Glenn Loury: Shades of Black

Black and white: the phrase suggests two polar opposites and a debate that can be boiled down into simple, irreconcilable positions. In an American context, given the country’s long history of racial division, the phrase has more loaded associations. So vast is this rift that our discourse on race has assumed a corresponding dichotomy: current discussions about race inevitably consist of “for” or “against” arguments about a limited number of policy topics. An intellectual who refuses to bow to these seemingly rigid dualities, then, both replenishes an increasingly worn-out vocabulary and creates some breathing space for approaches that have been left out of the dialogue on race in America.

Glenn C. Loury, who sets out his philosophies on race in America in his new book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, has established himself firmly in the gray areas of the discussion about race. An economist by training, he is currently a professor and the founding director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University. Early in his career, his work in economics led him to the idea of “social capital”: that “family and community backgrounds can play an important role...in determining individual achievement.” The racial divide, he posited, was a result of African-Americans’ lack of this social capital. Until the late 1980s, he was known as an advocate of the more conservative view that black society was ultimately responsible for this deficiency. This stance, coming from an African-American, won him the appreciation of the right and drew a certain amount of rancor from the left, particularly among liberal black Americans.

Prudence L. Carter, an assistant professor of sociology, speaks about the existence of “a notion of fictive kinship among African-Americans.” Referring to Loury’s negative reception by the black community, she explains, “One is considered to be a transgressor because he or she doesn’t hold to the racial party line. Blackness is equated with a certain political and social orientation. Anyone outside of the dominant conceptualization of it will find themselves sanctioned.”

During the first half of his career, Loury was active as a conservative voice in the discussion of race, seemingly indifferent to how he was seen within the black community. Personal troubles, the alienation that his conservative views engendered and a religious reawakening all helped contributed to a profound change of heart. Since the mid-’90s, he has come to criticize many of the conservative views he once espoused. To some extent, he has returned to the ideological fold and been received, with some reservation, by several prominent intellectuals who hold racially liberal positions.

The Anatomy of Racial Inequality is based upon a series of talks Loury gave at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in 2000. The book’s palpable reluctance to discuss issues in terms of their real-world connotations speaks to Loury’s personal experience of the messy debate on racial inequality in America. His confidence often seems to falter when he talks about “hot” topics. On the issue of affirmative action, for example, he couches his debate in a theoretical “thought experiment” (a real-world example considered in the abstract), then skirts the issue, then makes a revealing comment about why he has danced around the point: “I desperately want to avoid having the far-reaching implications of my argument projected onto the narrow and partisan ground of the debate over racial preferences.”

Indeed, that debate has been highly publicized, and highly polarized, by the American media. Ingrid T. Monson, Jones Professor of African-American Music, says, “I don’t think there’s enough credit given for the complexity of people’s thinking and practice [when it comes to affirmative action]. Affirmative action becomes a whipping boy and a red herring, in many ways.”

One of Loury’s most useful contributions in this book is his identification of the practice of racial discrimination as another red herring in the discourse on race. He contrasts racial discrimination—treating people unequally because of their race—with a phenomenon he defines and presents as more important: “racial stigma.”

What causes racial stigma? Professor of Government Jennifer Hochschild says that America’s racial history makes it “difficult [for white Americans] to fully see blacks as equivalently human.” Loury argues that this racial stigma restricts the social interactions and opportunities available to blacks. This “social divide,” Loury says, leads to “racial differences in the acquisition of productive skills” that thwart African-Americans before they even enter areas of public life where racial discrimination is illegal. Add this to the material disadvantages, like the wealth gap, that black families suffer because of the historical fact of slavery and, as Carter puts it, “We [African-Americans] are still playing catch up.”

Carter stresses the importance of this gap despite her acknowledgment of legislation meant to counter it. “A significant part of our society,” she says, “believes that since laws have been put in place to ‘equalize’ things, everyone has equal opportunity.” Indeed, Loury explains that since our country’s laws (as well as its ideals of freedom, democracy and equal opportunity) condemn racism, many Americans see policies that explicitly take race into account as unnecessary, or even as a sort of “reverse racism.” At this point, the popular discourse on race offers two options: do we consider race or do we ignore it completely when creating new policies?

Conservative takes on the latter vary. Some claim that “race-conscious” policies are superfluous because white racism is no longer a significant obstacle to black progress. Others maintain that these programs serve only to intensify the racial divide. Some conservatives argue that the government has no responsibility to consider race because the causes of the racial divide lie within the black community itself: in the innate inferiority of African-Americans (as the infamous 1994 book The Bell Curve suggests) or in the community’s own inadequacy (according to the “black pathology” argument). Liberal thinkers contend that the government should take race into account because American society at large bears responsibility for the disadvantages many African-Americans face. Their policies on race consider diversity to be a desirable social goal and tend in some measure to compensate blacks for the economic, social, political or education power they lack.

Loury’s “middle way” between ignoring and accounting for race is insightful and well-defended. He is critical of the constructionist argument for the absence of race-consciousness in policy debates. According to this view, differential treatment of individuals of different races, even if the results are positive, violates the American principle of individual autonomy (every person must be treated equally regardless of personal characteristics like race or gender). Loury contrasts the “good” of individual autonomy with the “good” of attempting, “because of an unjust history, to reduce inequalities of wealth and power between racial groups.” His conclusion, though based upon a “liberal” commitment to fighting inequality, is that there are no easy answers: if we can, we ought to create policies that ignore race, but sometimes moral sense demands that we implement policies based on it.

From a literary standpoint, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality is a forceful, well-argued and innovative scrutiny of the problem of racial inequality within the United States which engages and challenges readers in spite of, or perhaps even because of its highly academic approach. Loury’s unique style blends abstract philosophical discourse with the terminology of the social sciences. He writes logically and eloquently, rarely succumbing to the pitfalls of technical jargon, and knows when a colloquialism or concrete example will bring his point home. The one significant weakness in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality is the distance that it deliberately puts between itself and the day-to-day, concrete world. On one level, this means that his language is sometimes too subtle. Loury’s abstraction is effective when it tries to examine an issue in its purity, but sometimes it blurs a significant and concrete point.

On another level, however, Loury’s academic distance is an attempt to legitimize and distinguish his work as a part of the discussion on race in America. His distaste for the pat, comprehensive ideological boxes that are available for intellectuals—particularly black intellectuals—on the subject of race coincides with a concern that the hackneyed terms that guide our discourse may be slowing, or stopping, progress. Both his biography and his philosophy break the mold of an overly simplistic way of thinking about race in America. Hopefully, the innovation and cogency of his vision will triumph over the partisan debates and self-defensive abstractions that surround this treatise on racial inequality.

books

The Anatomy of Racial Inequality

By Glenn C. Loury

Harvard University Press

190 pp., $22.95