Interview with
Glenn Loury by Glenn Yu ’20 illustrator Nicholas Edwards ’23
Glenn Cartman Loury is an economist, academic, and author. In 1982, at the age of 33, he became the first Black tenured Professor of Economics in the history of Harvard University. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, and currently hosts a podcast called “The Glenn Show” on bloggingheads.tv.
Glenn Yu: I find myself in the awkward position of being uncomfortable with the liberal stance on race that seemingly denies the disturbing underlying cultural realities of the Black experience today while also being uncomfortable with the conservative stance that, in its willful acceptance of this reality, seemingly confers no meaningful solutions to it. Beyond these first-order confusions, however, what I’m most confused about is whether it’s even my place to talk about these issues at all. Glenn Loury: If we were going to try to be systematic and rigorous in developing a theory—an epistemology, or a theory of knowledge—to know what it would mean to know something, we would have to develop a theory about the question of experience, the authority of experience, and the personalization of it. I happen to take a rather strict view that regards with suspicion the assertion of authority in the realm of knowledge based upon identity or based upon Blackness. Let’s take this example: Were the actions we’ve all seen of the police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, expressions of racial hatred? I think that we have no reason to suppose that about him, absent further evidence. There are plenty of alternative accounts that could be given, from negligence to him just being a mean son of a bitch. Sure, we could project motive onto him, onto the expression on his face, onto his smirk; we could feed thoughts into his head that make
10
FALL 2020 | ISSUE 01
him symbolically emblematic of a certain trauma or sickness in American society, and this all may or may not be true. You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying you’re not Black. They say, you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear. How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? What are we talking about here? What is Blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or, do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in a housing project too. I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative authority move when it’s played. It’s an ad hominem move. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that you might begin to see the problem. What experiences are Black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their Blackness? If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a Black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being Black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument. How unreasonable. Suppose someone, a white guy, is arguing about affirmative action with me. Suppose they think that affirmative action
"I think it's extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative authority move when it’s played."
