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Interview with Glenn Loury by Glenn Yu
Interview with Glenn Loury
by Glenn Yu ’20 illustrator Nicholas Edwards ’23
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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 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
is undignified because they think that positions should be earned, not given, but they don’t expect me to understand that argument because I’m Black. That would be terribly unreasonable—even racist. It would certainly be very pernicious, yet I’m hard-pressed to see the difference.
Many people are protesting the policing system, as well as broader issues having to do with the structure of society. On June 1, 2020, President Christina Paxson wrote a letter indicting the structures of racism and prejudice that most on the left claim to be at the basis of American life. You published a challenge to this letter. Why?
If my dear colleague, Christina Paxson, Professor of Economics, as well as president of this university, were simply to have said, “dear colleagues, I have been pondering the events of the last few days and weeks, and it has brought me to a set of conclusions that I want to share with you from my heart,” and then she proceeded to do so, I would not have written to my friend, nor would I have made public what I wrote, which was printed in the City Journal. I wouldn’t have done it because she’s entitled to her opinion. But that’s not what happened. What happened was a letter signed by the president and cosigned by the provost. It was signed by the Senior Vice President for Administration, by the Senior Vice President for Finance, by the person in charge of Advancement and Development for the University. It was signed by the University’s General Counsel, by the Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, and by every other functionary all the way down the line to the Dean of the School of Public Health. They signed a political letter.
The letter is surely political. These events don’t speak for themselves. Americans disagree about Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is not axiomatic. They represent a particular thrust in American politics. I’m not without sympathy for the struggle for racial justice, but I have severe disputes with people when it comes to interpreting what’s going on in American cities. The letter doesn’t mention the fact that it’s dangerous on the streets of many inner-city neighborhoods where police have to operate every day, that there are a lot of weapons out there, or that the homicide rate is extraordinarily high and that most of the people committing the homicides are Black. Now, imagine that I wrote not a left letter, but a right letter. “I think the Blacks are complaining too much.” Suppose I wrote that letter and I had everybody in the administration sign it. So, it’s a political statement. It may be a very sympathetic and a very persuasive statement, but it’s political! Universities ought not to be political in this sense. When I got that letter signed by everybody on the payroll of this university who gets paid above $400,000 a year, I thought: This is thought-policing. They’re telling us what to think. They’re saying that this is what “Brown values” require one to think. They’re speaking about a “We” with a capital W, and it’s including everybody. Well, actually, it didn’t include me! So, I object. I object to the very soft tyranny of having political postures put forward as self-evident truths to which every decent member of this community should subscribe. I object to that. That’s the last thing that a university should be doing. It’s malpractice. It is administrative malpractice of this precious institution for it to be swept along by political fad and fancy, and then have the assent of every administrator in lockstep, without any dispute among themselves. This is horrible, I thought. It was trying to tell me what to think. It was telling me what I can and cannot write, what I can and cannot pronounce in my public statements if I wish to remain a member in good standing in this community. That is an outrage, in my opinion.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
