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The reorientation of Glenn Loury

By David J. Craig

Few social commentators could draw the heated reaction that Glenn Loury has with a book as politically moderate as his latest, Anatomy of Racial Inequality.

Glenn Loury, a UNI professor, CAS economics professor, and director of BU's Institute on Race and Social Division. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Loury, a UNI professor, CAS economics professor, and director of BU's Institute on Race and Social Division, rose to prominence in the 1980s as an outspoken critic of post-Civil Rights social programs such as affirmative action, saying they stigmatized blacks as inferior. But in Anatomy (Harvard University Press, 2002), Loury, who has been drifting toward the political center from the right for the past several years, says that America owes a social debt to blacks, denounces "color blindness" as a standard for college admissions, and urges that the country rethink the way its drug war targets poor urban youth. Few reviewers have resisted scrutinizing his apparent political pirouette.

The main obstacle to achieving racial equality in the United States, he argues in the book, is not overt racial discrimination, but what he calls "racial stigma" -- the perception among whites that blacks are inferior. Stigma, he says, leads whites to accept as unproblematic the fact that blacks are overrepresented in prisons and creates self-fulfilling stereotypes: a black employee whose boss expects him to fail sees no sense in trying.

Recently, Loury discussed with the B.U. Bridge the concept of stigma, his message to the black community, and what he calls the "Clintonism" that helped inspire his new attitude about race relations.

Bridge: Why is it important to distinguish between racial discrimination and racial stigma?

Loury: The conventional way of thinking about racial bias is to consider whether or not a group of people is being treated unfairly. I want to talk about perception, and about what underlying social processes lead us to think of some types of disparity among groups as being problematic and others not so.

Bridge: How does the concept of stigma help us understand the racial implications of America's drug war?

Loury: We have a society-wide drug problem driven by demand, and the demand doesn't know racial or income bounds. On the other hand, it's easy to see that drug trafficking, especially street trafficking, happens disproportionately in poor, urban, black, and Hispanic neighborhoods. And when we crack down on enforcement, we're hitting that population most severely. And I think that as a society we don't question whether that should be changed because that group of people is stigmatized. We think they're reaping what they've sown.

Bridge: Can affirmative action help change those perceptions?

Loury: I'm prepared to argue that if an elite institution of higher education, for example, makes it part of its mission to have some of its graduates be African-Americans and thereby inducts them into high-status positions in society, that it will help counter the impression in the minds of people that blacks are somehow not fit to be involved in those areas of life.

Bridge: Will talking about stigma make blacks feel powerless?

Loury: There are two different matters here. One is the actual facts about what is going on in society around race. Does it involve blatant discrimination against blacks? Does it involve stigmatizing perceptions that impair opportunities for blacks? That is a social science question. Whatever the answer to the first question might be, how we African-Americans ought to go about our lives is a totally separate moral and spiritual question. Should we see ourselves as pawns on a chessboard of larger forces or should we strike out to do what we can for ourselves? If I'm wrong on the first point, then we don't have a problem. But either way, we ought to try to understand what the structures are that we're acting within so we can go about our lives effectively.

Bridge: Is your message to the black community any different from what it was in 1980s?

Loury: Not really. I see myself as having addressed two different audiences. And I don't think there's a contradiction in saying that we in the African-American community first and foremost are responsible for telling our youngsters who are killing each other and having children they can't support to clean up their act, and on the other hand calling on the nation to be more sympathetic and supportive and helpful.

Bridge: Was there a particular political event that inspired you to change the emphasis in your work?

Loury: I became very disillusioned in the mid-'90s with how I saw attitudes about race congealing in the center right. An important part of that, ironically, was the Clinton ascendancy. The whole new centrist Democratic philosophy -- we're going to help people but we're never going to let Republicans beat us on the cultural issues in the way they have in the past -- had a big impact on the tone of discussion around race issues. We saw a return of the idea of the deserving poor, the idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, you shouldn't be poor, which, by implication, means that those who do not play by the rules should be poor. So it's three strikes and you're out, and with welfare, five years and you're off. For me, that's a problem.

Bridge: You first broke with the right over Proposition 209, which in 1996 banned the use of racial preferences in California hiring and university admissions.

Loury: Proposition 209 was a big problem for me, as was the kind of quasireligious fervor I saw in some of my colleagues. I would hear things like, 'I thought you were with us,' and I'd say, 'I understand your points, and I've been arguing against affirmative action for a long time, but maybe we ought to at least consider recruitment and outreach.' I mean, suppose police departments actually make an effort to produce qualified black candidates and recruit in schools. If I get 10 job offers and my equally qualified white friend gets only 2, I've benefited from a preference, but it's not the type of preference we're used to, because I'm still just as qualified as anybody. In a sense, preference is built into the very fabric of any attempt to correct for historic racial wrongs. The Proposition 209 zealots were unable to see that.

Bridge: Are you concerned that the attention paid to your political transformation distracts from your arguments?

Loury: Yeah, sometimes I deeply regret it. My book has a bit of polemic in it, but as a whole, it is a sustained social scientific argument and it ought to be evaluated on those terms. On the other hand, I realize that I invite it. Most of us don't mind talking about ourselves, and the first-person narrative is a very seductive thing. When I wrote critically about affirmative action back in the '80s and early '90s, I was always including bits of personal testimony in my analytical arguments. I don't think you can name a black public intellectual in the United States for whom that's not true.

5 April 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations