A basic income would dispel racist stereotypes by empowering African Americans to avoid the choice between demeaning jobs and incarceration.

There is considerable evidence that some Americans oppose welfare entitlement programs because they are prejudiced against blacks, with whom such programs are generally associated. A longstanding and deeply offensive stereotype about blacks is that they are lazy. The ghetto poor would also have grounds to refuse work, then, if they have a justified belief that their fellow citizens have erected a work regime because of racism, whether as a means to punish shiftlessness or as a paternalistic effort to correct habits of indolence. High-poverty neighborhoods with few good employment options lead some residents, especially those unemployed for long periods, to consider securing income through unlawful means. Ghetto poverty creates desperation and feelings of shame, and some, seeking to escape the weight of their social conditions, resort to crime. As a result, many who reside in ghetto neighborhoods have been incarcerated. Upon release their felony records make it difficult for them to find work or housing, as it is not illegal to deny a person a job or an apartment because they have been convicted of a felony. Most convicted felons were already disadvantaged by their limited skills, low educational achievement, and lack of work experience, and they are not eligible for many forms of public assistance. The formerly incarcerated are thus among the worst off in ghetto neighborhoods. Families who depend on them for support are also made worse off by high incarceration rates and the treatment of ex-convicts. Rogers rightly worries that if convicted felons were to be ineligible for basic income, they would likely become a permanent laboring underclass, forever stigmatized, exploited, and poor. But given the employment discrimination they face (particularly if they are black), many would turn, not to menial labor, but back to crime and so likely end up re-incarcerated, where a for-profit prison might still exploit their labor. Given the history of slavery and Jim Crow—three and a half centuries of gross and far-reaching injustices—no one can plausibly argue that the current, racially skewed distribution of resources is entirely the result of just appropriations and fair market exchanges. Nothing approaching adequate reparations for slavery or Jim Crow have been offered to the descendants of slaves or the victims of the segregation regime. Given that contemporary ghetto poverty is plausibly explained, at least in part, by historical injustices in appropriation and transfer (what some term structural racism), it is far from clear that welfare conditional on work or the denial of public benefits to former felons is justifiable. Therefore one of the strengths of basic income is that it would empower marginalized black workers by enabling them to refuse demeaning, insecure, exploitative, and low-paying jobs. They could do so without having to live in degrading forms of poverty and without having to bear the risks of the underground economy. Basic income would deal a real blow to ghettoization and mass incarceration. It would not solve all problems of racial or economic injustice. But any civil rights–labor alliance should seriously consider fighting for it.