Economics explains why nonviolent resistance is an effective strategy and today’s immigration demonstrations are failing.
I grew up in the Dallas suburb of Lewisville when it had more gun racks than yoga mats. In elementary school, I was one of two black kids in the entire building. It was the early 1980s: faded Wranglers, girls in leg warmers, boys with bowl cuts shaped by their mothers at the kitchen table. Our classroom smelled faintly of pencil shavings and cafeteria biscuits.
Every February, Black History Month arrived with a tone shift. Voices softened. Smiles lingered a beat too long. One morning in my homeroom, the teacher asked what a harvest moon was. My hand shot up. What I remember isn’t only the question, it’s the reaction after I answered correctly. The nodding. The approving murmurs. The looks that said it was amazing I could read at all. That was when I started to hate February.
A few years later, I was bused across town to a much worse—and more diverse—middle school. Februarys there came in hot. I learned about Malcolm X, Black Power, systemic oppression and a version of history that treated anger as authenticity and restraint as weakness. It was also where my youthful hostility toward Martin Luther King Jr. crystallized.
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Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is Professor of Economics at Harvard University, an entrepreneur, and co-founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.
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