On second thought: A Black conservative reconsiders

On Second Thought: A Black Conservative Reconsiders

The Anatomy of Racial Inequality By Glenn Loury (Harvard University Press, $22.95)

Conventional wisdom holds that modern Black conservatism has its roots in the economic agenda set by Booker T. Washington just over a century agend ago The "Tuskeegee wizard's" emphasis on selfhelp, industrial education, moral character and indifference to civil rights is well kown. Less frequently discussed are his anonymous attempts to undermine the legal edifice of Jim Crow via strategic lawsuits and his late-life endorsement of labor organizing and civil rights work. In publishing The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, an indictment of the politics of "racial stigma" in America, Boston University economist Glenn Loury may be more in the tradition of "Bookerism" than many contemporary conservative critics will care to admit.

Loury, along with the sociologist Walter Williams, essayist Shelby Steele and, yes, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was part of a wave of Black conservatives who came to prominence during the Reagan-Bush era. Indicting what conservatives contemptuously referred to as the "civil rights industry" Loury assailed race-based correctives like affirmative action and endorsed a sort of democratic colorblindness. From podium and page, Loury declared that affirmative action operated on a type of group identity politic that ran counter to the American tradition of individualism and was, moreover, a betrayal of the creed espoused by Martin Luther King Jr. that Blacks be measured by "the content of our character" rather than the color of our skin.

With his new book, Loury completes an intellectual volte-face that began with his 1995 resignation from the American Enterprise Institute. The conservative think tank supported Dinesh D'Souza, author of The End of Racism, a particularly vitriolic assault on "Black failure" in America. That same year, Loury joined the radical intellectuals Cornel West and Sylvia Wynter in a forum at the Schomburg Center in New York that challenged the findings of his fellow conservatives Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, the authors of The Bell Curve.

In Anatomy of Racial Inequality, Loury assails "race-blindness" as often (if inadvertently) indifferent to the cause of racial justice. In his view, the degradation of slavery in America translated into an enduring "stigma" that has marginalized the majority of Blacks and negatively affects their life chances. Evidence of this phenomena is to be seen in the vast numbers of African Americans languishing in the nation's prisons (1.2 million, according to Loury). While the reigning conservative line holds that this mass incarceration is the product of a broad "moral quandary" and "social pathology," Loury argues that it is a product of racially oppressive "political, social and economic institutions that have distorted the communal experience of slaves and their descendants." This is not, of course, a particularly novel analysis. Similar ideas have been discussed by liberal critics like the sociologist William Julius Wilson for some time. The argument is more striking in contrast with Loury's previous ideas.

As a means of explanation, Loury proposes a number of "thought-exercises" that highlight the ways in which "racial stigma" reinforces racial subordination.

While Loury's hypotheses are insightful - one might even say compelling - they rely upon a presumption that Black subordination is the product of mis-informed judgment and provincialism. In this book, "racial stigma" operates largely as a social phenomenon with economic consequences. One would expect an economist of Loury's standing to grapple with the proposition that racism is an integral - not accidental element of the American economy. Certainly the "moral pathology" allegedly responsible for skyrocketing rates of Black incarceration has been an economic boon to the construction industries building new prisons, to the deindustrialized cities and towns where these facilities are being built and to the nascent security-technology complex that creates the electronic wares that run these penal institutions.

Given this "racism dividend," one must question whether the persistence of "stigma" can be as inadvertent as Loury posits. Also, the essays in the book were initially given as part of the W.E.B. Du Bois lecture series at Harvard University (even more ironic given Loury's Bookerist past), and they retain an academic in-crowd type of prose. These issues notwithstanding, Loury has written a concise and, at times, provocative analysis of the American racial conundrum - one in which he exercises that most central of intellectual virtues: the capacity to change one's mind.

William Jelani Cobb is a visiting professor at Spelman College and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (Palgrave Press).

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2002
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