Hans F. Sennholz, “What’s Holding Black Americans Back?” — Summary

This short 1993 policy essay argues from a classical-liberal economic perspective that black economic advancement is impeded less by market inequality itself than by political interventions that block entry into work. Sennholz begins by distinguishing inequalities that arise in free labor markets from inequalities produced by coercive policy. His core conceptual move is to separate “service and productivity” from political privilege: in markets, incomes reflect valued contribution; under government intervention, income gaps may express exclusion, regulation, and protectionism.

In a free society with unhampered labor markets, the differences in income and wealth ultimately spring from the great differences in individual service and productivity.

The essay’s structure follows this contrast. First, Sennholz presents inequality as compatible with economic dynamism. Second, he acknowledges the historical role of Jim Crow and discriminatory state power. Third, he argues that post-1960s civil-rights gains are real but incomplete because several labor-market barriers remain. The key target is not civil-rights law as such, but the persistence of minimum wages, union seniority rules, and the Davis-Bacon Act.

Discriminatory policies create economic and social conflict and jeopardize peaceful social cooperation.

Sennholz contends that civil-rights legislation removed many explicit public discriminations and enabled measurable improvement among educated black workers. Yet he criticizes “reverse discrimination” and affirmative-action politics as forms of political favor that can “emasculate and mislead” beneficiaries. The sharper claim is that labor regulations hurt those with the least schooling, experience, or bargaining position. Minimum-wage law becomes, in his account, a legal prohibition on hiring low-productivity beginners, especially young black men.

This $8 minimum prevents millions of young blacks from reaching the very bottom rung of the economic ladder of productivity and success.

The essay’s most sustained analytical move is to reinterpret benevolent regulation as exclusionary pricing. If a worker’s current productivity is below the legally required compensation package, Sennholz argues, the law does not raise that worker’s wage; it blocks the job. This claim is extended from youth unemployment to older unskilled workers and to neighborhoods where regulation, taxation, and location reduce productivity.

He next turns to union seniority systems, presenting them as a formally race-neutral mechanism with racially unequal effects. Because black workers were historically less likely to hold senior union positions, seniority-based layoffs can reproduce exclusion even after overt discrimination has been outlawed.

In the name of seniority thousands of blacks are purged from employment and labor income.

The Davis-Bacon Act receives the harshest judgment. Sennholz portrays federally mandated “prevailing wage rates” not as worker protection but as a protectionist device historically designed to shield higher-paid white labor from lower-wage black competition. In his view, prevailing-wage rules favor senior skilled union workers while discouraging employers from hiring apprentices, helpers, and semi-skilled workers.

The Act was spawned by racism and continues to sow the evils of racism.

The essay concludes by rejecting the idea that stronger anti-discrimination enforcement alone can overcome these obstacles. Its relevance lies in its libertarian recasting of racial economic disadvantage: Sennholz does not deny historical discrimination, but he argues that the remaining policy problem is state-created exclusion from labor markets. His proposed remedy is deregulated entry—wages and employment determined by productivity rather than statutory floors, union rank, or federal contracting rules.

Let there be freedom in compensation for whites and blacks alike, and freedom of employment according to productivity rather than seniority.

The main thesis, then, is that black Americans are held back by political barriers masquerading as protection: minimum wages, seniority rules, and prevailing-wage mandates. The essay’s polemical force comes from joining anti-racist language to anti-interventionist economics, presenting labor-market freedom not merely as efficiency policy but as a civil-rights cause.