Loury, Glenn

economist, Brown University; host of The Glenn Show

Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture

Lex Fridman Podcast · May 14, 2022

• Glenn Loury
• affirmative action critique
• Black patriotism
• Martin Luther King and Malcolm X legacies
• IQ and cognitive ability research debate
• spiral of silence and cancel culture
• Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama
• Thomas Sowell
• university free inquiry
• racial identity and belonging
• mortality and meaning

Core ideas

Loury opens by locating Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech within the history of emancipation, arguing King's vision was one of equal status and citizenship for African Americans within the American political community rather than a demand for equal outcomes, and reflects on the "amazing achievement" of slavery's eradication (at a cost of 600,000 Civil War deaths) as evidence of the malleability of American institutions. He extends this into an argument about human nature's capacity both to normalize grave injustice while it persists and to sustain dignity under oppression, and credits figures like Frederick Douglass with showing that individual moral courage can seed large-scale social change.

Discussing equality today, Loury argues explicitly that fairness of treatment does not imply equality of outcome, contending that distinct groups with different cultural norms, traditions, and practices will naturally show different rates of success in different domains (using NBA representation as an illustration) without that necessarily reflecting discrimination. He distinguishes this from equality of opportunity, which he says is shaped not just by law and policy but by developmental conditions starting before birth — nutrition, verbal stimulation, neighborhood and peer influences — arguing that social-scientific analysis should try to isolate how much of an outcome gap reflects unequal treatment versus differing cultural or developmental factors, a position he acknowledges is "controversial" among people who consider themselves progressive.

On racial identity itself, Loury describes an internal ambivalence: he can see the argument that race is a "superficial" and arbitrary basis for group identity, yet also affirms his own identification as a Black American, partly because of how he is perceived and treated by others (illustrated through hypothetical encounters with a police officer and a store salesman) and partly because, in his view, every person needs a narrative of ancestry and belonging to pass to their children. He describes his own 2003 essay "The Case for Black Patriotism" as arguing that Black Americans should identify as Americans first, rejecting both separatist fantasies and what he sees as an excessive orientation toward grievance, while also giving sympathetic voice to the more confrontational, self-reliant tradition he associates with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam (recounted partly through a personal story about his uncle "Mooney"), stating that he personally believes, in 2022, that violent rebellion "gets us nowhere" and that the 2020 unrest following George Floyd's death set back rather than advanced the interests of Black Americans.

Loury argues at length that accusations of "racism" are frequently used as what he calls a rhetorical "power move" to shut down empirical claims (about crime statistics, affirmative action, or IQ research) rather than to rebut them, comparing the dynamic to McCarthy-era accusations of communism and invoking Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's "spiral of silence" theory to argue that widely-held but socially unacceptable views can persist suppressed until a "shrewd" public figure breaks the taboo — a phenomenon he suggests could apply to racial issues and cites Donald Trump and Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition as examples of this dynamic in current politics. Discussing Joe Rogan's use of a racial slur in reported contexts, Loury states he does not consider it evidence of racism, drawing a distinction between quoting or referencing a word and using it as an epithet.

Asked to "steelman" concerns about IQ research of the kind associated with Charles Murray, Loury lays out several counterarguments (that IQ is a narrow, single-dimensional measure of human capacity; that social interventions can offset natural differences much as corrective lenses offset differences in vision; that such research can be politically weaponized) before ultimately arguing against suppressing the research itself, comparing restrictions on politically uncomfortable inquiry to historical resistance to Darwin, Copernicus, and nuclear physics, and stating he does not want to "cede that kind of power to politicians over the course of human inquiry." He similarly frames university "administrators" — rather than faculty or students — as the primary threat to open inquiry on contested topics (race, gender, colonialism, climate), a position he summarizes as "the administration is the barbarians at the gate."

Loury describes his own political evolution from a "liberal Democrat" upbringing on Chicago's South Side toward a free-market, Reagan-influenced economic outlook shaped by his MIT training, and toward what he calls a break with the civil rights establishment's framing of Black American social problems (family breakdown, violent crime, school underperformance) as primarily a matter of external discrimination rather than, in his stated view, community-level behavior and choices — a position he explicitly frames as controversial and states "not everybody's going to agree with." He states he "hates" affirmative action, which he calls a patronizing "band-aid" that substitutes for genuine capacity-building, and criticizes then-candidate Joe Biden's public pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court as demeaning identity-based pandering — while stating he has no doubt Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is fully qualified — and separately criticizes Barack Obama for what Loury calls promoting a "false" narrative of systemic police racism (citing Obama's "if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon" remark) rather than, in Loury's view, more directly confronting Black-on-black violent crime as the more significant threat to Black lives. He praises economist Thomas Sowell as one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century whom he believes has been denied a Nobel Prize for political reasons, and separately argues Justice Clarence Thomas's life story deserves the same cultural celebration Barack Obama's has received.

The conversation closes on mortality: Loury reflects on recently eulogizing his brother-in-law, describes reading Richard John Neuhaus's As I Lay Dying aloud to his wife, economist Linda Datcher Loury, as she died of breast cancer, and states that although he no longer holds Christian or theistic beliefs, he finds meaning in teaching, writing, and connection to others, describing love as central to what makes life worth living.

Excerpts