From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [11:59]: What is your perspective from now, particularly looking at it through historical time when we could point to … slavery, things like that, it would seem to me that it’s improved. The other question is: Is capitalism an institution and as an institution (if it is an institution) is it one that could be argued is racist? Or is it otherwise?
Stephen Hicks 13:13
Okay. An interesting network of questions there. You’re asking the long historical question: Have we improved or not? I think, yes, absolutely. We have made huge, huge improvement over previous centuries and so on. If you want to go back to the long form, if you go to the 1600s, or the 1500s. The idea then was that different races and different ethnicities, and so forth, some are obviously better. And that was a universal belief. It’s not until the 1600s, but then especially getting into the 1700s that we even find a few individuals challenging the kinds of racial and ethnic prejudices that had been baked into the human condition for millennia. And then in historical time, we’ve made astonishing project progress in eliminating large amounts of individual racism. I think all of the surveys that I have seen, show that, you know, the vast majority of Americans now and Canadians now are not racist at all. You have to look really closely and start to get into kind of micro-racist types of language—to say: if you look at this particular formulation of this practice by this person that maybe you can see it as having some hint of racism. The overt racism, the unquestioning assumption and unquestioned racism that was pretty much universal to the human conditions is now much, much less than in any historical time. It’s astonishing how quickly that has happened.
The vast majority of legal racisms have been eliminated. Obviously, the biggest of those was the great movement against slavery, including those that incorporated racisms in the great battle against that, which started in the late 1700s. And accelerated over the course of the 1800s. That’s a great human achievement. It’s amazing.
And then the ongoing segregation, Jim Crow laws and so forth—and the battles against those in the 20th century. Those have been largely successful. So I think I’m optimistic about the future trend line. And as much as I disagree with many of the contemporary analyses of racism, and where it comes from and what the solutions to racism are, I think that trend line will continue.
You mentioned capitalism, specifically as an institution. I think it is fair to say it’s an institution. It’s a set of economic and legal principles and policies that are that are put in place. And generically that’s a kind of institution. Capitalism has been one of the great anti-racist forces in history, partly because capitalism comes out of the same set of principles that say people should be free to pursue their own lives, to pursue their own dreams, as individuals, and that very general set of principles applies to people of all races, all sexes, all ethnicities, all religions, and so forth.
So as a matter of philosophical principle, capitalist freedom and capitalists’ respect for the individual and the individual’s achievements has been applied to racial issues, and quite successfully. But then also, capitalism builds into it a certain kind of ethos that we should treat people as productive individuals, and that we should be willing to deal with them based on their productive performance: Can they get the job done or not? And as that ethos becomes more widespread in capitalist societies, obviously, it puts any sort of racism on the defensive. That’s because if I can hire someone who is of a different race—but is clearly going to be a better worker than someone of my own race—the profit motive is going to make me want to hire that person of a different race. And even if I have some racist attitudes within me, the profit motive is going to help me over overcome that.
This is also borne out by the historical record. It has been the places around the world, if you look at the historic free ports—Hong Kong, Tangier, Beirut before its disasters, Amsterdam, London, New York—all places where there been free trade and lots and lots of capitalists and capitalism going on—those are the places where you find the most racial mixing and people willing to get along with each other, precisely because they’re there to do business. The desire to do business leads people to set aside any prejudices they have. So capitalism has been a great anti-racist force.
The full interview is here:
Related: Robert Nozick’s “The Tale of the Slave,” in the Philosophers Explained series.