Glenn Loury's Round Trip
Although Glenn Loury and I
overlapped in graduate school--I arrived at MIT in 1974 and he left in 1976--I
have never known him well. But I do remember the joke classmates told about
him--that his thesis began: "This dissertation is concerned with the economics
of racism. I define racism as a single-valued, continuous mapping ..." The
story isn't true, but a chapter of that thesis, titled "A Dynamic Theory of
Racial Income Differences," does have an appendix that begins "Each agent
begins life with a random innate endowment. Q is the endowment set, taken to be
a subset of an arbitrary, finite dimensional Euclidean space."
Loury, in
other words, was and is a first-rate technical economist with a mathematical
bent who has ended up writing and speaking not about Euclidean spaces but about
the political economy of race. This is partly because he is as good with words
as he is with equations. It is partly because he cares deeply about social
issues. But inevitably, it is also partly because he is one of only a handful
of well-known African-Americans in his field. In the process he has become
what, say, Arthur Koestler or George Orwell was in another time and place: one
of those emblematic intellectuals whose career illustrates in microcosm the
dilemmas, temptations, and betrayals of an era.
When he was young, Loury's disillusionment with the civil
rights movement drove him into neoconservatism. But in recent years, he has
been exiled once again, cast out by the right essentially because he still
cares about what happens to the poor. The dogmatic rigidity, left and right,
that has left Loury without an ideological home is also why this nation has
such a hard time talking honestly about race.
Reading
Loury's dissertation today, 22 years after he wrote it, is a depressing
experience--precisely because the essays were so good and remain so relevant.
In the first few pages, he stated the central dilemma of race policy in modern
America. He was willing to give American society the benefit of the doubt, to
assume that in the future, racism--direct economic discrimination--would no
longer be a major force holding African-Americans back. But he argued that this
probably would not be enough, and therein lay the dilemma.
On one hand, we all believe that individuals
deserve to be judged on their own merits, not by who their parents were or what
group they belong to. On the other hand, anyone who imagines that a child
growing up in the South Bronx has the same chance to make it as an equally
talented child growing up in Scarsdale is living in a fantasy world. So merely
eliminating current racial discrimination might very well fail to
eliminate the effects of past discrimination. Indeed, Loury argued persuasively
that even a world of "equal opportunity" might "perpetuate into the indefinite
future the consequences of ethically unacceptable historical practices." If you
find that prospect unacceptable, you must support some form of social
engineering--which ultimately, no matter how you package it, means giving some
people special consideration based on the color of their skin as well as on the
content of their character.
In a
better world, Loury would have spent the last 22 years devising
policies--working with other well-intentioned people to come as close as
possible to squaring this circle, finding ways to eliminate the legacy of past
racism with as little intrusion as possible on the colorblind ideal. But he has
basically never been able to get off square one--because at no point over the
past two decades has he been able to find allies who are even willing to accept
the reality of the dilemma.
Loury's problems began with the left. Although his
dissertation was written only a dozen years after passage of the Civil Rights
Act, he saw clearly that the problems facing African-Americans had changed. The
biggest barrier to progress was no longer active racism of whites but internal
social problems of the black community. But black leaders, and to a lesser
extent liberalism as a whole, flatly refused even to contemplate that
possibility. He also found powerful pressures--"loyalty tests"--operating
against any black intellectual who tried to challenge the orthodoxy.
To Loury's
credit, he did not give in to these pressures. He said what he thought. In so
doing, he found himself labeled a "black conservative"--and thereby exposed to
new and dangerous seductions. Let's face it: Any articulate minority
intellectual who reliably espouses conservative positions is automatically
offered a ticket to a very nice lifestyle. No more rejections from picky
academic journals or grubbing for sabbatical time. Instead there are cushy
fellowships at Hoover, guest editorials in the Wall
Street
Journal , and invited articles in Commentary --maybe even a regular
column in Forbes --and a steady stream of invitations to plush
conferences in nice places. All this and more lay before a bona fide academic
star such as Loury. Until personal problems temporarily derailed him in 1987,
he was well on his way to high political office and all the rewards that brings
in later life.
But at some point Loury made the discovery that
eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the
political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends.
The Glenn Loury who wrote that 1976 thesis was not a conservative. He
criticized the simplistic anti-racism of the liberal establishment because he
wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand
aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested
only in the critique, not in the next step. (According to Loury, "When I told
one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social
program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot
properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because
he had moved on to the next case.") Loury found out that the apparent regard
for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any
questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving
aid and comfort to the liberal enemy. It was the loyalty test all over
again.
The final straw was surely
the grotesque affair of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell
Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life . This book came
close to claiming that, given your genes, it makes no difference to your
economic success whether you grew up in Scarsdale or the South Bronx. The
implied subtext was that this absolves society from any responsibility to do
something for children growing up in the South Bronx. Since The Bell
Curve was published, it has become clear that almost everything about it
was inexcusably wrong: suspect data, mistakes in statistical procedures that
would have flunked a sophomore (Murray--Herrnstein is deceased--clearly does
not understand what a correlation coefficient means), deliberate suppression of
contrary evidence, you name it. Yet conservative publications such as
Commentary , which was always happy to publish Loury when he criticized
liberal evasions, would not grant him space to critique The Bell
Curve .
So Loury is now on his own
(or rather, at the head of a small movement of like-minded people, centered on
his new Institute on Race and Social Division): rejected by the black political
elite, which still wants to blame everything on white racism, and equally
rejected by a conservatism that wants to do precisely nothing about continuing
racial inequality. And the dilemma Loury identified so clearly 22 years ago
remains not only unresolved but also unconfronted.
