Economics, ruled by white men, is roiled by Black Lives Matter
The national protests seeking an end to systemic discrimination against black Americans have given new fuel to a racial reckoning in economics, a discipline dominated by white men despite decades of efforts to open greater opportunity for women and nonwhite men.
A growing chorus of economists is seeking to dislodge the editor of a top academic publication, the University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig, after he criticized the Black Lives Matter organization on Twitter and equated its members with “flat earthers” over their embrace of calls to defund police departments.
Days earlier, the profession’s de facto governing body, the American Economic Association, sent a letter to its members supporting protesters.
Black economists say the events have brought some progress to a field that has long struggled with discrimination in its ranks — and with a refusal by many of its leaders to acknowledge discrimination in the country at large. But the profession remains nowhere close to a full-scale shift on racial issues. On Wednesday, the director of the White House National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, told reporters, “I don’t believe there is systemic racism in the U.S.”
Uhlig’s Twitter posts criticized demonstrators for not coordinating recent protests with law enforcement, before singling out Black Lives Matter over calls to defund the police.
The posts drew a swift backlash, including criticism from several white colleagues at Chicago and a petition calling for him to resign his editorship of the Journal of Political Economy, considered one of five journals with an outsize role in the field.
Uhlig, a 59-year-old German citizen,apologized on Tuesday evening for his Twitter posts. But in an email interview on Tuesday night, he disagreed with critics who say his comments “hurt and marginalize people of color and their allies in the economics profession (and) call into question his impartiality in assessing academic work on this and related topics.”
Some conservatives hailed Uhlig as a champion of free speech and a victim of “cancel culture” — although critics said they were not seeking his dismissal from his tenured professorship.
Critics, however, held up Uhlig as an example of the deeply embedded advantages of white economists, including nearly full control over the journals that determine, in their selections for publication, which economists receive acclaim, tenure and top jobs.
“This is a way in which potentially good ideas, potentially good contributors of ideas to the economics profession, have been thwarted because of a gatekeeper,” Lisa Cook, a Michigan State University economist and one of the profession’s few prominent black women, said in an interview.
Cook leads the American Economic Association’s Summer Training Program, a decades-old effort to recruit black and Latino students to the profession. She said students often asked her how she overcame discrimination in the field, and whether they would be welcome.
“They’re asking where does this racially hostile environment come from?” she said. “Why does this racial discrimination exist in the pinnacle of the social sciences?”