Certainly, the Drug War has been the largest driver of the disproportionate black and Hispanic prison populations in recent years, both through the incarceration of non‐​violent offenders and prosecuting those people involved in the violence associated with prohibition regimes. But the tensions between blacks and the American justice system did not start with Nixon’s War on Drugs in 1971.

Before Emancipation, law enforcement hunted down fugitive slaves who fled to the North. After Reconstruction, local law enforcement stripped the recently won civil rights of blacks, including the right to peaceably assemble, the ability testify against white people, and equal protection of the laws. Some offenders, picked up for charges like vagrancy—that is, being black and without a job—were sold back into civil slavery to corporations the profit of local sheriffs’ offices and judges under the “convict lease” system—not unlike slave leasing in the antebellum South. Years later, police officers were among the civil servants who sicced dogs, swung batons, and unleashed fire hoses on protesters in the 1960s. Special Weapons [A]nd Tactics teams, or SWAT, were established in the 1970s to help quell white fear of racial unrest and militants such as the Black Panthers. The 1980s saw drug enforcement ramp up, turning American inner cities into war zones. And perhaps most famously, in the 1990s, a home video showed several Los Angeles police officers beating black motorist Rodney King within an inch of his life. Today, SWAT‐​style raids as standard operating procedure, anecdotes of “driving while black,” and the documented abuse of Stop‐​and‐​Frisk tactics in New York City evince the continued tension between law enforcement and black Americans. If the Drug War were to end tomorrow, any belief that the tensions between blacks and the police would stop must be based on entirely ahistorical assumptions.

Most criminal laws since Reconstruction are facially “colorblind,” but enforcement clearly is not and has never been. Context matters, and in the American context, race matters. So when we, as libertarians, talk about what we can do to change people’s lives for the better, we have to look at exactly what they’re facing and what practical solutions look like. For black Americans, many of those problems have been around for a very long time, in one form or another, and they are directly tied to race.

So, yes, libertarians should continue to argue vehemently against the Drug War, for school choice, and in support of other policies that have been shown to help all people. But it is simply not enough to believe that, given free choices, citizens will make decisions that maximize their own benefit, ultimately to the benefit of all people. The United States’ long history with both public and private discrimination is a testament to the power of racial prejudice and its power to overcome rational self‐​interest. And given the numerous statistics now available—from unemployment disparities to tracking hiring practices to police harassment—it is clear that lingering prejudice contributes to unequal opportunities for American blacks, on top of the myriad obstacles they may face in their neighborhoods and schools.

Libertarians need to actively combat racial prejudice instead of relying on assumptions that the market will work it all out on its own. If libertarians are going to maintain that government answers to racism are usually inappropriate, then libertarians must be among those leading the private, society‐​driven remedies to injustice. It is not enough to be passively ‘not racist’—libertarians must be actively anti‐​racism. To do anything else is to accept the status quo and hide behind the logic of markets, despite the deeply seated, inherent illogic of racism.

This means, inter alia, discussing racial impacts of substandard schools (perhaps allaying fears that school choice will lead to more segregation academies), the pernicious effects of antagonistic policing, and explaining whose jobs will likely be lost due to a minimum wage hike. It means trying to remedy the longstanding disconnect between those who push for punitive laws and those who suffer under them. It means supporting community programs to encourage entrepreneurship and funding scholarships for aspiring business leaders. It means talking to black people and audiences like intelligent individuals whose life and family histories may temper enthusiasm for free markets, and not a mass of people too ignorant or dependent to believe in a theoretical version of freedom unknown to them. It means vocally and unequivocally distancing ourselves from people with longstanding racial baggage, be it Confederacy revisionism or career obsessions with black pathology. Then, maybe, libertarians’ “It’s not us, it’s you” message of liberty would turn into something different: a message better received by people with memories of how duplicitously the words “freedom” and “liberty” have been used in this country.