This point is powerfully illustrated by the fact that even the notoriously racist apartheid regime in South Africa had to designate the Japanese ‘honorary whites’. There was no way the Japanese executives running the local Toyota and Nissan factories could go and live in townships like Soweto, where non- whites were forced to live under apartheid law. Therefore, the white-supremacist South Africans had to swallow their pride and pretend that the Japanese were whites, if they wanted to drive around in Japanese cars. That is the power of the market.
The power of the market as a ‘leveller’ is more widespread than we think. As the British writer Alan Bennett’s play-turned-movie, History Boys, so poignantly shows, students from disadvantaged groups tend to lack intellectual and social confidence and are thus disadvantaged in getting into elite universities – and by extension, better-paying jobs. Obviously, universities do not have to respond to market pressures as quickly as firms have to. However, if some university consistently discriminated against ethnic minorities or working-class kids and took in only people from the ‘right’ backgrounds despite their inferior quality, potential employers would come to prefer the graduates from non-racist universities. The narrow-minded university, if it is to recruit the best possible students, would have to abandon its prejudices sooner or later.