Is there a centrist approach to racial issues in these polarized times, one that deals honestly with American history while upholding the best of the country’s founding values? Two recent books take up the question, one looking primarily to the past while the other makes plans for the future.

In Black Liberation through the Marketplace, Rachel S. Ferguson and Marcus M. Witcher have messages for both the Right and the Left. Viewing black American history through the lens of classical liberalism — a political tradition embracing free markets, free speech, and the rule of law — they urge conservatives to confront the ways in which African Americans have been denied the liberties and rights that make America great, and how these violations slowed black flourishing. They also urge the anti-capitalist Left, however, to reckon with the role those very same rights and freedoms have played in black liberation and progress, not to mention the way that many important black leaders have embraced these tenets of liberalism. Ferguson and Witcher can sometimes run a little too far with libertarian dogma, but their careful parsing of history makes their book easily worth reading.

Given their approach, an inevitable theme is the tension between the principles America has professed and the reality that black Americans have experienced. This starts, of course, with slavery, which denied the right of individuals to control their own lives and profit from their own labor. Soon after slavery came Jim Crow segregation, laws that restricted freemen’s ability to work and own property as they saw fit, and “convict lease” programs, in which blacks were arrested (often on minor or trumped-up charges) and forced to work.

Still later came a “progressive” movement enamored with eugenics, unions and labor laws that worked to the disadvantage of black employment, a New Deal that excluded blacks in some ways, efforts to segregate neighborhoods that spanned every level of government, highway projects routed through the black neighborhoods of America’s cities, and far more. When blacks did succeed, white envy could tear them back down, as evidenced in the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, in which white rioters killed an unknown number of people and destroyed an affluent area known as “black Wall Street.”

As Ferguson and Witcher drive home the extent to which blacks were denied full participation in America’s institutions, they force readers to grapple with the long-term effects of such abuses. But if some conservatives could be more forthright about how blacks were kept from opportunity, many on the left could recognize that the principles of classical liberalism are sound — and that black advancement has often come through them.

Many slave-owning societies didn’t profess core principles that were fundamentally incompatible with slavery, but in America, the national creed gave blacks some of their most moving arguments for equal participation in society. Frederick Douglass called the Constitution a “glorious liberty document.” Martin Luther King, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, talked of the “check” America had written with its founding promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The power of classical liberalism to advance black interests is not limited to soaring rhetoric; much of black advancement really has come “through the marketplace.” In the wake of the Civil War, blacks gained in their ability to move and find work elsewhere in the face of restrictive laws and cartels that sought to preserve some semblance of slavery. “Freedmen’s towns” thrived as havens from white oppression; schools such as Virginia’s Hampton Institute inculcated literacy and education. Blacks’ living conditions had improved immensely by the turn of the century, when Booker T. Washington was working to build black skills and advance black businesses. Later on, blacks used their economic power to fight segregation through bus boycotts, and sometimes businesses opposed segregation laws as well, in part because segregation forced them to spend extra money on separate facilities.

Ferguson and Witcher also take on some of the arguments from the New York Times’ 1619 Project, an effort to re-center American history in general on the country’s exploitation of blacks. In particular, they wade into the thorny question of slavery’s role in the overall American economy: Does America owe its success to slavery in some fundamental way?

Individual slave-owners profited from free labor in the short term, of course. They wouldn’t have participated otherwise. But slavery has broader economic downsides: It keeps an entire class of workers from rising to their full potential, gives them little incentive to innovate, and so on. Ferguson and Witcher argue that these effects are quite powerful and that America could have built a healthier economy without slavery.

Also scattered throughout Black Liberation are various modern-day policy prescriptions, though they range from the well worn (a libertarian “justice reform” platform that feels like it was written in 2015) to the somewhat oddball (“reparations” in the form of selling off federal lands and giving the proceeds to black, Native American, and poor entrepreneurs, which would hardly settle the matter for any non-entrepreneur). So, for a more spirited and focused look at how to move forward, we might turn to Ian V. Rowe’s Agency. Rowe is an American Enterprise Institute fellow with experience running charter schools in New York.

Like Ferguson and Witcher, Rowe aims to chart a path that eschews the excesses of Right and Left while embracing what is truly great about American principles. But while the co-authors contemplate the history of black oppression and advancement, Rowe wants children to “overcome the victimhood narrative” in which racism makes success impossible, to understand the extent to which their own efforts determine their fate, and to seize the opportunities offered in a rich, free society.

Despite seeing such power in human agency, Rowe does not merely call for poor kids to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The effort, he explains, must include mediating institutions such as churches as well as certain initiatives from the government. Individuals don’t develop agency in a vacuum; they absorb these attitudes and problem-solving approaches from their loved ones and the broader culture.

Rowe calls his plan “FREE”: family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship.

When it comes to family, Rowe would like kids to be taught the power of the “success sequence”: Poverty is rare among those who finish high school, put off childbearing until they get married, and work full time. An aggressive messaging campaign brought down the rate of teen pregnancy in the ’90s, he adds, and a similar effort today could focus especially on nonmarital births to those aged 20 to 24.

As for religion, Rowe sees it as a source of meaning and support — and more ambitiously, he would like to restore it to its “proper place in America’s culture.” In practice, he envisions a lot of effort by nonprofits to help spread religious messages, improve churches’ ability to serve their members, and develop new models for religious schools. (As an agnostic I can only wish him the best of luck on this.)

Education, meanwhile, is a special emphasis of Rowe’s. He is not under the illusion that schools can overcome every problem for every child, but of course he understands the importance of learning to economic success. And this is an area where the government has a big role to play, not only by improving its own schools but also by getting unreasonable restrictions out of the way. Rowe calls for the elimination of school-choice barriers nationwide so that in-demand charter schools aren’t subject to artificial enrollment caps and parents everywhere can pick the school that fits their children’s needs the best.

The second “E” refers to entrepreneurship — in the sense not just of starting businesses but also of taking charge of one’s life. This isn’t so much a policy proposal as a psychological outlook that is needed for success; it’s a restatement of the book’s overall theme that, even in a country with our history and present unfairnesses, individual behavior makes a whole lot of difference.

Rowe’s agenda (not to mention his own work with charter schools) is laudable. But I’ll level one bit of criticism: In his efforts to place kids’ own agency at the center of the story and overcome the “victimhood narrative,” he sometimes downplays racial disparities to such an extent that even this white conservative blanched. At one point, he excitedly reports that there is a more than $150,000 wealth gap “in favor of blacks over whites” (his italics) — though only if one compares white single-parent households with two-parent, college-educated black families.

At another point, speaking of the racial gap in school performance, Rowe notes that fewer than half of white students are considered “proficient” in reading on the Nation’s Report Card. Merely trying to equalize outcomes by race thus subjects black students to a ceiling of “mediocrity.” But “proficiency” is an essentially arbitrary threshold, and international comparisons offer a very different view of the situation. On the 2018 PISA (Program for Internatonal Student Assessment) test, white Americans scored on par with Western European nations such as Germany, the U.K., and Sweden in math — and near the head of the international pack on literacy — while black students scored similarly to kids in Chile, a nation less than half as rich as the U.S. Perhaps obsessing about race is not the best way to boost black achievement, but there’s simply no ignoring that the gap is huge and that closing it would be an enormous achievement.

None of this changes the fact, however, that Rowe is right: Americans can do a whole lot to shape their own destinies, and this country’s institutions could do a lot more to get that message across.