https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/wrongthink-on-race-with-glenn-c-loury
Four decades ago, Glenn C. Loury became the first tenured black professor of economics in Harvard’s history. Ever since then, he has made waves for his willingness to buck the elite intellectual establishment; for his iconoclastic ideas about race and inequality; and for his incisive cultural criticism.
He is a man of many apparent contradictions: he rails against the divisiveness of woke politics from his post as the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics Brown University, one of America’s most left wing campuses. He worries about what the death of God means for the country — though he calls his own past religious beliefs a “benevolent self-delusion,” even as he admits they saved his life. In the ‘80s, Glenn challenged his fellow black Americans to combat the “enemy from within,” while he himself battled personal demons like addiction.
For my part, I think Glenn embodies what the philosophers call a man in full. Glenn is a man who, in a time of lies told for the sake of political convenience, strives to tell the truth even when the truth is hard. Or complicated. Or an affront to our feelings. Or contradicts what we wish were true.
On today’s episode of Honestly we discuss: race, racism, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Tony Timpa, school choice, standardized tests, crack, sexual infidelity, Christianity, the Nation of Islam, neoconservatism, and pretty much every other hot-button subject you can imagine.
Plus, Glenn’s own remarkable life story and what it says about America.
Below are some of the highlights from our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.
