Glenn Loury thought maybe the world — maybe he — had been wrong about Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. Loury had watched a documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” that had circulated largely on right-wing social media, arguing that Chauvin had been wrongly convicted, and found himself persuaded. Was it possible, he wondered, that Floyd had actually died of a drug overdose?
Floyd’s death had ignited protests nationwide and spurred a passionate national debate about racism that often left Loury, a prominent Black conservative, at odds with many other Black intellectuals and with much of the American left.
He welcomed the film’s creators, Liz Collin and JC Chaix, as guests on his podcast, “The Glenn Show,” which has over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.
The blowback was swift and harsh.
“Really, you’re going to take Chauvin’s side?” friends emailed Loury. Commenters on his newsletter and social media also took issue. Then Radley Balko, an independent journalist, published a lengthy and meticulous critique of the film, calling it “all nonsense.”
“Frankly, I felt exposed,” Loury told me. We were sitting by the fireplace of his living room on a chilly April afternoon in Providence, R.I., where he is a professor at Brown University. “I felt that my integrity could potentially be called into question.” He needed to “come clean.”
“I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true,” Loury wrote in a mea culpa for his Substack, calling his error egregious. That weekend, he had Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, who oversaw the prosecution of Chauvin in the Floyd case, on his podcast, to hear the other side of the story.
How had he made such a mistake?
“The real story is I hated what happened in the summer of 2020,” he told me. “I think these moral panics we have around these police killings are over the top and it’s bad for the country.” He had supported the filmmakers, he confessed, because they were attacking people he opposed. “I let that cloud my judgment.”
This is far from the first reversal, political or personal, for Loury, 75, one of the most celebrated and reviled Black intellectuals of the past half-century. While public debate has too often devolved into lobbing grenades from entrenched positions, Loury’s tumultuous life, his swings from the right to the left and back again, his remarkable, barrier-busting successes and his considerable frailties and failures, have taught him to always recognize that he could be wrong and to keep an open mind, no matter how vehement his opinions. He outlines this ragged road to wisdom in his remarkably candid memoir, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”
‘The Enemy Within’
The name Glenn Loury often appears on lists of prominent conservative Black figures like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele. He was a star Ph.D graduate in economics from M.I.T. and the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard. He was a darling of the neoconservative movement and was tapped to be deputy secretary of education during the Reagan administration.
But that was before he was charged with assaulting his ex-mistress. Before he was arrested for drug possession. Before he was exposed as both a serial philanderer and a crack addict. He’d left two daughters from his first marriage back in Chicago; he barely acknowledged a son born to a former girlfriend, until the son was fully grown.
A 1995 New Yorker profile described Loury’s first public downfall thus: “Loury was emerging as exactly the kind of person he had warned Black America to avoid: a violent, irresponsible, drug-using womanizer who put his own pleasure above the demands of his career and the needs of his family.”
In recounting all that’s happened since, “Late Admissions” does something that is rare in fiction but almost unheard-of in memoir: It presents both an unlikable and an unreliable narrator.
In an unusual introduction, Loury explains that he hopes to build trust with the reader by exposing his obfuscations and prevarications, warding off anything terrible a reader might say about him by saying it all, himself, first. One title he considered for the book, he told me, was “The Enemy Within.”
Loury was born in 1948 on the South Side of Chicago. The early childhood scenes in the memoir evoke a close-knit slice of Black working-class life in Park Manor following the Great Migration, a place of honest jobs and not-quite-honest side hustles, to which even his strait-laced Aunt Eloise occasionally turned a blind eye.
Despite early success in school, by the time Loury was 19, he had dropped out of college, had two children with a high school crush (they eventually married and divorced) and was working at a printing plant.
It was only at community college, when a professor recognized his promise and urged him to apply to Northwestern, that Loury turned his life around. After he got a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T., his rise was meteoric, eventually leading to a dual appointment in economics and Afro-American studies at Harvard in 1982.
‘Who Have I Become?’
In his 1976 dissertation at M.I.T., Loury pioneered a concept of “social capital” that became hugely influential. Loury showed that in the labor market, success isn’t predicted purely on the basis of intelligence and skills but also on networks and connections: social capital. These differences, he argued, apart from legal discrimination or racism, often explain racial disparities in the work force.
It is a paradox of Loury’s career, then, that he has repeatedly built up and then destroyed his own social capital. His working-class background led him to bristle at some of the assumptions of the Black intelligentsia, particularly the idea that Black people didn’t play a hand in their own circumstances. He resented what he saw as the presumption of a singular liberal opinion among the Black establishment.
But at Harvard, Loury, long a critic of affirmative action, couldn’t help but worry he might be there as its beneficiary. The fear that his colleagues doubted his abilities led him to seriously doubt them himself, and he buckled under the pressure, real and imagined. He stopped doing economics research. He hid in his office in the Afro-American studies department.
“I choked,” he told me. “I wasn’t sure I was good enough.” At the peak of his scholarly performance, he quit the field and took a job at the Harvard Kennedy School where he assumed a busy life of freelance writing, public speaking and conferences.
When he began publicly criticizing the civil rights movement, he was embraced by the burgeoning neoconservative movement. The intellectual set behind Commentary magazine courted his contributions and he became part of the same circles as Jack Kemp, William Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. He became friendly with Clarence Thomas. He relished their appreciation of his point of view.
But in the ’90s, three popular conservative books on race led him to break with the right: “The Bell Curve” by Charles Murray and Richard J. Hernstein, which posited a relationship between intelligence and race; “The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society,” an incendiary polemic by Dinesh D’Souza; and “America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible,” by his friends at Harvard Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom. After he wrote a scathing review of “The End of Racism” for The Weekly Standard, The Standard published a long rebuttal from D’Souza in the next issue.
Kristol, the former editor of The Weekly Standard, says Loury’s criticism of those books look good in retrospect. “He was warier of them that most of us were, to his credit,” Kristol told me. “Loury could have had a pretty easy path to being a famous Black conservative and he didn’t do that. I kind of respect him for not being one, to be honest.”
Loury had opposed the politics of the civil rights leadership, rejected affirmative action and thought that behavioral problems in poor Black communities posed a more serious obstacle to progress than discrimination. But in these writers he saw a callousness and even a disdain for Black people.
“It made me wonder, who are these people I’m in bed with?” he said to me. “Who am I? Who have I become?”
‘I Was Really Broken’
One through line persisted through all these political rifts. Loury had been living a double life, one that in many ways felt to him more authentic to his urban roots: the life of “the player,” a mythic ideal he based largely on his Uncle Alfred, a man who’d fathered 22 children by four women.
Wherever he’d travel, he’d visit the local alleys and bars, playing pickup chess and picking up women, sometimes prostitutes. All the while, he was married to his second wife, Linda, an academic at Tufts, “taking this wonderful woman and dragging her through the mud, and taking advantage of her, exploiting her fidelity and her patience,” as he put it to me, his voice strained. (Linda died of cancer in 2011.)
After getting arrested in 1987 for domestic abuse of his 23-year-old mistress (the charges were dropped when she stopped cooperating with prosecutors), Loury, then 39, sank into crack addiction, after a prostitute casually introduced him to the drug. Another arrest and two stints in rehab later, Loury entered yet another Black enclave, the Black evangelical church. In the early months of recovery, he was born again.
“I came into the church on my hands and knees,” he told me. “I mean, I was really broken.”
It’s as if Loury repeatedly plays a game of tug of war, with himself and with the wider world. His yearning to belong countered by a suspicion of belonging. Why do you want me here? What purpose am I serving, and is it one I want to carry out?
This helps account for his “lurching from left to right to left to right,” the fear of being seen as a token rather than as an “economist who happened to be Black,” and the deeper fear of actually being one.
In the late ’90s and in a decisive and very public move to the left, he started writing about policing and race. He took up mass incarceration — “before Michelle Alexander!” — as his main cause and decamped from Harvard to Boston University, where he created the Institute on Race and Social Division. Soon enough, Henry Louis Gates Jr. invited him to give the coveted W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard in 2002. For the first time, the Black intellectual establishment opened its doors to him, occasionally with warmth. It felt “damn good,” he said.
And then once again that feeling of affirmation started to dissipate.
What bothered him about the left was its evasions, assumptions and methods in addressing issues of racial inequality. What bothered him about the right was that it didn’t seem to share his goal of addressing racial inequality at all.
Through all his political shifts, Loury has been consistent in his abiding concern for Black Americans. He believes there are serious problems in Black educational achievement and Black economic, social and health outcomes. The collapse of family, the spread of gangs.
“There’s something rotten there, there’s something problematic there, there’s a deep, deep, deep something amiss there,” he said. “And I want to say it’s not just them, it’s not just on them, it’s us.” He wants to talk about agency, choice, responsibility.
“I can’t even look at you in the eye when I’m saying this!” he exclaimed suddenly, interrupting himself. “Because it’s so hard to say. I mean, it is blaming the victim at some level.”
I asked Loury: If not affirmative action, if not D.E.I., then what’s the solution? He hesitated, then talked about early childhood education, school reform, investments in mental health, tools to develop the potential of Black families and communities.
At heart, he still believes in what he calls “the Booker T. Washington-slash-Clarence Thomas” idea that slavery was horrible, but it’s over. Between what he calls the two polar paths to Black progress, W.E.B. DuBois, who emphasized equality and integration with white America, and Washington, who emphasized separatism and self-sufficiency, he falls on the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps side.
“We’re not supposed to talk about out-of-wedlock births. That’s passé,” he said. “But I don’t believe that for a minute!” When 70 to 80 percent of kids are brought up without fathers, he said, “How’s that not the death knell for the healthy reproduction of social life? How is that not the end? And what I see is excuse making. The artful changing of the subject.”
“We need to get busy,” he said. “You have to stand up.”
But he’s still got to check himself. Maybe he’s wrong. His wife of seven years, LaJuan, is strongly committed to her progressive beliefs. Their marriage, he said, has “had far-reaching implications for my own intellectual life.” Together they listen to the left-wing podcasts she favors: “The Jimmy Dore Show,” “Max Blumenthal,” “Due Dissidence.” Not only is he exposed to different ideas, but out of his respect for his wife, he has to “self-interrogate a bit.”
‘I Am a Fallen Man’
Loury remains a hugely popular economics professor at Brown, where he has taught largely progressive students since 2005. His classes are always oversubscribed, especially now that he has announced plans to retire next year. In recent years he has taught a class on free inquiry in the modern world, which he developed with an undergrad who told him he was sick of nobody saying what they really thought.
“It’s maybe the most gratifying teaching experience I’ve had in my career,” he told me. “Because we tackle the cancel culture-political correctness conundrum.”
Last semester, Loury co-taught a class on race, crime and justice in America. Former students told me they relish the open debate they find in his classroom. “At times it could get a little heated,” Ayla Kim, a junior, said. “But it generated a lot of thought. I felt more informed on particular issues hearing multiple sides.”
“It’s pretty unique and refreshing to get to hear a deviation from the standard opinion in college, it’s sad to say,” Henry Mass, a senior, told me. “You’re meant to nod your head and conform in other classes. But this was really cool. We were allowed to argue on a number of hot button issues, whether it was police abolition or affirmative action.” The students I spoke with all loved the class.
Loury hopes to continue teaching after retirement, even without pay. He’d like to take up piano. He plans to continue his podcast, having just constructed a new studio in his basement. These projects excite him in a way contemporary politics do not. Loury still doesn’t know whom he’ll vote for this fall, but he knows he won’t vote for President Biden; he says he’ll probably abstain or vote for his friend Cornel West. That’s where his free-market conservatism comes in and his distrust of “the liberal Democratic cognoscenti,” which he finds patronizing. “Much of the D.E.I. initiative backed by Biden is little more than pandering with irrelevant concessions to an elite wing of the Black Democratic establishment,” he explained.
“I’m terrified for the future of this country,” he told me. “Nobody trusts anybody anymore. I fear that seeds of dissension have been sown that will bear a bitter fruit down the line, so I’m finding it hard to be optimistic.”
He also worries about the publication of “Late Admissions,” which comes out on Tuesday. He knows some people will be “gunning” for him because they find his politics despicable; that’s not what bothers him.
What he does fear is that students and friends will form negative opinions of him. His two adult daughters by his first wife have read the book. “And they are not happy campers,” he said slowly. A close friend read it and said to Loury, “I don’t know if I like that guy,” to which Loury responded, “I don’t know if I like him either.”
“I am a fallen man,” he told me, repeating a phrase that appears near the end of the book. “I cannot defeat the enemy within, not entirely.”
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