ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ideological terrain shared by economists and jurists who continue to normalize and institutionalize Black-White economic inequalities. A decade of Circuit Court and Supreme Court rulings demonstrate that judicial leaders are ideological kin to neoclassical economists. Rulings indicate the Courts' commitment to the "formal equality" doctrine. Formal equality requires only equality-before-the-law, or procedural equality. The doctrine of "separate but equal" legitimated substantive racial inequality in the public spheres and white financial control over black human capital development. Southern governments routinely denied African Americans equal protection of property and life, thus enabling white efforts to achieve racial domination in economic and political life. Industry and job-based employment discrimination was the norm in union and non-union settings, and neither competition nor Black acquisition of human capital proved sufficient to erode substantive racial inequality. The judiciary provided additional affirmation to Whites dedicated to the economic exclusion of freedmen and freedwomen in the sometimes overlooked Civil Rights Cases of 1883.
