At the end of last week, the American economist and writer Professor Glenn Loury spoke on a panel as part of a conference held at King’s Col
By: Glenn Loury
Published; Jan 19, 2023
At the end of last week, the American economist and writer Professor Glenn Loury spoke on a panel as part of a conference held at King’s College, Cambridge. The event, ‘Towards the Common Good: Rethinking Race in the 21st Century’, was organised by The Equiano Project and aimed to promote liberal and universalist approaches to tackling racial conflict and inequality.
An edited version of his speech is printed below.
Fellow combatants in the culture wars, we are fighting for our lives here. We are fighting for the preservation of Western civilisation and the hour is late. I only mildly exaggerate.
I am an economist by training and that is a bust of the great John Maynard Keynes, here at King’s College, Cambridge. It resonates.
I agree with my friend and colleague Shelby Steele that, for black Americans, when we talk about disparities in race the problem is not oppression: the problem is freedom. The problem used to be exclusion and discrimination; the problem today is freedom. We’re well into the 21st century and African Americans have equal citizenship before the law in the United States, as a matter of fact.
Don’t bother me with anecdotes. I’m talking about the basic structure of citizenship. It’s a level playing field; it’s an open field. The ball is in our court. The issue is, what shall we do with our freedom?
I’ll quote another great economist, Thomas Sowell, who has taught us that disparities are one thing and discrimination is another. This is now my second point. The first point is, for black Americans the problem is the problem of freedom, not unfreedom. My second point is that disparities are one thing, discrimination is another. Disparities are not, ipso facto, evidence of unfreedom. Disparities are to be expected.
There’s a deep irony here when the identitarians become group egalitarians. The identitarians are the ones who are constantly telling us, “This is my identity; this is who I am; this is my group; this is my culture; these are my people. Don’t tread on us; don’t culturally appropriate us. We are an integral, distinct, identifiable type.”
Okay. So you have your blacks, you have your browns, you have your yellows, you have your gays, you have your whatever. How, then — since you are so insular, distinct, identity-based and different — should we expect that you would represent yourselves in equal numbers in every dimension of human activity? That there would be the same number of doctors, the same number of engineers, the same number of financiers, the same number of school teachers, the same number of criminals, the same number of shopkeepers per capita across all these different identity categories — if, indeed, identity is a real thing. The position is incoherent.
We should not expect group equality across every aspect of humanity and we don’t see it, and this was Thomas Sowell’s empirical point in book after book after book. Everywhere you look in the world you see disparities because everywhere you look in the world you see cultural differences which reflect themselves in human behaviour, which then lead to different representations in various areas of human activity. So disparities are not ipso facto a problem.
Finally, I want to say that equity is not equality. I could name them but I won’t: the writers in the US who are so prominent now — Ibram X. Kendi comes to mind — in promoting a certain ideology assert, “I see a disparity. I want equity.” And by equity they mean an equal representation. This is not equality.
If you use a different standard of assessment in order to achieve equity, you have just patronised me. You have just communicated tacitly that you don’t think I’m capable of performing according to the objective criteria of assessment as well as anybody else. I am now your client. I am now a ward. I go or come by your leave.
This argument that “We blacks must be made equal and you have to open up the doors and let us in! Never mind that our test scores are not as great” is pathetic. It’s a surrender of dignity. You will not be equal at the end of that argument even if you get what you ask for. There’s no substitute for earning the respect of your peers: if they grant it to you out of guilt or pity they have just reduced you, not elevated you.
Amid great cultural upheaval and unrest, Glenn Yu reached out to Glenn Loury, his former teacher, to record his thoughts about race and equality.
On June 24, amid great cultural upheaval and unrest, Glenn Yu reached out to Glenn Loury, his former teacher, to record his thoughts about the current moment. An edited version of their conversation follows.
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You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying, “you’re not black.” They say, “you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear.” How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.
I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that, you might see the problem. What experiences are black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their blackness? If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument.
Suppose someone, a white guy, is arguing about affirmative action with you. Suppose he thinks that affirmative action is undignified because he thinks that positions should be earned, not given, but he allows that he doesn’t expect someone like you to understand that argument because you’re black. That would be terribly unreasonable— even “racist.” Yet I’m hard-pressed to see the difference.
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People cry, “structural racism.” Is that why the homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher among young black men? They say structural racism. Is that why the SAT test-score gap is as big as it is? They say structural racism. Is that why two in three black American kids are born to women without a husband? Is it all about structural racism? Is everything structural racism? It has become a tautology explaining everything. All racial disparities are due to structural racism, evidently. Covid-19 comes along and there’s a disparity in the health incidence. It’s due to structural racism. They’re naming partners at a New York City law firm and there are few black faces. Structural racism. They’re admitting people to specialized exam schools in New York City and the Asians do better. This has to be structural racism, with a twist—the twist being that this time, the structural racism somehow comes out favoring the Asians.
This is not social science. This is propaganda. It’s religion. People are trying to win arguments by using words as if they were weapons.
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And just so I don’t sound like a right-winger, observe that if I were a Marxist, I’d be furious at these people going around talking about “structural racism.” Structure, yes. Racism, no. Because if I were a Marxist, which I’m not, I’d understand the driving force of history to be the interaction between class relations and the means of production, the struggle between workers and capital in the quest for profit given the logic of capitalism. Though I don’t subscribe to it, that’s at least an intellectually serious theory. I know what people are talking about when they say we need more unions, when they say we need to break up big companies, when they say that the accumulation of wealth has gotten too great. When someone says that the logic of profit-seeking leads to war, at least I know what they’re talking about. I don’t necessarily have to agree with Das Kapital to understand that it’s a serious engagement with history.
Structural racism, by contrast, is a bluff. It’s not an engagement with history. It’s a bullying tactic. In effect, it’s telling you to shut up.
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Yu: I’ve had conversations in the past few weeks that have ended very poorly; conversations that have spiraled out of control, where I’m suddenly a racist, so I’m on damage control. I just don’t know how to reach people in a meaningful way, and that’s very disturbing to me.
Loury: It is disturbing. I’m not a seer. My mouth is not a prayer book. I only say what I say based on my subjective assessment of it all. But it may be that, for a while anyway, there’s not going to be a whole lot of effective talking. It may well be that we have to imagine a world where effective deliberation and consensus is not within reach for us, and we’re going to have to manage that situation. It could get very bad. It could go to violence. This is what Sam Harris always says, and he’s got a point. He says that if we can’t reason together, then the only alternative for dispute resolution is violence.
I don’t know if you saw my piece in Quillette about the looting and the rioting, but I pick up these pieces published in the New York Times, respectable left-wing journals. I’m reading them, and the writer is saying, “America was founded on looting. What did you think the Boston Tea Party was?” Or, “You’re talking about looting when George Floyd lies dead? Oh, I see, black lives don’t matter as much as property.” These are, to my mind, incomprehensibly idiotic. I don’t mean that to cast aspersions. The civilization that we all enjoy rests upon a very fragile foundation. Look. I’m in my backyard. It’s very nice. I’ve got a lot of space. There’s a fence. The birds come. I have a lawn. It’s mine!
Now, if a homeless person comes and squats in my backyard, I call the police. I have him removed, forcibly. There should be no lack of clarity about whether George Floyd’s death somehow excuses or justifies burning a bodega to the ground that a Muslim immigrant spends his whole life building. Being confused about that, equivocating about that, splitting the difference about that—I don’t understand how we’re going to have a reasoned discussion. My thoughts go back to, protect civilization. Again, I know how that sounds. It’s hyperbolic. It’s exaggerated—but only a little! My gut response is that this is not the time for argument. This is the time to protect civilization and protect institutions. When people start toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and spray-painting on statues of George Washington, “a slave owner,” things fall apart. The center cannot hold. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe.
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Yu: If there’s no available policy intervention, and there’s also no way we can change people’s minds, then is it hopeless? Is disparity always going to be the case?
Loury: Yes. My answer is it’s hopeless. But let me rephrase the question, and I’m channeling Thomas Sowell now. You have two alternatives. You can live with disparities, or you can live in totalitarianism. Again, hyperbolic, I know. No, I’m not talking about Eastern Europe circa 1960, but look at it this way: there can’t be a disparity without somebody being on top. People don’t recognize this.
What groups are on top? What about the Jews? You could say, “There are too many Jews in positions of influence.” If there are too few black lawyers who are partners in big law firms, doesn’t it follow that are too many Jews who are partners at these big firms? If there are too few blacks who are professors of mechanical engineering at places like Carnegie Mellon, why aren’t there too many Korean professors at these places?
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What is the nature of the world that we live in? Why would I ever expect that there would be parity across the board between ethnic, racial, cultural, and ancestral population groups in an open society? It’s a contradiction because difference is a very fact of groupness. What do I mean by a group? Well, it’s genes, to some degree; it’s culture; it’s networks of social affiliation, of intermarriage and kinship. I mean the shared narrative, the same hopes, the dreams, the stories. I mean the practices of parenting and filial piety and whatever else there might be.
A group is a group. It has characteristics. Those characteristics matter for whether you play in the NBA. They matter for whether you learn to master the violin or the piano. They matter for whether you pursue technical subjects or choose to become a humanist or a scientist. They matter for the food that you eat. They matter for how many children you raise and how you raise them. They matter as to the age when you first have sex. They matter for all those things, and I think everyone would agree with that.
But now you’re telling me that they don’t matter for who becomes a partner in a law firm? They don’t matter for who becomes a chair in the Philosophy Department somewhere? Groupness implies disparity because groupness, if taken seriously, implies differences in ways of living life. Not everybody wants to play the fiddle. Not everybody wants to dunk a basketball. Not everybody is frightened to death that their parents are going to be disappointed with them if they come home with an A-minus. Not everybody is susceptible to being swayed into a social affiliation that requires them to commit a violent crime in order to prove their bona fides. Groups differ. Groups are not evenly distributed across society. That’s inevitable. If you insist that those be flattened, you’re only going to be able to succeed by imposing a totalitarian regime that monitors everything and jiggers everything, recomputing and refiguring things until we’ve got the same number of blacks in proportion to their population and the same number of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in proportion to their population being admitted to Caltech or the Bronx High School of Science. I don’t want to live in that world.
Glenn Loury: The answer I’m taking from you, to my question of how do we get to antisemitism, is that the world is divided into oppressors and victims. The oppressors are white, the victims are BIPOC.
Jews are white, ergo, Jews are oppressors. Palestinianss, I guess by extension of this kind of logic, are people of color, are incorporated somehow into the BIPOC coalition, so they are the victims.
And that’s their account of this conflict that has sued over the last 75 years since the founding of the state of Israel.
I guess I want to say about that, that is a gross oversimplification that actually betrays the responsibility to educate here, regardless of "whose side you’re on," we can get to figuring out what we want to say and what we want to do about the conflict and what’s wrong and what’s right. But let’s just understand the circumstance.
And that is ahistorical and ignorant and should be objected to strongly, should not be tolerated in an institution of higher education.
Tabia Lee: Yes, and unfortunately, Glenn, it’s not only being tolerated, it’s being held up as the only way to understand these geopolitical and world issues in many institutions. And if you even suggest that there’s other ways to view this, that we don’t have to view everything through a matrix of domination and oppression, even just saying that got me labelled as a pariah.
This is the environment that people are working in, and often you don’t hear about it because what happens for us as faculty members, we're advised, at least I was, by many mentors, you know, Lee, just resign. It’ll be like this never happened.
I could’ve taken that option. I could’ve done that. But I felt like there were people who were being very unprofessional bullies and gangsters in a learning environment. So, if I just disappear quietly and save myself, right, then I’m contributing to the problem as well. So that’s why I chose to go public. I knew the risks, I knew that I would probably never get another tenure track position.
Once I went public, hearing from people across the nation that it wasn’t just California. You know, sometimes people say, California, you guys are a little weird over there. That's just the California thing. This is happening all over the place.
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"Another aspect of the construction of whiteness is the way certain groups have moved into or out of that race. For example, early in our history Irish, Jews, and Italians were considered nonwhite—that is, on a par with African Americans. Over time, they earned the prerogatives and social standing of whites by a process that included joining labor unions, swearing fealty to the Democratic Party, and acquiring wealth, sometimes by illegal or underground means. Whiteness, it turns out, is not only valuable; it is shifting and malleable."
-- "Critical Race Theory (Third Edition)," Delgado & Stefancic
This, partly, gives the game away. "Whiteness" is so malleable that activists can decide that anything they don't like falls under this banner, just as they declared everyone to be a Nazi (before becoming Nazis themselves).
Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and great abolitionist, in a famous speech of 1852 titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” asked America whether he had a share in the nation’s civic inheritance. Douglass was cautiously hopeful that America might be faithful to its founding principles and grant liberty and equality to his people. But he had to plead with his audience to consider the gravity of the times; he had to indict his country for not standing up to its own ideals.
Today we stand 170 years later. Douglass’s criticism of America remains fashionable, but many Americans seem to have forgotten what it was about America that Douglass wanted to be a part of. When we talk about race and America, we must ask whether the standoffishness exemplified, by, for example, the “America ain’t so great, and never was” posture popular on campuses and in newsrooms, truly serves the interests of black Americans. The narrative we blacks settle upon about the American project is fundamentally important. Is this, basically, a good country that affords boundless opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of American citizenship? Or, is this, basically, a venal, immoral, rapacious bandit-society of plundering white supremacists founded in genocide and slavery, and propelled by capitalist greed and unrepentant racism?
I wish to make the case for unabashed black patriotism—for the forthright embrace of America by black people. Our birthright citizenship in this great republic is an inheritance of immense value. Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness.
Of course, there is some warrant in the historical record for both sentiments. African slavery flourished at the time of the founding, true enough. And yet, within a century of the founding slavery was gone and people who had been chattel became citizens of the United States. Should equality before the law have taken another hundred years? Should my ancestors have been enslaved in the first place? No and no. But we must not forget that slavery had been commonplace since antiquity. Emancipation, the freeing of slaves en masse as the result of a movement for abolition—that was a new idea. It was a Western idea, brought to fruition in our own United States of America. It would not have been possible without the philosophical insights and moral commitments cultivated in the West during the Enlightenment—ideas about the essential dignity of human persons.
The founding of the United States of America was a world-historic event by means of which enlightenment ideals about the rights of individual persons and the legitimacy of state power got instantiated for the first time in real institutions. The United States of America fought authoritarian fascism and communism in the Pacific and Europe in the mid-twentieth century. Our democracy, flawed as it most surely is, has been a beacon to billions of people. On our shores, we have witnessed since the end of the Civil War the greatest transformation in the status of an enserfed people that is to be found anywhere in world history. Some 46 million strong, we black Americans have become by far the richest and most powerful large population of African descent on this planet, and it’s not even close. We have access to more than five times the income of the typical Nigerian, the richest nation in all of sub-Saharan Africa.
I am a descendant of slaves and I came up in the 1950s and 1960s on Chicago’s South Side; I didn’t have an easy upbringing, but I was a beneficiary of the civil rights revolution, which made possible for me a life that my forebears only dreamed of. I became an economist and Ivy League college professor. I am a product of the Enlightenment, and I am an inheritor of its great traditions: Tolstoy is mine. Dickens is mine. Newton and Maxwell and Einstein are mine.
We Americans, of all stripes, have a great deal in common, and our commonalities can be used to build bridges, undergirded by patriotism, between black America and the nation as a whole. We all want the same things. We want a shot at the American Dream. We want each generation to do better than the ones that came before it. Connections among groups in America could be stronger if we focused more on the things we have in common than on the things that divide us.
Those who make their living by focusing on our differences believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the American project. They’re wrong.
They betray the legacy of Frederick Douglass, and we should resist their divisive rhetoric. It is easy to overstate the racial problems facing our country, and to understate what we have achieved.
Join me in valuing the American tradition at FairForAll.org
Glenn Loury: The Spiral of Silence in Social Justice
In the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, two swindlers promise to provide an emperor with magnificent new clothes that will be invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent. Officials see no clothes are being produced on the swindler’s looms, but none will say anything to avoid being seen as a fool. When the emperor walked through the city in his new “clothes,” everyone could see that he was naked, but no one would be the one to say it. But then came along a child who in his naiveté was willing to defy consensus and speak out.
The thing about the child in the story is not that he’s saying it, it’s not even that other people heard him say it. It’s that everybody knows that everybody else heard him say it. The child created a circumstance in which it’s now common, shared, knowledge that the emperor has no clothes.
German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined a term that describes this phenomenon: the “Spiral of Silence.” In a spiral of silence, when holding a certain view obtains a stigma, for fear of being seen as having that view people will stay silent. Thus the masses believe they are alone or in a small minority of people with the stigmatized view, and yet in fact they are indeed one of the masses.
In progressive controlled areas of our society today, we are suffering from a spiral of silence when it comes to the topic of social justice. In that half of America, many don’t like it when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee at a football game and says, “I’m not going to stand for this pledge of allegiance”, or when when a Black Lives Matter activist stands up with his balled fist and says “Burn this down” about a city, but they are too afraid to be the only one in their community saying it, to be perceived as a racist or supporter of racists for holding mild views that most of America holds.
Though censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat is the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech creating a spiral of silence. It is not the iron fist of repression, but the velvet glove of seduction, that is the real problem.
Spirals of silence can cause people with extreme views to drive moderates, out of a conversation. In effect, the moderates "hoard" their opinions. Hence, the public discourse on some issues, for example abortion, can become more polarized than is the actual distribution of public opinion.
Once the practice of punishing those who express certain ideas is well established, the only ones who risk ostracism by speaking recklessly are those who place so little value on conforming to their community that they must be presumed not to share their dearest common values.
Those, for example, who genuinely value racial equality know that, even if they harbor reservations about the effectiveness or ethics of affirmative action, if they utter their reservations in the wrong circles they will be perceived as an opponent of racial justice; so they say nothing at all. This silencing of such conversations has a devastating impact on our ability to improve society.
The notion of "objective research"--on say police interactions with black Americans, or the lifetime effects of fatherless homes--can have no meaning if, when the results are reported, other "scientists" are mainly concerned to pose the ad hominem query: "Just what kind of economist, sociologist, etc. would say this?"
Not only will investigators be induced to silence, the very way in which research is evaluated and consensus about "the facts" is formed will be altered. If when a study yields an unpopular conclusion its author is subjected to ostracism, an obvious bias to "find what the community is looking for" is introduced.
Who, we must ask, will speak for compromise and common sense, when to speak in this way is seen to signal a weak commitment to "the struggle"?
Who will insist that we speak plainly and tell the truth about delicate and difficult matters which we would all prefer to cover-up or ignore?
Who will declare "the emperor" to be naked?
How can a community sustain an elevated political discourse, when the social forces which promote silence threaten to usher in a dark age? It cannot.
But, with a simple choice, with just a little bit of bravery, you can choose to be like the child who spoke truth to the empire and put an end to it all.
Join me in ending the spiral of silence at FairForAll.org
Still thinking about Glenn Loury's memoir, haven't started a new book yet, maybe its core theme is more profound than I let on yesterday.
What is my cover story and what is my real story? At least in regards to my career and lack of progression and my need to improve my networking.
The cover story is networking isn't fun. I'm naturally introverted so it's harder for me. No one likes doing it anyway. Everyone finds it a little awkward and cringe.
But the real story is I don't put myself out there because I don't think I'm good enough.
Just finished reading Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conversative by Glenn Loury.
He ended up less apologetic for his personal failings than I would have predicted from the midway point of the book, but he doesn't need to seek forgiveness from me. It was an entertaining read, if not as profound as I would've hoped. I'm more into art that explores the battle between the commercial and the authentic at the moment as opposed to the inner battle Loury writes about. But maybe I need to grow up.
The final few chapters of the book reminded me of when I paid most attention to Loury, the summer of 2020, the frustrations I felt when smart people seemed be justifying dumb statistics while the world got worse. Loury was a voice of reason to help me through it.
Almost 5 years later and I think I'm more frustrated with how things are going, I have different voices of reason in my life, but they really aren't calming me down. Maybe I should write a post about it over spring break, maybe that would be the start of something for me.
But more likely, I will focus inward, I will worry about my family and my career and hope this time of craziness passes, and I can look back in 5 years, remembering how I felt now and not really caring. I certainly hope so.
