Glenn C. Loury's The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
Campbell, James T.
THE ANATOMY OF RACIAL INEQUALITY by Glenn C. Loury Harvard University Press, 2002 160 pp $22.95 THE RIGHTWARD migration of progressive intellectuals into the ranks of neoconservatism is a...
...A few months later, he was arrested for cocaine possession...
...The most egregious example occurs in a thought experiment on affirmative action, introduced to illustrate the "vicious circles" idea...
...The net effect is to perpetuate the disparity in achievement, confirming the original belief that black applicants require preferential treatment...
...Readers will find no answers to that question in this book...
...How do we combat it...
...The problem is not simply in our institutions but in ourselves, embedded and reproduced in the very ways in which we see, interpret, and act upon the world...
...The questions, at least, are clear...
...He stresses the importance of black self-help, a consistent strain in his thinking, and devotes an inordinate amount of time to defending the legitimacy of black institutions against the imagined objections of doctrinaire, "color blind" liberals...
...But it has been crucially important in combating both historic and current processes of racial exclusion...
...C]onsider the incentives for achievement that will have been created," he writes...
...Perhaps he simply cannot bring himself to defend a policy epitomizing the kind of "liberal" social engineering he spent nearly twenty years denouncing...
...African Americans today sit on juries...
...They sometimes pay more to get them, but the differential is a fraction of what it was a generation ago and it narrows by the year, thanks to legal action brought under the rubric of the Civil Rights Act...
...In the decades since, innumerable scholars, pundits, and politicians have weighed in, highlighting everything from de-industrialization to progressive demobilization to Sartrean "bad faith," not to mention the endless variations on "culture of poverty" theory...
...Loury sets predictable parameters: applications to a college or professional school reveal a "substantial disparity in the academic merit of black and white applicants...
...The Supreme Court may soon give us an opportunity to test that proposition...
...Meet the new Glenn Loury...
...In 1996, he left the Center for New Black Leadership, an organization he had founded with Shelby Steele, in a dispute over California's Proposition 209, which eliminated affirmative action...
...Du Bois lectures at Harvard University...
...He underscores the argument with a series of short (sometimes dubious) "thought experiments" designed to illuminate the "vicious circles of cumulative causation" through which racial disparities are perpetuated and reproduced...
...The Anatomy of Racial Inequality presents the lectures he delivered on the occasion...
...Black Americans had the responsibility and the right to control their own destinies, he argued...
...But how, short of divine intervention, are we to get there...
...AS EVEN THIS bare summary suggests, there is much to ponder here...
...The new Loury bites the hand that once fed him, deriding "conservative commentators" for their "simplistic social ethics and sophomoric social psychology...
...It would also surely reveal the continuing reality of formal racial discrimination in the United States, and hence the continuing relevance of antidiscrimination law...
...Adopt as an axiom from the outset a belief in the equal humanity of these sons and daughters of slaves...
...Racial inequality is not simply a vestige of our nation's "unlovely past" but an unfolding reality, routinely reproduced by ordinary, decent, rational people...
...Perhaps he is trying to mask the gnawing insecurity he himself feels as a possible beneficiary of the policy...
...The first centers on the concept of "stigma...
...HY IS LOURY so reticent about affirmative action...
...He entered a drug treatment program...
...They take out mortgages and life insurance policies...
...Yet, as that formulation suggests, he remains curiously conflicted on the issue...
...Most important, black people vote and hold public office...
...They enjoy access to public facilities all over the country, including hundreds of state universities from which they were legally excluded as recently as the 1960s...
...If one truly wants to understand unequal educational attainment, surely the first place to look is to the yawning racial disparities in American public education...
...In their absence, he has written a most peculiar book, at once a rousing call for immediate action to combat an enemy that threatens our moral and political life and a grim appraisal of the utter inadequacy of the weapons at our disposal...
...Equally important, it helps us to see how such disparity comes to seem "natural and non-dissonant" to observers, a process that is vital to understanding the otherwise bewildering absence of empathy in America today...
...THE ANATOMY OF RACIAL INEQUALITY by Glenn C. Loury Harvard University Press, 2002 160 pp $22.95 THE RIGHTWARD migration of progressive intellectuals into the ranks of neoconservatism is a leitmotif of twentiethcentury American politics...
...Where the old Loury might have used such logic to deflect or minimize allegations of racism, his intent here is to highlight the severity of the problem...
...Antidiscrimination policies enacted in the civil rights era, he argues, may have succeeded in abolishing discrimination in formal political and economic institutions—"discrimination in contract"—but they have done little to redress "discrimination in contact...
...Had the officers steadfastly stuck to racially uniform standards," Loury suggests, "they might thereby have created a factual circumstance in which their diversity goals could be met without any use of race in the admissions process...
...A servant to the very rich, he remained a working-class chauvinist who took pride in his roots on Chicago's South Side...
...A generation or two ago, many white Americans were prepared to kill to preserve racial segregation in restaurants and bus station waiting rooms...
...Indeed, in one remarkable passage, Loury goes even further, suggesting that the dynamics of racial inequality, rooted as they are in the "complex interactions of myriad, autonomous decision makers," may be beyond "human agency" altogether...
...Well, what can you do...
...In 1994, he lashed out at conservatives for their uncritical embrace of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's thinly veiled attack on black intelligence...
...I N THE FINAL sections of the book, Loury makes some efforts to escape the cul-de-sac into which he has argued himself...
...In 1987, he was nominated as undersecretary of education by William Bennett, but withdrew amid charges that he had assaulted his young mistress...
...As such, it is all but impervious to desegregation orders, antidiscrimination laws, and other traditional "liberal" remedies...
...It represents nothing less than a "withholding of the presupposition of common humanity" from an entire class of people...
...Extending an argument first made by Gunnar Myrdal, Loury shows how this stigma operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy, with whites, persuaded of black people's flawed character and inferior capacity, acting in ways that distort character and diminish capacity, thus confirming the original presumption...
...You say that more than a third of black children grow up in severe poverty...
...The important point, for present purposes, is simply to note the perils of decontextualization...
...Slavery, he argues, inscribed a stigma on black bodies, a badge of dishonor that has persisted long after the institution's abolition...
...admission officers, in order to "meet their racial diversity goals," admit black applicants with lower qualifications...
...The new Loury describes the plight of black Americans as a "collective" tragedy for which "the entire nation bears a responsibility" The old Loury enjoyed lavish support from Republican foundations and regular access to such journals as American Enterprise and Commentary...
...BOOKS According to a profile in the New York Times Magazine (January 20, 2002) he led a double life during his last years at Harvard, lecturing by day and trolling the streets at night, freebasing cocaine and enacting many of the same "pathological" behaviors he decried in his writing...
...It is woven into the fabric of our lives—our perceptions, our preferences, our personal relationships...
...We are "cognitive prisoners...
...Tellingly, the Voting Rights Act does not even appear in the index of Loury's book...
...The fallacies are obvious...
...Black students will recognize the lower standard and perhaps slack off, while white students, anticipating more exacting scrutiny, will exert greater effort (or, one is tempted to suggest, file lawsuits for reverse discrimination...
...Leftward migration by a conservative intellectual is a more novel phenomenon...
...Loury interweaves "stigma" with a second argument, growing out of his early work on soDISSENT / Summer 2002 n 91 BOOKS cial capital...
...He alludes to the need for broad, structural transformation, but offers no further specification...
...It deserves better than this kind of tepid, apologetic support...
...In 1999, Loury was formally drummed out of the conservative camp by Norman Podhoretz, a man who knows something about apostasy...
...This is hardly a new problem...
...Although not exactly Paul on the road to Damascus, Loury did some soul searching...
...RDOTED IN economic theory but ranging freely across disciplines, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality is as unclassifiable as its author...
...I desperately want to avoid having the far-reaching implications of my argument projected onto the narrow and partisan grounds of the debate over race preferences," he writes plaintively...
...Though still unequivocally a conservative, the Loury of the early 1990s was less predictable, less willing to toe the party line...
...the new Glenn Loury calls for "broad-based, system-wide interventions" to attack the "national disgrace" of racial inequality...
...Certainly informal processes of cognition and contact are important, but can we really fathom the reproduction of racial inequality—or devise ways to combat it— without at least some consideration of the changing shape of the American labor market, the crisis of public education, the role of federal housing and transportation policies in underwriting segregation, changes in welfare policy, differential access to health care, and so forth...
...We need a "paradigm shift," a "common baseline of historical memory," an "a priori commitment" to racial equality...
...There is even evidence to suggest that, contrary to Eisenhower's admonition, changes in law do affect people's "hearts and minds...
...The same might be said of antidiscrimination laws, which Loury continually disparages...
...Any reader of Dissent can retail half a dozen such stories, each a blend of political disillusionment and personal rancor, principle, and opportunism...
...He came to success early...
...Indeed, aside from the early allusions to the stigma of slavery, there is no history in the book—not a word about Reconstruction and its aftermath, the Great Migration, the New Deal, the civil rights movement (I), or the twenty-year long assault on the black poor by Loury's erstwhile right-wing cronies...
...Similarly, for someone who speaks of the need for broad "structural" change, Loury is curiously inattentive to social structure...
...Unfortunately—or rather fortunately—the book also offers ample scope for criticism...
...Though nominally accepted as full citizens, African Americans continue to bear the burden of social exclusion, rooted in their continuing stigmatization...
...From his lips to God's ear...
...To be sure, civil rights legislation alone will not end racial inequality, which is indeed embedded in the structure of our economic, political, and social lives...
...Ultimately, their salvation would come from their own efforts, not from following the false prophets of the "middle-class" civil rights establishment and certainly not from trafficking with the "anti-capitalist, envy-mongering left...
...The old Loury exhorted African Americans to stop bleating about "racism" and to focus on "the enemy within"—welfare dependency, teenage pregnancy, and other "problematic behaviors" of the so-called "underclass...
...Affirmative action receives "too much attention," he complains...
...What is required . . . is a commitment on the part of the public, the political elite, the opinionshaping media, and so on to take responsibility for such situations as the contemporary plight of the urban black poor, and to understand them in a general way as a consequence of an ethically indefensible past...
...Bayard Bustin posed it in an influential 1964 essay, written before passage of the Civil Rights Act...
...That African Ameri92 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 cans, roughly 12 percent of the population, represent a majority of the nation's prisoners...
...These are not trivial gains...
...Unfortunately, his portrayal of liberalism is so caricatured and capacious— referring variously to liberal theories of justice and to neoclassical economics, to Great Society statism and to Reaganite conservatism— as to be incoherent...
...and if they still provoke raised eyebrows, and sometimes worse, they are no longer an invitation to murder...
...94 n DISSENT / Summer 2002...
...A misbegotten offspring of behaviorism, neoclassical economics, and rational choice theory, the thought experiment has a dubious history in poverty research, most notoriously in Charles Murray's 1982 book Losing Ground, the bible of the antiwelfare movement...
...That's just how "they" are...
...Alas, it does not necessarily make for a more edifying tale...
...Yet even as Loury reached the pinnacle of political success, his life spun out of control...
...Not only does it address deficits of social capital, by projecting previously excluded groups into the kinds of educational and professional settings in which such capital is accrued, but it has also created unprecedented opportunities for black and white Americans to interact in conditions of at least relative equality, thus helping to interrupt the cycle of biased social cognition...
...Loury, mercifully, no longer traffics in that rot—he even includes a short critique of rational-choice theory—yet his thought experiments likewise BOOKS present people in contextual vacuums, responding "rationally" to perceived "incentives...
...Loury's analysis, although perhaps less epochal than he implies, does illuminate some of the mechanisms by which racial disparity is reproduced...
...A year later, he resigned from the American Enterprise Institute over its support for Dinesh D'Souza's execrable The End of Racism...
...In 1991, he moved across the Charles to accept a chaired professorship at John Silber's Boston University...
...It is not (nor was it intended to be) a jobs or antipoverty program...
...The old Loury used to warn about that sort of thing...
...Most important, he looked anew at his right-wing masters...
...How is racial inequality reproduced in a society in which discrimination by race has been legally abolished...
...In this, as in so many other ways, the late twentieth century uncannily echoes the late nineteenth century...
...In contrast to Thomas Sowell, who acted the part of rightwing race man for most of the first term, Loury made a plausible spokesman, lacing conservative bromides about self-help, moral rearmament, and the perils of affirmative action with a healthy dose of black nationalism...
...Loury's argument advances along two broad fronts...
...Today, those same people share public facilities with black people without a second thought...
...The discussion of affirmative action is of particular interest, because it provides a benchmark to measure Loury's transformation...
...Loury was the most interesting of the Reagan-era black neoconservatives...
...Trained in economics at M.I.T., he pioneered the concept of "social capital," the web of informal "connections," associations, and networks of information that condition economic success...
...Yet however familiar the question rings, it remains profoundly important, particularly today, with the Supreme Court apparently poised to deliver the coup de grace to affirmative action...
...Such laws seem especially toothless today, thanks to judicial decisions that have narrowed their compass to next to nothing...
...The effect is a bit like listening to a pedantic physician explain all the reasons that your tumor is inoperable...
...He joined a church and was "born again...
...Whether sustained historical and structural analysis would lead to a more hopeful conclusion is an open question, but at the very least it would suggest that American race relations are hardly as unchanging as Loury believes...
...To be sure, affirmative action is no panacea...
...Curiously for a book heralding its author's break with conservatism, the voice that emerges from the pages is that of Dwight Eisenhower, warning his countrymen that no amount of legislative legerdemain can alter the "hearts and minds" of men...
...But whatever the explanation, there is no mistaking his ambivalence...
...Murray used an imaginary couple, Harold and Phyllis, to show how public assistance victimized the poor, by rewarding indolence and out-of-wedlock childbirth...
...Loury still manages to make "liberal" sound like an epithet...
...Interracial marriages, illegal in thirtyseven states not so long ago, are today legal and increasingly commonplace...
...Even if one accepts the existence of a racial disparity in "academic merit," it is hard to imagine that the "biased social cognition" of college admissions officers has much to do with it, and harder still to believe that adopting a unitary standard— that is, abolishing affirmative action—would solve the problem...
...JAMES T. CAMPBELL is an associate professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies, and History at Brown University...
...Stigma" entails more than distaste for certain groups or a susceptibility to negative "stereotypes...
...Most obviously, he hopes to move discussions of race away from what he sees as fruitless moralizing: the sources of America's race problem, he insists, lay not in the realm of morality but in the realm of "cognition," in processes of meaning, classification, interpretation...
...Upon finishing his dissertation, he migrated up the Charles River to Harvard, where in 1982 he became the first African American to secure tenure in the department of economics...
...The irony (at risk of indulging in the sort of shallow reductionism he pleads against) is that affirmative action would appear to be the perfect prescription for responding to Loury's diagnosis...
...Not only do they lack access to the associations and connections vital to professional preferment, but they are deprived of the enriching interactions and experiences that enable human beings to discover and develop their talents in the first place...
...The old Glenn Loury touted supply-side economics and Jack Kemp's enterprise zones...
...pundits' preoccupation with the issue bespeaks "intellectual shallowness...
...Loury's inattention to historical and political context is most obvious in his use of "thought experiments...
...The very fact that right-wingers determined to roll back the legislative legacy of the civil rights movement have had to resort to "coded," ostensibly race neutral appeals is itself perverse proof of how far we have come...
...In promoting "stigma" over more familiar concepts such as "racism" and "discrimination," Loury has several goals in mind...
...The event had all the trappings of a political rehabilitation, as the notorious exneoconservative was gathered back into the 90 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 fold by Henry Louis Gates, William Julius Wilson, and the other neoliberal luminaries of Harvard's (now depleted) Afro-American Studies' "Dream Team...
...Though not yet prepared to endorse affirmative action, Loury freely registered his reservations about the proposition, as well as his skepticism of the morality of those who, in the name of "raceblindness," blithely tolerated the most appalling racial inequality...
...But antidiscrimination DISSENT / Summer 2002 • 93 BOOKS laws have not been inconsequential either, and we "demote" them (to use Loury's phrase) at our peril...
...The old Loury warned of diluting standards and undermining black self confidence...
...And, of course, he indulges in liberal bashing, a sport that suits both his old conservative and his new radical identities...
...The new Loury dismisses critics of affirmative action as hypocritical and "indifferent," and professes himself "not at all reluctant" to defend the policy...
...To encompass this dual reality, to discern the glimmers of hope and political possibility in the racial storm billowing around us requires historical imagination, analytical balance, and a broad tolerance for ambiguity—precisely the qualities that Loury, in both old and new incarnations, has always lacked...
...Whether the argument is proffered in terms of contact or cognition, the prospect Loury sketches is utterly bleak...
...Clearly he has changed...
...Commentary declined to publish his review of the book...
...In the spring of 2000, Loury was invited to deliver the W.E.B...
...Perhaps he is reluctant to invest political capital in a policy that appears foredoomed...
...Defiantly iconoclastic, intellectually self-confident to the point of arrogance, he was also palpably insecure...
...For someone forever condemning others as "ahistorical," Loury is a very poor historian...
...In the end, Loury is reduced to exhortation...
...For all his academic distinction, Loury owed his public visibility to his work as spokesman for the Reagan Revolution, especially during Ronald Reagan's second term...
Vol. 49 • July 2002 • No. 3
