Prometheus 6

Loury, in other words, was and is a first-rate technical economist with a mathematical bent who has ended up writing and speaking not about Euclidean spaces but about the political economy of race. This is partly because he is as good with words as he is with equations. It is partly because he cares deeply about social issues. But inevitably, it is also partly because he is one of only a handful of well-known African-Americans in his field. In the process he has become what, say, Arthur Koestler or George Orwell was in another time and place: one of those emblematic intellectuals whose career illustrates in microcosm the dilemmas, temptations, and betrayals of an era.

…Reading Loury's dissertation today, 22 years after he wrote it, is a depressing experience--precisely because the essays were so good and remain so relevant. In the first few pages, he stated the central dilemma of race policy in modern America. He was willing to give American society the benefit of the doubt, to assume that in the future, racism--direct economic discrimination--would no longer be a major force holding African-Americans back. But he argued that this probably would not be enough, and therein lay the dilemma.

…In a better world, Loury would have spent the last 22 years devising policies--working with other well-intentioned people to come as close as possible to squaring this circle, finding ways to eliminate the legacy of past racism with as little intrusion as possible on the colorblind ideal. But he has basically never been able to get off square one--because at no point over the past two decades has he been able to find allies who are even willing to accept the reality of the dilemma.

…He said what he thought. In so doing, he found himself labeled a "black conservative"--and thereby exposed to new and dangerous seductions. Let's face it: Any articulate minority intellectual who reliably espouses conservative positions is automatically offered a ticket to a very nice lifestyle. No more rejections from picky academic journals or grubbing for sabbatical time. Instead there are cushy fellowships at Hoover, guest editorials in the Wall Street Journal, and invited articles in Commentary--maybe even a regular column in Forbes--and a steady stream of invitations to plush conferences in nice places.

…But at some point Loury made the discovery that eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. The Glenn Loury who wrote that 1976 thesis was not a conservative. He criticized the simplistic anti-racism of the liberal establishment because he wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested only in the critique, not in the next step. (According to Loury, "When I told one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because he had moved on to the next case.") Loury found out that the apparent regard for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the liberal enemy.