On further reflection, there may be some upsides to this cancel culture business, specially within economics. How bout this fellow Karl Marx. There’s a dead white European male if ever there was one. Why isn’t he now being cancelled? How should economists, and social theorists generally, deal with this: Marx and Engels’s theory of history: making sense of the race factor. Here’s the abstract:

This article argues that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s theory of history contained racist components. In Marx and Engels’s understanding, racial disparities emerged under the influence of shared natural and social conditions hardening into heredity and of the mixing of blood. They racialized skin-colour groups, ethnicities, nations and social classes, while endowing them with innate superior and inferior character traits. They regarded race as part of humanity’s natural conditions, upon which the production system rested. ‘Races’ endowed with superior qualities would boost economic development and productivity, while the less endowed ones would hold humanity back. Marxist race thinking reflected common Lamarckian and Romantic-Nationalist assumptions of the era.

If we are going to colour-code who we allow to speak or whose words we listen to, which I do not for a second believe we should, why not turn to Thomas Sowell: Thomas Sowell says concept of systemic racism ‘has no meaning,’ warns US could reach ‘point of no return’.

“You hear this phrase, ‘systemic racism’ [or] ‘systemic oppression’,” host Mark Levin told Sowell. “You hear it on our college campuses. You hear it from very wealthy and fabulously famous sports stars. What does that mean? And whatever it means, is it true?”

“It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one tests hypotheses,” answered Sowell, who added that the currency of the phrase reminds him of the “propaganda tactics” of Nazi Germany.

The true racists are the ones who believe skin colour should have any bearing on political issues.