The American Spectator

The Nation's Pulse

(Page 2 of 2)

br> To black Americans living in a time of institutionalized, even legally sanctioned racism, the market wasn't their oppressor. The market was their only shelter from the storm -- the only place where white Americans who would never have blacks to dinner or allow them to join their country clubs would, albeit incompletely, put their prejudices aside and afford blacks a place at the table.

Of course, blacks were treated unfairly in the pre-civil rights era market, because capitalism does not prohibit racism. But the capitalism of that day was the one true ameliorator of the barriers of race; the one place where in the hard unemotional currency of economic exchange, the worth of ethnically disfavored people was given value. Thus, in our society, and indeed in any society with a race problem (that is to say, any political compact whose members consist of more than one race), capitalism and markets are not the problem. They are part of the solution. Markets create reasons for people to focus their hearts and minds beyond their own cultures and ethnicities. They meld. They do not divide.

As proof of this assertion consider a question with a self-evident answer. Would African-Americans be more broadly assimilated into mainstream American life if the political movement to end discrimination against them hadn't been dominated by people who held such enmity for the market, and who instilled that same enmity in a broad cross-section of the beneficiaries of their efforts? But then, that isn't the fault of the left, is it? That's the fault of the right.

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