«How are you going to be equal if you’re dependent upon
people seeing your narrative of
victimization as morally authoritative?»

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Glenn Loury, sixty years ago, Martin Luther King said that he wants his children to live in a country where they are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. How much closer is the America to this ideal compared to the 1960s?

We’re still a long way away from that ideal. I would make a distinction: Not wanting the color of his daughter’s skin to prevent her from having opportunity is one thing. That is different from the idea that the color of her skin doesn’t matter, that it’s irrelevant. The first aspect is about how she should be treated, the other is about who she is. To say that we need not pay any attention to skin color is a radical claim. It makes something go away. It makes us forget about something.

In what way should we pay attention to skin color?

That’s an open question. And I want to be careful because there are a lot of issues in the air here: affirmative action, racial preferences, reparations, Black Lives Matter, “defund the police” or voter suppression. I don’t want to try to pronounce on all of them with one sweeping statement. But saying that people should not be discriminated on the basis of their racial identity is not the same thing as saying: Let us forget about the racial identity.

Aren’t we getting into the territory of identity politics there?

Yeah, we are. I’m struggling here myself, personally. On the one hand, I want to say: Grow beyond your origins. You start out as one thing, but that’s not who you are, that doesn’t define you. I want to say to my fellow Black Americans: We’re Americans. This is our country – the whole of it. I want to say: Tolstoy is mine, Einstein is mine. As a human being, I can appreciate their genius. On the other hand, my life, the things that I have passion for, the experiences that I have undergone in my effort to live authentically are all rooted, they’re not abstract. They have a particular grounding: history, culture, family, and so on. There’s a kind of ethnic blackness to that. And I don’t want to lose that.

In your early work as an economist, you analyzed the role of social capital for human development and concluded that policies such as racial antidiscrimination laws alone cannot bring about racial equality. Did you feel vindicated when the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action last year?

Yes, I did. My thinking about affirmative action has gone through a number of different phases. I thought the court made the right decision for the country. The arc of the United States’ development depends on getting our institutions right. Merit, excellence, judgment on objective performance are at the center of civilizational integrity. I think there was a corruption built right into the heart of the compromise that we were making. The historical problem is that the blacks were, on the whole, not as developed at the end of the Jim Crow laws. They were held back, they were excluded, they were discriminated, they were subordinated. There were not enough qualified students. But to respond to that problem by putting a different set of standards, and building that into the framework of the institution is a historical mistake of monumental proportions. Frankly, the Supreme Court in a way saved the country in that decision.

«The arc of the United States’ development depends on getting our

institutions right. Merit, excellence, judgment on objective performance are at the center of civilizational integrity.»

But one could argue that you yourself benefited from affirmative action.

I did. Where’s the inconsistency? I don’t understand this argument. I don’t owe loyalty to a policy because I benefited from it. By the way, at that time, you might have argued differently than you would argue today. The lawsuit was not brought by Southern racists. It was brought by second generation Asian immigrants. And Blacks have to ask themselves: Are we going to depend upon a special dispensation for every race? Is that our strategy: to beg others to give us a break? There’s no dignity in that if you want to be equal. How are you going to be equal if you’re dependent upon people seeing your narrative of victimization as morally authoritative? People have to learn the skills that allow them to be effective in the modern world.

What do you think has to change, then?

We could talk about education, about how public schools are funded, how they’re governed, where the resources are coming from. We could talk about social background, family, community and norms. I don’t have a panacea.

In 2020, protests over the death of George Floyd erupted. European media reported very positively about these. However, the calls to defund the police have resulted in a surge of homicides, the victims of which are disproportionately black, yet we read very little about this. Why is that?

Because we talk about the things that the people who decide what gets talked about think is legitimate to talk about. This is also influenced by partisan politics: If the Republicans and Donald Trump and Fox News are talking about something in a certain way, then you don’t want to talk like that. You would be called a racist if you did.

So the intellectual class and the cultural elite in in the media and academia are pushing a certain narrative?

Yeah, I think that’s right. I think there is a narrative, I think there is a class of like-minded elites. I’ve been saying for a long time that if you were smart, you would try to de-racialize the discussion about police. If the cops need to be disciplined or supervised more strictly, you can get that done more effectively by focusing on cops and kids, not white cops and black kids. If you start talking about the race of the cop and the race of the kid, pretty soon you’re going to be talking about the race of the criminal and the race of the victim. Now, blacks are vastly overrepresented among criminals. A decent person isn’t supposed to speak of this because It’s considered racist. But everybody can see it. Something similar is observable when it comes to the difference in intelligence tests. There are objective differences between different groups that are large. But when Charles Murray wrote about this, everybody called him a racist, and therefore no one talks about it. It’s a taboo.

Do you ever feel uncomfortable that some people might see you as a black mascot of conservatives?

I am in my seventies now. I think I’ve earned a certain deference. I may not get it, but I deserve it. Confucius once said: A man should not worry that other people recognize his accomplishment; he should be content to know that he has done his best. So, don’t live thinking: “Do they see what I’ve accomplished?” Live knowing that you have had integrity, that you have you been disciplined, that you have applied yourself – this should be its own reward. Of course, there are trolls, I see what some people say on social media for example, but I don’t let that bother me very much. I know who I am. But there was a time in my life when I was much more insecure about that and I let it affect me.

You started the politically on the left, you moved to the right, then to the left again. Now you call yourself a conservative. Who are you going to vote for in November?

I’m not going to tell you. I would never admit to voting for Trump. But there are other options. I haven’t decided yet.

I have to say: I don’t envy you for your choice.

I said at the time of January 6th 2021, I had said things in defense of Trump, but I was wrong. He should have stepped down. I don’t blame him for insurrection, this is an exaggeration, but he didn’t concede the election and he exhausted his options in the courts. That’s very troubling. Although I think the fact that he’s popular in many quarters is an interesting fact about American politics that needs to be understood. There’s something going on underneath the disaffection with the governing structures that allow for a person like Trump to come along. It’s not coming out of thin air.

«There’s something going on underneath the disaffection with the

governing structures that allow for a person like Trump to come along.»

It’s not just in the US. We saw the same phenomenon in the recent EU elections as well. And I think it’s too easy to blame it on populism or right-wing extremists. If people vote for candidates like Trump, then the establishment should ask itself why, and maybe: what they did wrong.

That’s what I’m saying. And the establishment are not only politicians, but also intellectuals, journalists and entertainment figures. In his book “The Tyranny of Merit”, Michael Sandel writes about the “laptop class” in San Francisco, in New York and Boston that is doing well in the globalization and modern economy. On the other side, there are the people whose town is going to hell because the factories have closed, their jobs have gone off, they can’t compete with the Chinese or the Mexicans. Sandel says that if the laptop class think they earned their thing, they’re basically telling the other guys that they also earn their empty bank account, their frustration and their opioid addiction. That’s an invitation to a certain kind of political disunity und dissatisfaction, and a guy like Trump might do well in those circumstances.

In your memoir, you are very honest, sometimes brutally honest about your dark sides. You repeatedly cheated on your wife, you created a public scandal when you threw your mistress out of the apartment you had rented for her, you became addicted to cocaine… At some points in the book, I almost felt anger and thought: Man, you have achieved so much and then fuck up like this… Why?

Did you ever get an answer to that question?

Not really, but I was thinking: You grew up in In the South Side of Chicago, and you made an impressive academic career. You became a professor at Ivy League university. At the same time, you were still rooted in the culture and in the in the community that you grew up in. Do you think that had some influence?

Yeah. I think it was an identity crisis. I always wanted to see myself as authentically black. When I was a transfer student at Northwestern University, working at a factory coming from home with a wife and two children to go to classes, I thought that the other black students were both more and less sophisticated than me. They knew more about the world, what fork to use at the dinner table, what wine would go with the fish or the meat. But they knew less about the streets. They wouldn’t be able to go into the dark spaces, the housing projects, the bar on the corner, walking along and knowing how to carry yourself so that nobody bothers you. I knew the streets, and I took pride in that. I took that as an anchor of my blackness. And what I associated with it was vice: Sex, inebriation, drugs, gambling. Even as I followed the path of intellectual development up to the pinnacle, I still want to stay in touch with that. I wanted to say that I haven’t sold out, that I haven’t lost my soul.

How do you look now at this thinking?

Today, I recognize how perverse it is to identify blackness with vice. That’s what a racist would do. I will leave it to a psychologist or psychiatrist to speculate about what kinds of insecurities and self-loathing might be behind that.

If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?

The most important thing I’d like to say is: Stay focused. Understand what’s important, and then focus on that. There was a time when I didn’t treat my late wife, Linda, well. And then I became a good husband, I kicked my drug habit, I stopped fucking around, I became a Christian, we had two kids, we bought a house. And then I abandoned my commitment to my wife and began fucking around again. Why? I don’t have an answer even now. I don’t blame a reader of my memoir for saying: I don’t like this guy. I can still remember a conversation with my wife in Barcelona, in which she informed me that she knew that I was not being faithful. She was struggling with breast cancer, she was dying. It was a moment when I might have made a turn, I might have acknowledged that she was right and I was sorry. But I didn’t. I didn’t confront the moment and didn’t change my behavior. Because I didn’t want to.

Do you think you would have if you had confessed your unfaithfulness then?

I’d like to give myself the benefit of the doubt on that. But I’m not sure. The enemy within is a bitch.