elements in the authors I study. I do know that in the late 1990s, it was David M. Levy and Sandra Peart that repeatedly alerted me (and others) to the significance of these themes for the (joint and separate) history of economics and history of philosophy and that how this history is handled also matters to the future of these disciplines (and their interactions). So, alerted I increasingly started to notice eugenic and racialized themes in places I least expected when I was still a PhD student (e.g., Berkeley's Querist; young Neurath; Voltaire; Hume and Montesquieu; etc.) Over the years I have tried to alert my readers to these sordid facts and their conceptual and philosophical significance.
Prompted by a chance encounter with Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, I have also come to see that universities today struggle to own up to their eugenic past and ongoing eugenic commitments (recall here; here; here; here). I don't think that struggle is a contingent matter. By this I do not mean that universities today are primarily still interested in advancing racialized or cultural hierarchy -- although undoubtedly some faculty don't see why this would be problematic --, but rather that in the very ideas of bildung and emancipation, improvement of humans is baked in. This shows up in all kinds of ways in the efforts of bio-medicine-technology at human enhancement. I don't need to remind my audience how frequent universities tie themselves in knots over their inability to convey a consistent approach to academic freedom and, say, minimum respect for all.
Even so, I was really shocked by Stigler's essay. (Stigler won a Nobel in economics in 1982.) I have frequently blogged and published in scholarly journals about Stigler and been reading him on and off for about twenty five years now. This is not a coincidence. Levy was one of George Stigler's few PhD students in the history of economics. And his son, Stephen Stigler (an eminent historian of statistics) was on faculty at Chicago. I remember my nervousness and pride when I took on the father's interpretation of Adam Smith in front of the very kind son (who since has given me permission to work with his father's archives and even checked his library on my behalf once).
As an aside, I was in the audience, when Stephen Stigler presented a version of his interpretation of the debate between Pigou and Pearson to Chicago's philosophy department. The debate is of interest because of the way they handled what came known as the amalgamation or Simpson's paradox. But the background is the scientific status of eugenic ideas. Only later did I realize how much of modern statistics was developed to enhance or make rigorous eugenic reasoning. For a while I was very fond of Pigou until I realized how immersed in eugenics he really was, too.
Okay, let's turn to Stigler troubling piece. First, he starts by acknowledging that "calm rational arguments" and the enunciation of "powerful ethical principles" have little impact on public opinion and tend to be impotent in generating welcome, even necessary reform. Echoing Machiavelli, he recognizes
that dramatic challenge and turbulence may be required to prompt social reform. And Stigler here anticipates his later, more famous claim (that helped him win the Nobel) that to influence policy one must understand (recall) “the political forces which confine and direct policy.” Stigler clearly believes, with Madison, that politics is the realm of opinion. This is also evident in (the title of) his essays, in which he reflects on the relationship between economics and politics, The Economist as Preacher, and Other Essays.
But it does not follow that there is no method in the political madness. In fact, in one of his most famous papers, he explicitly rejects the then popular idea "that the political process defies rational explanation: "politics" is an imponderable, a constantly and unpredictably shifting mixture of forces of the most diverse nature, comprehending acts of great moral virtue (the emancipation of slaves) and of the most vulgar venality..."' (Note the example.)
Unlike other critics of the civil rights movement, Stigler is, thus, not tempted by tone-policing. Anticipating contemporary philosophers (who (recall) draw on Lorde; and here; here), he thinks indignation in public life may not just be fully justified, but also instrumentally necessary to produce reform. And, in fact, his idea of politics is not idealized at all. He fully expects that the "courageous" leaders of the civil rights movement will not be treated with "civility or respect." Given that he recognizes this, his use of "insolence" is odd to say the least.
But despite this stance, Stigler's attitude toward civil rights leader is not just unsympathetic, it's contemptuous (note the repeated "disservice"). This is all the more remarkable because Stigler does not deny that it is true that "the white man" is an "obstacle to the rise of the negro." Rather, he demands from the subordinated that they do not offend the sensitivities of the majority because it "must lead to hatred, and hatred to violence, and violence to the retardation of the mounting compassion and assistance." And the contempt here is not just for the civil rights leaders and their followers, but also for the non elite white majority. For it is assumed that their response to the truth must be hatred and violence. It does not occur to Stigler to explore that hatred and violence may be engineered by local white elites who fear that their power will be undermined. (This would fit his rent-seeking view of politics.)
At this point, I need to note something. Stigler's economics was, despite the clear political preference for free markets, in this period data-driven. His studies of monopoly and even the sociology of knowledge are data rich. His style of economics, especially in the 1940s-1960s, was neither like the highly mathematical work that was dominating general equilibrium modeling nor like the back of the envelope calculations of consumer surplus pioneered by his Chicago colleague Harberger. It was also little like the work he later did with Becker. So with that in mind, we can see how things go really off-rails, when Stigler notes that "no amount of restitution for past injustice by the white man could solve the basic problem of the Negro in America. That problem is that on average he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end."
First, as one of the pre-eminent historians of economics of his generation, Stigler was familiar with both Adam Smith's denunciations of slavery, and the 19th century debates in political economy over how to use compensation principles to rectify injustices.** So, it is astonishing that he takes for granted that restitution would not contribute greatly (let alone) solve the basic problem.
Second, and undeniably racist, he makes gross generalizations without any evidence about the psychological disposition of a whole population ("on average). Since Adam Smith is Stigler's hero, it is worth noting that for Smith it is axiomatic that there is "uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived." And as I have noted elsewhere this is part of Smith's anti-hierarchical conception of human nature.
Third, since in the very period African-Americans were subject to violence while trying to access education, it is appalling to read Stigler assert that "The real task, however, is not to provide good schools and good teachers, but to create an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the Negro youth." And no less appalling are the fact free claims that "the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax, group." And so on. Whatever merit, if any, Stigler's underlying economic criticism of the solutions pursued by the leaders of the civil rights movement might have had, it is completely overshadowed by his willingness to engage in racialized stereotyping and victim blaming.+
Let me close. I was sincerely shocked when I read Stigler's essay. I want to explain why. This shock is, in part, because I intend to understand Chicago economics as opposed to the state-centric eugenics tendency they loath in Keynes (and Pigou). And, in part, because I understand them as heirs to the cosmopolitan and anti-racist tendencies evident in the founders of neoliberalism--many of them outspokenly antiracist (even if their modern critics tend to overlook this or very grudgingly acknowledge this).
I am by no means an uncritical admire of Stigler in my own work. Despite admiring some of his sociology of knowledge, I have long argued he is partially response for the abuse of Kuhnian ideas as a means to silence alternative viewpoints in science. But because of his fondness of pithy phrases and institutional centrality, I have often used his writings (in this blog and my scholarship) to illustrate or illuminate debates within economics or in the philosophy of economics. But this does not get to heart of the matter.
Stigler was (recall) centrally involved in articulating, the Kalven report, one of the most thoughtful reports on the mission of higher education and the role of academic freedom in it. (I have critically discussed this report in a number of blog posts.) This is somebody that clearly took his task as an educator seriously, and he wrote non trivially on the economics of education. Yet, when given the opportunity to educate the "Young Americans for Freedom" (The New Guard was its house organ, and the organization was influenced by of William F. Buckley, Jr.), he pandered not their best instincts, but to their worst prejudices.
*The document that DeLong uses has 1962. But most other sources I have found suggest 1965 (see especially this one). I have not found the publication so I have been unable to double check the text quoted above! (The journal's archive is incomplete.) UPDATE: it can be found here.
**Of course, Britain chose to compensate slave-owners and not the slaves!
+There is, of course, a whole essay to be written on his eugenic suggestion to African-Americans to be like Jews and intermarry.
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