Walter E. Williams is a Negro (he uses the word without self-consciousness) professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. who writes a newspaper column syndicated by Heritage Features. He is also a former National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of two monographs, more than thirty articles, and now a book—The State against Blacks (New Press/McGraw-Hill, $14.95)—that is causing his name to be yoked nationally with that of Thomas Sowell, the economist and political scientist, who is certainly America’s foremost black conservative theoretician. The State against Blacks is a powerful assault against hoary myth and steadfast reaction, against complacency and ratiocination by rote. A century from now the New York Times and The Nation will be lamenting the passing of the economically and humanly restrictive society this book describes and denounces, as certain parties below the Mason-Dixon Line are still bewailing the end of the Confederacy and the demise of Southern Civilization and the Peculiar Institution.
In an attempt to soften the ground a little, Williams begins by lobbing a few shells behind enemy lines, “extricat[ing] from race some of the emotive language.” With Johnsonian aplomb, if not language, he tackles the meaning of “discrimination,” which “may be defined as an act of choice based upon utility maximization. Racial discrimination is an act of choice whereby racial attributes provide the criteria for choice. Our lives are largely spent discriminating for and against selected activities, objects, and people.” Discrimination then is a perfectly human, unexceptionable activity, just as “prejudice” is nothing more than foreknowledge applied as economically as possible to a given situation:
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