The author of many scholarly articles, Glenn Loury first made his mark as an economic theorist. A consultant to state and federal government agencies and private business organizations, he has taught at Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Michigan before coming to Boston University, where he is university professor and professor of economics.
General readers, however, know Loury best as an analyst of public policy, particularly regarding racial inequality. His essays and commentaries appear regularly in leading national publications. Although he is identified as a conservative, Loury’s views defy easy categorization. While arguing that black Americans must place an emphasis on “self-help”–a position that has earned for him the enmity of the civil-rights establishment–he warns that this call for self-reliance is in danger of being hijacked by “those who are looking for an excuse to abandon the black poor.”
Loury’s writings on politics and culture have been collected in “One by One from the Inside Out: Essays on Race and Responsibility in America” (Free Press, 332 pp.; $25, hardcover), the epilogue to which is a powerful Christian testimony. In a conversation in Washington, D.C., last fall with CT advisory editor Michael Cromartie and former CT assistant editor Edward Gilbreath (now with “New Man” magazine), Loury talked about the evolution of his outlook on race relations and his personal faith journey.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE EXPERIENCES THAT HAVE SHAPED YOUR THINKING ABOUT RACE AND RESPONSIBILITY IN AMERICA?
One thing I think of is the years I spent at the University of Michigan, from 1978 to 1982, and watching the city of Detroit go through some very serious changes. Toward the end of that time, just before I moved to Harvard, I was asked to give a talk at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. It was Black History Month and I wanted to be responsive to the charge, so I chose to take up the issue of what was happening in the cities, to talk about Detroit in particular. I ended up writing an essay that had a lot to do with issues of character, responsibility, and values. I tried to direct attention away from structural problems and onto questions of what individuals were doing, how they behaved, and so forth. That was a very formative experience, both thinking through that presentation and dealing with the reaction to it, which was quite sharp and negative. It was seen as “politically unhelpful.”
I think also some of my personal experiences that I talk about in “One by One” have played a role. I remember reading a book by John Edgar Wideman called “Brothers and Keepers,” which was published in 1985. It stunned me. Wideman is a gifted writer. That book is about a pair of brothers who grow up in Pittsburgh. One of them is the writer, who goes away to the university, becomes a Rhodes Scholar, and ultimately a critically acclaimed novelist. The other one is incarcerated for life for being a part of a robbery in which someone gets killed. He’s charged with murder, he gets convicted, and he goes to jail. So Wideman is writing about this relationship with his brother, and how his brother is in jail and how he came to be there.
As I say, the prose is brilliant, but underneath, I found that the vision was bankrupt. It was corrupt, because the vision was about how society was arrayed against his brother, how his brother never had a chance. And here, right in the same family, subject to exactly the same environmental influences, there had been these two disparate paths. I was struck by how the author was denying the evidence implicit in his own story. How reluctant he was to affirm that he had lived his life in a certain way, with certain consequences, in contrast to the choices made by his brother, and the much different consequences that followed those choices.
AS YOU STARTED THINKING ABOUT THESE MATTERS, YOU BECAME INCREASINGLY CRITICAL OF THE CIVIL-RIGHTS ESTABLISHMENT. WHAT WAS THE SUBSTANCE OF THAT CRITIQUE?
The bottom line was that I thought the civil-rights movement was over and had been over for a decade when I started writing in the mideighties. I published an article in “The New Republic,” called “A New American Dilemma.” I knew about how if you operated a nickel-and-dime grocery store on the corner, there was a good chance you would get shot in the chest by somebody. My wife and I, when we were going out to listen to jazz, had to be worried about our physical safety. And yet, many civil-rights leaders were talking about police brutality. The article was very controversial, and it got attention.
BECAUSE YOU ADDRESSED NEW ISSUES?
Exactly. We have to find ways of being responsible in our positions of leadership in the face of these new issues. I don’t say that there are no external issues at all, and I don’t say there’s no point to politics; but I say politics won’t get it done–not by itself–not when it is ignoring the things that are happening on the ground.
IS WHITE RACISM THE MOST SERIOUS PROBLEM FACING AFRICAN AMERICANS TODAY?
No, I don’t think racism, certainly not in the classical sense, is the problem. My operating premise is that it’s the human condition, not the racial condition, that we’re dealing with. As a sociological and political matter, getting people to see their circumstances in that way will be a challenge. If there needs to be a moralistic movement, it perhaps should be a movement of a kind of reconciliation, of a kind of transcendence of particularity. Promise Keepers is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. It can challenge people to do better and can encourage some sense of generosity, some sense of sympathy.
Many people seem to have no sense of the human dimension of the tragedy we’re talking about. That’s true of many conservatives, I’m afraid. They see the blight of poverty and crime and aimlessness in our cities as a policy problem (wrong-headed government programs) or a black problem, but not as a human problem.
YOU’VE WRITTEN ABOUT “THE ENEMY WITHIN AND THE ENEMY WITHOUT.” COULD YOU COMMENT ON THAT?
I first used that formulation in a little piece in the “Washington Post,” on the op-ed page, where I just said young men are killing each other, families are falling apart, and there are births out of wedlock. We are responsible for what happens in the cities today, because the black middle class includes administrators, teachers, and so on. I wanted to critique the preoccupation with finding fault outside ourselves and the “It’s all what white people will do” attitude. Some of the problem is what we will do or won’t do. You can get into a posture of paralysis, an abdicating of responsibility, because you’re always looking without, always assuming that all our problems are in the heads of white people, always concerned with “What are they thinking now?” and “What are they doing now?” Rather, we should focus on the lives of black people. There’s no reason, even in a poor community, for there to be trash on the street. People can aspire to live better than they do if we will hold up an ideal. That was the kind of critical exhortation I was giving.
THAT WAS FOLLOWED BY “GOD IN THE GHETTO” IN THE “WALL STREET JOURNAL.” THERE’S A PROGRESSION HERE, ISN’T THERE?
“God in the Ghetto” was a few years after that. Lord knows I had gone through some things and had a rather different outlook on life. I had become a Christian myself, which I really had not been in any meaningful sense before 1988. The “Washington Post” piece had been published in 1985. It was the difference between having an intellectual take, an abstract take, on a problem and coming with a deeper spiritual, as well as intellectual, solution.
“God in the Ghetto” came out of a conference at UCLA on poverty, right after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Charles Murray was there and Christopher Jencks, the distinguished sociologist from Northwestern University, and I was asked to comment on their papers. I had read these papers, and I had a little prepared statement about data and numbers and all that. But when I got up to the podium I never even turned the paper over; I never read a word of it. Suddenly, the Spirit moved me to say something different, which was about how tired I was of going to poverty conferences and how it’s all talk, talk, talk. I told them, “People think you’ve got it figured out. Do you? Well, you don’t. There’s something you’re not even talking about here–the hearts of these people, and how they can be touched to see themselves in a different way. You’re going to rebuild. You’re going to get jobs. I’m not against jobs. I’m not against supermarkets on the corner, but where is this other dimension? Without it, we’re going to be back here again in a few years.” That just came out. I remember the political scientist James Q. Wilson coming up and hugging me after that and saying, “God bless you,” because I had dared to use the word God in this speech.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE.
I was in a very bad place. I had gotten myself into a real box. It had been building for some time. I was on drugs–alcohol, marijuana, and finally cocaine. The cocaine progressed to freebasing. That’s just the end–it’s death. It’s really no place that anybody wants to be. That stuff caught up with me. Meanwhile, my career was continuing to skyrocket. All of these gifts that God had given me, I was deploying to my personal and financial benefit. I was a professor at Harvard at 33 years old, a full tenured professor. I was a distinguished research economist, and I had a really strong track record. Then I had branched off into public policy, and I had instantly hit stardom. I was writing and getting attention. But I was on a really unstable, rocky track.
My life blew up, as it had to. I didn’t have any resources to fall back on. I didn’t have anywhere to go, anywhere to turn. I think I was just numb. If I’d realized what bad shape I was in, I don’t know if I would have been able to bear it. But I didn’t know how bad it was. I told myself all kinds of things.
I remember I was in Lisbon, Portugal, with Richard John Neuhaus, at a conference that sociologist Peter Berger had organized. Neuhaus had asked me out to dinner because he wanted to know what was going on. I was saying, “Everybody does it. You don’t see anyone complaining about Martin Luther King; he was a big womanizer. What’s the big deal?”
Neuhaus just blew up. I think, if he had been inclined, he would have grabbed me in the car and worked me over a little bit. He said: “Don’t you ever say that. That was a terrible flaw. It fundamentally undermined his capacity as a leader. It was wrong. You take a good look at yourself.”
But I wasn’t taking a good look at myself. Soon I was arrested for the possession of a controlled substance. That became very widely known, and I was humiliated, but I still had all kinds of excuses. I wasn’t going to get better like that. I didn’t get better for a while. I went to a drug treatment program that the court mandated after the arrest charge, but I kept using drugs. My wife was still with me, for reasons I can’t fathom. She loved me, and she stuck it out. Eventually she persuaded me to go in for treatment, and I went in, but it didn’t take. I relapsed after being out a matter of a few weeks. I went back in for treatment again, and my insurance coverage of 60 days of inpatient treatment at $500 a day had run its course. They told me, “We can’t do anything else for you, you’d better go over to a half-way house. You’d better get yourself into this structured situation, and you’d better do whatever they tell you to do over there.”
So I moved to a half-way house in Dorchester run by an ex-Boston cop who had spent five years in prison for corruption, who had been an alcoholic, and who had become an evangelical Christian and had devoted his life to helping men recover from addiction. He ran a nightly recovery meeting where we talked about alcohol, what it is, and how you get clean and stay clean. He held a weekly voluntary Bible study in the house, and there were about 25 men in there. Some of these men had been sleeping in cardboard boxes in the underground, some of them had just gotten out of prison, some were heroin or intravenous cocaine users, some were winos; and there was this college professor from Harvard.
I sat in that house for six months. It was during that time that I became a Christian, that I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. Ray Hammond, who is now my pastor, was coming and asking questions and trying to talk to me and counsel me. He got me to come to his Bible study. Now I was doing two Bible studies a week. I don’t know what happened. I think grace. It just seems miraculous to me. It was miraculous that the desire to do cocaine went away. It was miraculous that my wife stayed by me and that the marriage came back to life again. It didn’t have to happen. I haven’t looked back from there.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN BEING A BLACK CHRISTIAN WHO IS ALSO CONSERVATIVE IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE?
It’s not that bad, really. I have not suffered because I am a black conservative. There are places where people die for their political views. It’s a lot easier to be a black conservative now, though, than it was ten years ago, I’ll tell you that. It was nasty the way other blacks were responding. I was called a traitor and an Uncle Tom. I was held in contempt by people who said, “You’re aiding and abetting the enemy.”
I think I’m discovering that what separated me from my black liberal friends when I broke ranks so long ago really didn’t have anything to do with politics, because it also separates me from some of my conservative friends today. I’m sorry if this sounds self-aggrandizing, but I had the courage to give voice to my convictions, to say what I really thought. I was not the only person who thought that the lower end of the black community was going to hell in a handbasket. But I was one of the few people who was willing to argue that in a sustained way. If you’re willing to tell the truth as you see it, there’s a certain price that goes with that.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHAT IS THE SOLUTION TO THESE PROBLEMS?
The solution is the Christian faith: I mean the church and the community of believers engaged with these problems, and bringing the moral teachings of the church and the salvation that’s available through the faith to those who are in need. That’s what I have in mind, anyway. Is it where we go from here? Yeah, I think it is. I don’t believe that tinkering with economic incentives can get us to where we need to go. Indeed, I think that the larger society is in some difficulty and that there are various indicators that people are recognizing that the only way to respond effectively to that difficulty is through revival and evangelism in a large sense. Piecemeal efforts won’t get us there. I think we’re seeing that when 50,000 men go to a stadium to worship and pray, and 2 million people come out to see the pope, and hundreds of thousands of black men gather in Washington.
Intellectuals and social scientists are reluctant to talk about revival except in a historical context. The usual sentence is, “Short of a John Wesley-type renewal, all we can do is the following…” In which, of course, they rule out the real possibility of a John Wesley-type renewal. I don’t rule that out. The idea that such a movement can take place is not at all out of the question to me. I don’t think it’s far-fetched. In fact, I think the circumstances require it.
IN YOUR REVIEW OF STEPHEN CARTER’S BOOK “THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF,” YOU DECLARE THAT MANY BLACK POLITICAL LEADERS, MANY DRAWN FROM THE PULPIT, OFFER LITTLE PUBLIC VOICE TO THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONSERVATISM IN THEIR OWN RELIGIOUS TRADITION. ELABORATE ON THAT.
As before, maybe telling a story gets the point across. The story is Jerry Falwell and Joseph Lowery on Crossfire. Joseph Lowery is the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a big civil-rights leader and a political liberal, but also a Baptist preacher. And you’ve got Jerry Falwell. Now the question of gays came up. Basically, Falwell turned around to Lowery, and he said, “Come on now, Joe. What do you preach in your pulpit on Sunday about homosexuality? Don’t you preach what it says in Deuteronomy?” Lowery fidgeted, grumbled, evaded, and never answered the question. I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty interesting. He’s a liberal, and he has to keep to the political line on this issue, yet to do so he’s denying what he teaches from the pulpit.”
Same thing with abortion. Jesse Jackson changed his position on abortion at a time when he was getting ready to make a prominent political move. At one point, there were eight or nine of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who were ordained ministers. None of them (I think Congressman Floyd Flake might be the only exception) were willing to state in public their views about abortion. It seemed to me a sort of unholy compromise. The price of admission into the Democratic party was to suppress the witness of your own religious tradition. Think about it: the Democrats have now gotten themselves really into a hole. In a way, it may be that they are depriving themselves of the diversity within their own ranks that the African-American cultural and religious sensibility might have contributed.
YOU SAY THAT BLACKS MIGHT NEED TO LOOK FOR NEW ALLIES IN THEIR QUEST. I’M WONDERING ABOUT YOUR THOUGHTS ON RALPH REED AND THE CHRISTIAN COALITION AND THE WHOLE CHRISTIAN RIGHT.
When Jesse Jackson came out and attacked the Christian Coalition after the 1994 election, comparing them to Nazis, I was appalled. It seemed a politically stupid thing to do. I saw no point in it whatsoever. Not only was it wrong on the merits–it was an unfair charge, clearly egregious, excessive, and wrong–but it was dumb. It was not shrewd. It’s a sad, political endgame on that front. I was thinking to myself, “If I wanted to make an argument that Christian charity and love required an engagement with the population of the inner cities in order to affect their uplift, it seems to me that the people I might have the biggest chance of succeeding with in such an argument are these people.” Class-wise, these people run the whole gamut in terms of education and income. There are going to be many of them who are going to be from their own kind of working-class or regional roots and sympathetic to the underdog.
But, also, spiritually there is a base on which you can make the argument. There’s a place to meet, because this is all about persuasion. One of the places where the civil-rights movement has gone badly wrong is to have essentially abandoned an effort at persuasion. Instead, they have hidden behind the courts, they have hidden behind the logrolling within the Democratic party and have perpetrated things of which they can persuade nobody that they are appropriate or necessary. Here you have a venue within which there is a possibility for persuasion. I would much rather argue the poverty and welfare issues in spiritual terms than in terms of incentives and so forth.
SO YOU’RE HOPEFUL ABOUT THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE SO-CALLED RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES’ OPENNESS TO NEW CREATIVE THINKING ABOUT RACE IN AMERICA?
The Southern Baptist Convention repented of racism in its past. Racial reconciliation is important in the Promise Keepers, as I understand it. I really believe there’s tremendous power there to get Americans to transcend their communal differences. I don’t have any plan. I don’t have a blueprint. I just think there is real potential there.
But there are significant problems as well. The Christian Coalition is politically conservative. African Americans, and certainly the African-American clergy, may be culturally conservative, but in terms of the role of government and so on, they’re liberal. People in the Christian Coalition want their taxes cut. They say they have compassion, but they also want the government to reflect their values. This, I think, is a really important arena, because the underclass pathology is a principal indicator of the departure from those values. What has to be guarded against, in my opinion, is self-righteousness and a kind of separation. In an effort to condemn what should be condemned, we must not lose our connection to the people. I think it’s tricky, and it’s something I want to try to think more systematically about.
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Michael Cromartie is a senior fellow in Protestant studies and director of the Evangelical Studies Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He is the editor of “The Nine Lives of Population Control” (Eerdmans) and “Creation at Risk? Religion and the New Environmentalism” (Eerdmans).
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