Glenn Loury And The Coming (?) Confederacy Of Races

Glenn Loury, a black Boston University economist, used to be a conservative. He used to be a critic of affirmative action. In an influential symposium on affirmative action in Commentary magazine (March 1998), he explained:

I have been criticizing affirmative-action policies for over fifteen years, in congressional testimony, in popular and scholarly articles, and in lectures nationwide. I was among the first to stress how the use of racial preferences sheltered blacks from the challenge of competing in our society on their merits. And I argued strenuously against the inclination of blacks to see affirmative action as a totem–a policy assumed to lie beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism, symbolizing the nation’s commitment to “do the right thing” for black people. In short, I sought to expose the fact that the practice of affirmative action had been corrupted, to the detriment of those it was intended to help.

But he changed. In an OpEd in the New York Times several months earlier (November 30, 1997), Loury was still describing himself as “a black conservative intellectual,” but it was clear that he no longer agreed with conservatives on race. “Today,” he wrote, “conservative discourse on race has largely been reduced to sloganeering, filled with references to black criminality, illegitimacy and cultural pathology.”

That itself, of course, is a sloganeering overreaction, but Loury was engaged in a transition based on more than swapping one set of slogans for another. For one thing, as he became more concerned with the end of promoting racial equality, which he came to define (without saying so explicitly) as roughly proportional inclusion, he became less concerned with the “formal” fairness of the means of achieving it. Consider the following, from the same OpEd:

Once conservatives battled rigid quotas. Now they attack all affirmative action programs meant to encourage greater inclusion of blacks in American institutions.

I find this sentence both fascinating and revealing, because it is such a moral and philosophical non-sequitur: since quotas also were (and are) justified as an attempt to promote greater inclusion, why are they wrong? What is objectionable in a “rigid” quota that is not also objectionable in a flexible quota?

Loury repeated this argument in the Commentary symposium:

In the wake of a successful ballot initiative banning affirmative action in the state of California, I now find it necessary to reiterate the old, and in my view still valid, arguments on behalf of explicit public efforts to reduce racial inequality. In doing so, I offer no brief for the status quo. I am not defending racial quotas, or race-based allocations of public contracts, or racial double standards in the workplace, or huge disparities in the test scores of blacks and whites admitted to elite universities. These corrupt practices are deservedly under attack and should be curtailed. But I do defend the U.S. Army’s programs to commission more black officers, the public funding of efforts to bring blacks into science and engineering, the attempts by urban law-enforcement agencies to recruit black personnel, and the goal of public universities to retain some racial diversity in their student bodies. The mere fact that these efforts take race into account should not, in my view, be disqualifying.

But this position is untenable. It is impossible to defend racial preferences without defending racial double standards. And if there’s nothing wrong with racial double standards (so long as their defenders favor “inclusion”), then it’s hard to see what’s so objectionable about quotas, rigid or otherwise.

It is also impossible to defend racial preferences in admissions at elite universities without defending — or at least being willing to tolerate — “huge disparities in the test scores of blacks and whites admitted to elite universities.” Which brings us up to yesterday, when Loury had another OpEd in the New York Times, this one declaring that “colorblindness is a false ideal” and explicitly defending the University of Michigan’s preferences policies.

First, let’s clear away some rhetorical underbrush. Some of what functions as moral embellishments to Loury’s new view, in my opinion, borders on incoherence. Take his conclusion (no, you take it):

Taking race into account, in university admissions or in other aspects of life, does not require abandoning a commitment to individualism. One can hold that race is irrelevant to a person’s moral worth