Third Way: Libertarian Perspectives On Colorblindness

Thomas Sowell and Walter E. williams

Libertarians’ focus on free markets and operation by incentive leans them against external forces influencing the flow of the economy. Since they are hardly likely to support affirmative programs aimed toward addressing inequalities, race-conscious or not, we will explore the arguments for and against the Libertarian value of a purely meritocratic society.

Problems of inequality can be mitigated, the Libertarian would argue, once businesses are allowed freedom to act on their incentives which, in turn, would encourage them not to act in a discriminatory manner lest doing so would come back to hurt the business. As Libertarian economist Thomas Sowell is often quoted as saying, “capitalism knows only one color: that color is green.”

As for the race-conscious initiative of affirmative action, Sowell, applying a meritocratic perspective, argues that there is the risk of “mismatching,” which means that otherwise qualified Black students will end up artificially being underqualified based on the preferential admissions they were given to higher, more select universities. Moreover, when there is no affirmative action, he asserts, Black students have higher graduation rates since they are well-matched in the colleges to where they are admitted.

But Sowell seems to imply that educational institutions are not for…educating. Is Sowell presuming that higher education is incapable of teaching their students? Is the admissions process not, by design, meant to explore applicants’ potential, not merely their GPA in a vacuum? Do universities not bear any responsibility for student success rates?

Even the right-leaning Manhattan Institute affirms that the mismatch question is more complicated, though they proceed to argue that affirmative action is, depending on the unique situation of a given student, capable both of helping and hurting minority students.

There is also the argument that affirmative action discriminates against those who have merit, who achieve good grades. Law professor David Bernstein notes that in a purely meritocratic system, the overwhelming majority of the student body at Stanford University would be Asian American or Jewish. Therefore, policies that interfere with meritocracy can have discriminatory effects.

Beyond affirmative action economist Walter E. Williams argues, in what could be described as a race-conscious analysis, that the “welfare state” hurts the mobility of Black Americans and that “minimum wage discriminates against the employment of low-skilled people.” He blames poverty on people having a lack of skills. Welfare, he maintains, incentivizes irresponsible behavior such as not looking for a job and having children before marriage – consequences that can disproportionately affect Black Americans.

Those opposed to colorblindness argue that meritocracy does indeed perpetuate inequality. Some go as far as to say that capitalism itself is essentially white supremacist. Historian Walter Johnson argued that “there was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.”

Johnson’s concept, “racial capitalism,” asserts that racism has been used by white capitalists to foment division between working-class white people and Black people, and then “extract value from everyone else.”

History professor Joan Caden states that meritocracy can perpetuate racial inequality. “Unbiased meritocracy” is a deceptive term, she maintains. She presents the example of the LSAT — the admissions test for prospective law school applicants — as demonstrating why some things can be unconsciously biased even if in theory supposed to be meritocratic.

In the now-defunct “cultural literacy” section which she took, Caden explains that because of her upbringing as “a middle-class kid with college educated parents, who grew up in New York less than a half-hour walk from the Museum of Modern Art, I easily answered a question about Gaugin.” Meanwhile, these kinds of questions disproportionately hurt Black, poor, and rural test-takers.

Importantly, Caden notes, and as seen in the example of the LSAT, the group in power gets to determine what “merit” looks like — a determination that goes to the benefit of “current elites.”

Philosopher Michael Sandel described the ideal of meritocracy as “flawed,” and “corrosive of the common good,” serving to encourage successful people to pat themselves on the back and believe they deserve all the benefits they reap. “They also believe, implicitly at least, that those who struggle must deserve their fate as well.”

“It leads us to forget the luck and good fortune that helped us on our way,” he continued. “It leads us to forget any sense of indebtedness to those who make our achievements possible, from parents and teachers to community to country.”

Furthermore, it turns out that “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps,” a common pro-meritocratic phrase, was originally intended to be satirical, to demonstrate the exact opposite point — that such a worldview is unrealistic.

“I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “But it's a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And many Negroes, by the thousands and millions, have been left bootless as a result of all these years of oppression and as a result of a society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless and degrading.”

Even if meritocracy is non-racist in theory, we ought to acknowledge the real effects of such a system, which is indeed a concern of morality. We need to be aware of the racist implications of such a system, even if doing so requires being class-conscious and race-conscious, in order to navigate the variables that drive the inequalities of today and understand the best path forward.