Breaking ranks: Glenn Loury's change of heart—and mind

GLENN C. LOURY had a lot going for him in the 1980s. The first black to be tenured in economics at Harvard, Loury was a famed black neoconservative and opponent of affirmative action. He dined at the White House and joined the Reagan administration. Conservative journals vied for his work. He was on the "A" list for events hosted by people like William F. Buckley Jr. and William Bennett.

But when Loury hit bottom as the result of a drug addiction id 1988, it was the 23rd Psalm, not friends in high places, that rescued him. He was in a court-ordered drug-rehabilitation program when an outreach worker from a black church urged him to pray the psalm.

"I had never considered that the words actually applied to me," said Loury during our interview. "I hadn't thought hard about what the `valley of the shadow of death' might mean in my own life. I hadn't considered how the metaphor `anointing one's head with oil' translated into the balm and succor that I was able to draw on in my darkest hour."

Although Loury had not been to church in years, he accepted an invitation from the outreach worker to attend her African Methodist Episcopal church. It was Easter.

"So I am back in church, and there is the music and the rocking and rhythms of speech and the preaching that I knew as a youth. It was a straight-ahead sermon about the meaning of Easter ... I could not stop crying. I wept through the entire thing. I realized, darn it, I sure need saving. I know the depths of my own sin and fallenness. I was just sort of swept away."

Loury was baptized one year later. Afterward, he began a process of change in his personal life and political views that included a falling out with those who had been his fellow conservatives. He is now the head of an institute on race and society at Boston University.

In a new book, Loury, who now calls himself a progressive, completes his move into the black intellectual mainstream, adopting a moderate liberal stance somewhere between the black conservatives who advocate self-reliance and the radicals calling for slavery reparations. The Anatomy of Racial Inequality marks a dramatic change in Loury's thinking about the causes of racial inequality. Where he formerly focused on the internal enemies that held black Americans back, he now examines the attitudes of white people and the social structures based on those attitudes that reinforce negative stereotypes of blacks.

According to Loury, some disparities make people think there is something wrong with the social order rather than the group in question. Other disparities elicit no response because people believe that they are explained by the intrinsic nature of the group in question. The latter response stigmatizes that group, he contends.

Over the past half-century, Loury notes, American culture has rejected overt white racism. But it has not addressed the deeper problem of unconscious racist attitudes based on assumptions about the intrinsic nature of blacks. These attitudes may lack a rational basis, but they have become embedded in social structures in ways that limit and predict the behavior of blacks. Thus they have deepened into stigma, he writes.

While much of the book is devoted to empirical evidence, Loury says he is also concerned by a "spiritual question" that stems from the soul-crushing effects of racial stigma. Loury explains the problem by citing racist affronts he has experienced and decisions he has faced about how to respond.

"Am I going to be resentful? Am I going to feel anger? Am I going to relive the experience over and over again? Or am I going to transcend it, look beyond it, pray for the person and sincerely do so? It seems to me that there is a similar spiritual question that confronts African-Americans, a question about whether or not in the face of stigmatism we are going to allow our souls to be so scarred and bedraggled in this undertow of negativity."

Once internalized, stigmatism can make African-Americans afraid to trust other people or themselves, Loury says.

Loury's break with his political past occurred after the publication in the mid-1990s of three books on race that he found intellectually flawed. His opposition to The End of Racism, by Dinesh D'Souza, a writer and scholar of Indian descent, was the most publicized, and it led to Loury's resignation from the American Enterprise Institute. Although he personally likes D'Souza, Loury said he found the book to be full of "sneering, cartoonlike provocations" about race.

Perhaps even more important, Loury said, was his belated recognition that Charles Murray's The Bell Curve was rife with errors and contained "sweeping conclusions based on poor science." Finally, Loury said he was also disturbed by what he regards as intellectual lapses and racist assumptions in America in Black and White, by Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom.

BUT THERE WERE also personal factors that bore on Loury's change. One was Uncle Alfred, a relative and patriarchal figure on the South Side of Chicago, where Loury grew up. One day, in the midst of his rocket ride as a "bad boy black neoconservative from Harvard," as Loury himself puts it, he had a visit with the uncle, who was clearly troubled. The uncle said: "I don't see us in anything you do. It's like we're the whipping boy for you, like you're exploiting your insider status as a black to give comfort to all these people who hate us. Why are you doing that?"