Glenn Loury On Being A Minority Within A Minority (Re-Aired)

In our last summer-break podcast two-fer, we’re re-running two very different conversations on sex and race, with two very different characters: Glenn Loury and Louise Perry. Next Friday we’ll be back with fresh Dish as the new season of Dishness kicks off after Labor Day with some great guests lined up for the fall. We’ll also be introducing Weekly Dish 3.0! Stay tuned. Glenn is an academic, writer, and podcaster. At the age of 33, he became the first African-American professor of economics at Harvard to get tenure. He’s currently the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University, a columnist for UnHerd, and co-host of The Glenn Show, alongside John McWhorter. In this early 2023 episode, we talked about Glenn’s incredibly colorful life, and he subsequently published his memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. So in this conversation we got a preview of the book: the product of a remarkable American life. Read a polished transcript here. Money quotes from Glenn: “I’m a black kid from the South Side of Chicago. Those are my people. That was the pull for me to reorient myself. I was unhappy with my life as a token and a mascot. That was the unfriendly way of putting it. But there was some truth in that.” “Don’t make us [black Americans] into clients. Don’t make us into wards. Don’t make us into a project. Don’t patronize us.” “I wouldn’t take solving the racial wealth gap as a goal of public policy, to be honest with you … Why not simply address ourselves, to the extent that we’re concerned about the lack of wealth of some quarters in the society, to the lack of wealth? What’s race got to do with it?” “I did not abandon the South Side. I transcended it. … I’m not less black for being, as it were, a free man.” You can hear two clips on YouTube — how the insistence on the permanence of “white supremacy” hurts African-Americans, and how we are all “hypocrites” to some extent. Other topics covered: Glenn’s parents dealing with him as a prodigy; dropping out of college with a newborn; rebounding to MIT and Harvard; being ostracized by the black cognoscenti; his drug addiction; his conversion to Christianity; his loss of faith; falling out with the neocon right; the racial wealth gap; and affirmative action. A fan wrote at the time, “I really enjoyed the Glenn Loury episode — disarmingly honest and very human.” Another: I enjoyed hearing about Glenn’s personal journey — something I hadn’t been aware of before. Thanks for that. My one wish would have been at the end of the interview, instead of the extended expressions of mutual admiration, I would have liked to hear you both talk about how we support those who do not have the intellects you have to heal and live full lives. You both overcame great adversity and I do not discount your efforts. But you also had the brains to get to Harvard, and from there into a high-economic strata that allows you the benefits of good healthcare, vacations, good child care, etc — quality-of-life items that many of my neighbors in upstate New York will not have access to no matter how hard they work. There are a lot of regular people in the world who have a lot of shitty things happen to them, burying them under economic catastrophe and opportunity disadvantage that they will never get out from under. They don’t have the intellect to reinvent themselves. It cannot be that pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is the only answer, as some don’t even have boots to pull on. I often wonder how as a society we can have some kind of hybrid between letting individual intelligence, ambition, etc. flourish and be rewarded, and also something that makes the lives of ordinary people less grueling. That would have been something I’d have liked to hear you and Glenn talk about. I agree with you. In fact, Charles Murray and I discussed those themes on the Dishcast, and here’s a key excerpt: Similar themes cropped up during our episode with David Goodhart — author of Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect. A clip from that pod: Back to the Glenn pod, another listener: I can’t stop myself from adding to your discussion of the racial wealth gap the simple observation that we have for a century taxed the creation of wealth while subsidizing consumption — instead of doing the more common-sense opposite: get the boot off of the throat of wealth creation and use consumption taxes to fund collective objectives. Political “reality” is oft cited as the reason we can’t reform this system, but technology and communication are getting closer to helping us change that reality. Plus, the transition from wealth taxes to consumption taxes can be made wealth-neutral, income-neutral, or progressive with Unconditional Basic Income algorithms. You would do well to have Andrew Yang and Scott Santens on the Dishcast to contemplate how we might come up with policy algorithms to, for example, help more pre-K kids get the sort of love and attention to prepare them to succeed where so many others are failing. (Just one upside of UBI.) Another responded to both Glenn and a Dish thread related to race: You published a revealing letter from someone who reads scripts in Hollywood. It was refreshing to see this insider acknowledge the strong taboo against portraying black characters in a negative light. Complicated characters offer far richer possibilities for dramatization than simplistic ones, and as another reader observed, it also undermines writers’ entertainment objectives. Recently, I watched HBO’s The Undoing, a psychological thriller: The show had the makings of an excellent whodunnit, at least until the fourth episode (out of six). That was when suspicion seemed to fall upon Fernando, a surly, tough-looking Puerto Rican from East Harlem. Any sentient viewer could see this was a misdirection. HBO was never going to make a show where the affluent white suspect was exonerated, and the underprivileged dark-skinned guy was the killer. So, that did it for The Undoing. Is this too trivial an issue to draw attention to? I don’t think so. When I was younger, Hollywood had the reverse problem. Screenwriters and filmmakers failed to show the full spectrum of humanity. They tended to overlook African-Americans, or else they presented them simplistically or cartoonishly. Often enough, the portrayals were offensive. But now, in Hollywood — as in so many other places — we’ve replaced one form of chauvinism (that disadvantaged African-Americans) with another (that elevates them). The point is simple and obvious, yet remarkable in its capacity for causing “offense.” To simply argue that people should be treated equally, as individuals, rather than on the basis of group identity, is to open oneself to torrents of bad-faith criticisms, gaslighting, and splenetic abuse. (I can hear the Dish’s critics in my mind’s eye: “Why are Andrew Sullivan’s readers so invested in wanting to seeing POC portrayed as rapists and murders?”) Relatedly, I loved your conversation with Glenn Loury. I found myself chuckling as Glenn talked about his uncle, from the South Side of Chicago, who accidentally flirted with the trans economist and spit out his fancy hors d’oeuvres at the Harvard reception. It was a comic scene, expertly told, with mirth, warmth, and insight. But it probably could not be portrayed in Hollywood. Mostly recently on Glenn’s own podcast, he had a righteous rant against the bigotry and low expectations of Cambridge regarding Jason Arday. Here’s a longer video about Arday on The Glenn Show, led by McWhorter: Here’s a Dish reader in the London, responding to my column on Arday (and the Trump cult): Numerous public figures here in the UK, including Mayor Sadiq Khan, have expressed outrage at the intense media scrutiny that Jason Arday endured prior to his death. Many have signed a petition calling for public inquiry, describing the media coverage as “two weeks of relentless harassment,” “vicious witch hunt”, “horrible media attention.” They insist the campaign was racist because other individuals accused of plagiarism in academia “had not been subjected to the attention Arday had received.” First of all, all public figures who have anomalies in their background are going to be subject to media scrutiny. Secondly, this was a BFD. We’re not talking about a professor at a backwater university, but someone at one of the top 10 universities in the world, and one that was under pressure to increase its minority representation of both students and faculty. As a big story, the media went after it. That’s what they do; that’s what they always do. Therefore, the idea that the media scrutiny of Mr. Arday was racist is highly questionable. Given his fragile mental condition, the intense media scrutiny was in all likelihood the immediate cause of his death, and it’s understandable that his friends and colleagues — especially those who rallied around him and supported in his final days — are outraged. However, the root cause of this man’s death was not racism in the media, but the fact that one of the top universities in the world compromised its standards to hire a minority candidate who clearly was not qualified for the position. This is what ultimately led to the tragic death of Mr. Arday. One more on the Arday tragedy: Commentators have been predicting the end of the Trump and woke cults for several years now, but like Rasputin, these cults keep on rising from what should be fatal blows and causing more havoc. And the reason is the same: What is the alternative to these cults? I won’t speak to the haplessness of the Democrats, but academia faces ethically bleak prospects. Conservatives rightly deplore the basic unfairness that leads to white professors being shut out of an extremely competitive job market while less qualified minority PhDs receive abundant offers. (I’m thinking of Jukka Savolainen and Kevin McCaffree’s statistics about sociology hires, and the situation for white humanities professors is far worse.) But is the only alternative to this unfairness “race realism”? If one wants to understand why British academics have defended Jason Arday for as long as they have, it may be because his principal accuser was Nathan Cofnas, who has argued that, in a true meritocracy, the number of black professors at Harvard “would approach zero percent.” I don’t believe that the situation is as bad as Cofnas says. (I know plenty of brilliant and objectively accomplished minority academics.) But the numbers are still dire. We don’t want to live in a world where a chancer like Arday is feted as a major intellectual, but do we want to live in a world where there are hardly any black faculty at our elite institutions? The question is, can we learn to live with equality of opportunity without equality of outcome? In the state of nature, there is no law dictating that equal numbers of men and women and proportionate numbers of different ethnic groups will be attracted to and thrive in every endeavor. Over 80 percent of young people going into veterinary science are women. Over 80 percent of young people going into mathematical physics are men. About 90 percent of the winners in the Scripps spelling bee in the past two decades have been South Asian. Do these lopsided figures reflect an unjust situation that needs to be corrected? Or would efforts to correct this situation be what creates the injustice? It seems to me that we want to foster a culture where people feel supported in environments where members of their sex, race, or ethnicity are rare — but not by artificially inflating the numbers of their sex, race, or ethnicity, and in doing so, tarring them with the brush of a “DEI hire.” But that is more easily said than done. Here’s one more email for the week, from the VFYW’s architect-sleuth responding to the invite to a BBQ posted in the latest contest: If there is still room, I’d like to come down from NYC and join the sleuth meetup in Alexandria on September 26. I’m glad someone suggested it. I have long thought it would be fun to meet other sleuths. My carriage house, which I’ve talked about on the VFYW a few times, would have been a nice location for a future meetup, but as it happens, last month we got an unsolicited offer for it. Since we are empty nesters and were considering downsizing anyways, we accepted. We are temporarily going to rent for the next year or two while we look for the next apartment / renovation project. Since we currently don’t have much of a view, we’ve only been checking out rentals with views. Here are the views from the windows of the two finalists: FYI, here’s a re-posting of the invite from the super-sleuth in Alexandria hosting the meetup: Please join DMV-area VFYW enthusiasts for a Fall Picnic in our backyard on September 26 (Sept 27 rain-date) from 5-8 pm in the Delray neighborhood of Alexandria, VA. My husband and I are within walking distance of the Braddock Road (yellow/blue line) metro stop … no sleuthing required. We’ll provide BBQ, a vegan dish, drinks, and cutlery for the first 50 RSVP participants. Please feel free to bring, if you’re inspired, a potluck dish to share, and VFYW memories encouraged ... with recipes! We will provide further details to RSVP folks. (For example, there is free on-street parking, but it’s tight.) Let’s visit, share stories around the fire pit, and plot more VFYW adventures … with a group photo. If you’re interested, RSVP to contest@andrewsullivan.com, including any plus-ones. And if you’d like to bring a small potluck offering, please note that as well, along with any ideas you might have for the meetup. See you next Friday.