, 10 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
THREAD-Milton Friedman, the Nobel-winning economist from the University of Chicago who was hugely influential in right-wing U.S. economic policy, was super duper racist altrightorigins.com/2017/08/09/whi…
"White people have the luxury of not thinking about race if they don’t want to. Marginalized people, on the other hand, are forced to think about their own oppression all the time if they want to get by in the world."
This "is what philosopher Charles Mills calls 'white ignorance.' In scholarship, one way white ignorance is displayed is by white scholars who ignore the scholarship of people of color. The poster child for white ignorance may well be Milton Friedman."
"Friedman argued the only thing we had to do to combat racial discrimination was……nothing. That’s right, if we just got rid of governmental interference with the marketplace, this whole 'race discrimination' hoo-hah would fade away."
"Here is Friedman on the immediate post-Civil War United States, the period of Reconstruction, when the white south was trying to keep African-Americans enslaved in all but name:"
"Oh, yes, that 'basic belief in private property.' Friedman does not mention that same basic belief in private property was the white south’s chief argument justifying slavery as in the Dred Scott decision."
"Friedman’s 1962 book is an example of selective memory, evidence-free claims about the past (literally 'making it up'), and letting his libertarian ideology decide the empirical question about how the world works.
"In 1962, he accomplished this by ignoring the scholarship of people of color like Cox and Du Bois. Forty years later, when he wrote that he was 'enormously gratified by how well the book has withstood time and how pertinent it remains to today’s problems'...
"... the only explanation for his crowing (rather than an abject apology) was a studied, willful ignorance of the historical record."
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