Whitewashing Capitalism: Mainstream Economics’ Resounding Silence on Race and Racism

Abstract

This paper is about the gaping silence in mainstream economics regarding the relationship among capitalism, race, racism, and enduring racial inequality in the USA. Racial inequality is a glaring and enduring fact about the US economy. And yet mainstream economics has little to say about race or racism. Gregory Mankiw’s bestselling textbook devotes seven pages to “discrimination.” There is no discussion of racism per se. Mainstream economists and textbooks typically conflate racism and “discrimination,” and reassure the reader that “markets contain a natural remedy for employer discrimination” (Mankiw, 2008: 409). A student is likely to leave ECON 101 (or an economics major) with a sense that “economic science” has “shown” that discrimination is not that big a deal, and that the history of racist plunder and exploitation in the USA (of which there likely has been no discussion) is not relevant to “economics.” I argue here that the mainstream narrative (its assumptions, its logic, its conclusions, and its rhetorical choices and emphases) systematically obscures, dismisses, and ignores essential ways that racial inequality has been (re)produced by US capitalism. Especially striking is the resounding silence about the legacy of racist economic practices—in particular, the ways in which the enormous black/white wealth gap (and its effects) in the USA are linked to centuries of racist exclusion, violence, and plunder. The mainstream narrative thus whitewashes capitalism and exonerates “the market system.” The final section argues for a radical multidisciplinary economics. JEL classification: J15, D63.