Race and Liberty in America (The Essential Reader)

In this long-awaited updated edition of Race & Liberty in America: The Essential Reader, editor Jonathan Bean presents the timeless and urgent insights classical liberalism has to offer our troubled and polarized time.

In 2009, when Race & Liberty in America: The Essential Reader was originally published, there was a spirit of optimism surrounding race relations. Fifteen years later, a far different spirit prevails: one fraught with tensions, many regrettably familiar and some new.

Which raises the question: What happened? And more importantly: How can we set things right?

With new contributions from Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wilfred Reilly, Kenny Xu, David Bernstein, and Ilya Somin—as well as a plethora of primary source evidence from recent landmark US Supreme Court decisions—Bean champions the values of colorblindness, freedom, and equal constitutional protection for all individuals—regardless of race.

It’s a message that couldn’t be more timely.

This first collection of writings on race and immigration to document the role of the classical liberal tradition—a tradition rooted in natural law principles of individual rights and liberty—reveals:

• Why classical liberals have espoused “unalien­able Rights” derived from God, individual freedom from government control, the Con­stitution as a guarantor of freedom, color-blind law, and capitalism;
• How classical liberals led the fights against slavery and racism against seemingly insurmountable odds and long before such positions became popular;
• What classical liberals’ defense of a “natural right” to migration implies for today’s immigration controversies;
• How capitalism undermines racism by penalizing those who act on their “taste for discrimination”;
• Why America’s obtuse preoccupation with left-versus-right politics overshadows solutions to racial division;
• How we can improve race relations in the United States today;
• And much, much more…

From the Declaration of Independence, the antislavery movement, post–Civil War reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the Great Depression and World War II, the civil rights era, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, all the way up to the present day—each chapter in this new and improved updated edition illuminates how specific time periods in American history grappled with the demands of equality.

Citing such influential Americans as Thomas Jefferson, Louis Marshall, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Zora Neale Hurston, plus those missing from other books and heretofore lost to history, Bean shows how classical liberal thought on race relations has helped shape both law and public opinion … and how it will need to do so again, if America as we know it is to prosper and thrive.

If you’re ready to trade the tired and failed left-versus-right politics for timeless principles that actually work and uplift societies, read Race & Liberty in America.