Late Admissions – Confessions of a Black Conservative – a Review by John Root

Book Review of Glenn Loury's Latest Book

One lasting element in Glenn Loury’s life was growing up under the roof of his aunt Eloise, a pillar of the ‘respectable’ black community in Chicago’s South Side, yet with a promiscuous mother, separated from his strongly disciplined father. So he was more deeply impressed with his loose living uncles – Albert fathered 22 children. The other main element in his story is his extraordinary intellectual prowess, such that as a twenty-year old father of two children and holding down a full-time clerical job, nonetheless he graduated with accolades as a maths student at the prestigious Northwestern University (where Harry first met Sally).

Loury then shifted his interest to applying mathematics to applied economic theory (‘my first and enduring love’), and had a dazzling career, becoming the first tenured black economics professor at Harvard.

The two contrasting elements of Loury’s life – the South Side boy who becomes a womanising ‘player’ and the applied economic theory whizz-kid – meant that ‘I thought of myself as singular. And in that singularity I felt pride’ (p 273). Harmfully they merged into his conception of himself as a ‘Master of the Universe’ – one who can do whatever they want, sexually and academically.  (A figure incongruously based on the very ‘white’ financier in Tom Wolfe’s New York novel ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’).

That conceit busted when a possible senior job in the Reagan administration led to a background check which discovered he had installed his mistress in a Boston flat. Following on the national publicity on this disgrace, Loury’s alcohol and weed consumption then morphed into a crack cocaine addiction that sent him prowling round Boston’s seediest neighbourhoods. In the furore and shame that followed Loury found focus and redemption in attending a church newly founded by a medical doctor friend and his wife.

Loury speaks dismissively of the quality of the black churches he had known, such as the African Methodist Episcopal church of his youth: ‘I’d seen enough of their inner workings to know that, often enough, their leaders were some of the biggest sinners and most blatant hypocrites you’d ever meet’ (p 274), but here however he found a living faith.

He was featured in the ‘700 Club’ tv programme of the Christian right entrepreneur Pat Robertson, he supported Charles Colson (born again after the Watergate infamy) in his Prison Fellowship Ministries. At the same time ‘the unfolding, arranging, and folding of chairs, alongside the other faithful volunteers, provided spiritual nourishment. It was also simple and egoless’ (p 287).

Meanwhile his academic life also had its share of transitions. As a student, he was rebuffed when his newly discovered enthusiasm for Nietzsche was dismissed by a wealthy black student as something ‘for white people’. His growing prestige as an economist meant he increasingly became a voice on racial politics. Alienated by the ‘radical’ posturing of middle class black leaders and academics, he increasingly stressed the importance of black agency and focus on hard work and community solidarity that he saw in the South Side of his youth.

But both his politics and faith changed yet again. He was alienated by right wing books such as Charles Murray’s ‘The Bell Curve’ on IQ being praised, though it was abstracted from the on-the-ground suffering of black people, for example indicated by large scale incarceration. He now wrote the progressive leaning ‘The Anatomy of Racial Inequality’, and after one lecture was given the accolade of ‘Welcome home’ by a black academic. But set against that shift, and of greater import, was his Uncle Albert’s painful rebuke to his easy presence amongst predominantly white academia: ‘Now I don’t see anything of us in what you do’. Ruefully Loury reflects ‘My black colleagues may have been telling me that I was home, but now I knew the truth of the matter. I would have to forge my own path forward, that I could never go home again’ (p 355).

Meanwhile his Christian faith began to dissolve. When a treasured colleague and fellow church member died suddenly, the funeral’s full-on celebration of Jesus’ victory over death grated painfully with his sense of deep sorrow and loss. He couldn’t share their hopes for miraculous healings, and acceptance of a Dawkinsian opposition of reason and faith led him to disbelieve in Jesus’ resurrection )rather than seeing that all reason is based on some sort of faith or other). However, a running trope in Loury’s book is contrasting the ‘cover stories’ that are publicly presented over against the underlying realities. In this case the above reasons for unbelief were paralleled by reversion to a deep-seated pattern of promiscuous womanising, with the examples of his Southside uncles strong in his mind.

While Loury still seems settled in his ‘lapsed born-again Christian’ status his intellectual journey continued its winding course. Criticism of large-scale incarceration was increasingly set against the damage, and indeed loss of life, caused by large-scale criminality. This led to a corresponding re-emphasis on the need for stable parenting, social responsibility, and behavioural restraint as necessary components for the well-being and progress of Black America. You can sense his pain at its decline, specifically of the Black South Side: "The streets where Woody and I rode our bikes and the alleys where we played stickball, the homes in whose backyards stood the apple trees we pilfered, are now, most of them, overrun by poverty and crime. I would not walk through those neighbourhoods myself, much less allow a child to play in them unsupervised. There are many such neighbourhoods in America’s cities, black neighbourhoods that must have felt, seventy-five years ago, as though they were on the upswing and that now lie fallow and half-abandoned" (p. 425).

Perhaps the best explanation of the oscillations of Loury’s take on Black America is its sheer complexity. ‘Now, sitting on high and wagging my finger at those living lives I did not approve of, I veered dangerously close to outright hypocrisy. I still believed in the essence of my moral critique. The out-of-wedlock birth rate, the violent crime, the lackadaisical approach to education, these were serious failings within the community. But were not those troubles partially perpetuated by a sense of alienation and hopelessness, by spiritual voids that could be filled neither by government programs nor by spontaneously generated “personal responsibility”?’ (p 338). So on the one hand it is his ‘desire to see America get past its resurgent obsession with racial identity’ and yet ‘My blackness is at the core of my being’ (pp 426/7).

What to make, then, of Loury’s ‘Confessions’? His son has compared the book to a confessional, with the whole world as the priest. It is a page-turner, often reading like a novel. Loury is impressively honest about his failures, not just his compulsive womanising, and the pain it inflicted on his astoundingly loyal second wife, Linda, but also less sensational failures like his cowardice in not standing by his light-skinned best friend Woody at a Black Panthers meeting. Conversely, he is refreshingly immodest about his achievements, not only as an economist but also as a chess player and in telling us great stories of his pool hall victories.

It is a detailed book. I learned more about processing crack cocaine than I need to know. We enjoy, but may not share, his delight in producing arcane economic theory, for example ‘Tacit Collusion in a Dynamic Duopoly with Indivisible Production and Cumulative Capacity Constraints’. We meet virtually every major figure in the last half century of American intellectual life in his pages.

More intriguingly, it is not just an ‘on the ground’ memoir but also a thoughtfully crafted attempted observation of the memoir that is being written, evidenced by his cover story/truth figure, and discussed in the ‘Preface’ and ‘Conclusion’. (Otherwise the sections are simply numbered; so too, the book has no chapter titles, footnotes, bibliography or index – we are given no more than his personal reflection. Though I would have found a time chart of his life helpful). So he recognises that his honesty can be a gambit to lure readers into a false trust in him; that his openness is only a veil to justify his self-indulgence. By openly admitting he is a fallen man, is he also cheaply casting himself upon our mercy?

For several years I have been an admirer of Glenn Loury on his blog/You tube for his humour, extraordinary fluency, passion and wisdom (as a survey of my blog references indicate): a true Romantic, especially when set alongside the dry Augustan cool of his dialogue partner John McWhorter. It may be a strange tribute to the book that I am now less entranced by the persona I encounter on my laptop. Intellectually he is still a giant, and I take his conservative (or ‘heterodox’) stance on race. His book’s remarkable honesty adds to the appeal, but his persistent unfaithfulness, and particularly his selfish disregard for his wife, is repelling.

For a Christian, of course, his story is unsettling. Set against his previous double life, he gives us the verse his pastor pointed him to: ‘No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear’. And yet it didn’t hold. On the last pages he writes of ‘the stirring of some hunger deep within me that seeks satisfaction’ and that intellectual acclaim doesn’t provide it, nor presumably seduction or cocaine, but nor does he believe Jesus Christ has provided a solution. Because to defeat the enemy within, who he fully recognises, seems also to defeat himself, his true nature. It is a zero-sum game. His concern for his self-regard is also his enemy. Can it be that his unmet satisfaction lies in the unhealed, painful lack of regard from the strongly self-disciplined father who died rejecting him.

This is a big book. It is well worth reading.

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