African-American economist Glenn Loury (Brown) has penned an essay that is generating, unsurprisinlgy, a lot of discussion. As regular readers know, I think "diversity" blather is a fraud, and that racism, while obviously real, is mostly an epiphenomenon of the class politics of capitalism. And while Loury has sometimes been scathingly accurate about the absurd posturing of the academy about race issues, this latest essay seems to me more deluded than illuminating, many of its "truths" being falsehoods, predicated on a quasi religious faith in autonomous or moral agency (no doubt this faith was important to his own recovery from personal traumas and missteps).
Professor Loury, for example, writes:
Anti-racism advocates, in effect, are daring you to notice that some groups send their children to elite colleges and universities in outsized numbers compared to other groups due to the fact that their academic preparation is magnitudes higher and better and finer. They are daring you to declare such excellence to be an admirable achievement. One isn’t born knowing these things. One acquires such intellectual mastery through effort. Why are some youngsters acquiring these skills and others not? That is a very deep and interesting question, one which I am quite prepared to entertain. But the simple retort, “racism”, is laughable—as if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what they identify as being critical to their own self-respect. Anyone actually believing such nonsense is a fool, I maintain.
But behavior, cultural patterns, etc. are themselves the products of history, and thus of social and economic conditions, including the de jure racism that only ended roughly two generations ago in America. It is indeed "a deep and interesting question" why some youngsters acquire the skills to succeed, and some do not, but Professor Loury doesn't appear that interested in considering answers that would press beyond the appeal to behavior, cultural patterns, etc.
The basic moralism of his perspective becomes clearest near the end of the essay:
When you take agency away from people, you remove the possibility of holding them to account and the capacity to maintain judgment and standards so that you can evaluate what they do. If a youngster who happens to be black has no choice about whether or not to join a gang, pick up a gun, and become a criminal, since society has failed him by not providing adequate housing, healthcare, income support, job opportunities, etc., then it becomes impossible to effectively discriminate between the black youngsters who do and do not pick up guns and become members of a gang in those conditions, and to maintain within African American society a judgment of our fellows’ behavior, and to affirm expectations of right-living. Since, don’t you know, we are all the victims of anti-black racism. The end result of all of this is that we are leveled down morally by a presumed lack of control over our lives and lack of accountability for what we do.
I am inclined to agree that the illusion that we have choices is often a socially useful one, even if none of us actually do, even if we are all, to varying degrees, the locus for all the various causal forces (social, economic, historical, psychological, physiological) that make us who we are. The real difficulty in this essay is Loury's overriding desire to "hold[] them to account," to be able to judge and blame individuals for their "choices." He might do well to consider the Nietzschean alternative.
Recent Comments