Two unusually powerful articles have appeared in the past day or so — Glenn Loury’s “Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America” and Shelby Steele’s “How Equality Lost to ‘Equity.’” They are almost eerily similar not only in their impressive eloquence but in the arguments they make.
Since it would do a disservice to each of them to quote snippets, you need to read all of both.I will share with you my short reply to the good friend who sent me the link to Loury yesterday:
Thanks. i had seen this, or rather seen that it exists, but had not read it. Now I have. If I were culture czar — which of course I should be, at least if you weren’t — I would put this at the top of the list of required reading, and send to re-education camp all who failed the quiz questions about it.Two quick thoughts.1. The best evidence that Loury’s article is correct, even profoundly correct, is that one can’t say the first thing that comes to mind to describe It: Boy, he really calls a spade a spade!2. Although Loury is speaking to everyone and eloquently recognizes that whites as well as blacks will be canceled if they say what he thinks should be said, his message is mainly to the black community, urging blacks to own up to their failure to take responsibility for their own actions. That’s fine, and certainly called for. But an equally powerful “speaking truth to censors” speech could be delivered about the equally if not more disastrous failure not of “white” society but of the elite and culture-shaping institutions of American society — which of course are generally “white” — to see and speak the truths Loury lays out. Actually, it worse: those institutions — academia, Hollywood, Fortune 100 companies who shoveled cash to BLM, Wash Post, NY Times, etc., etc. — are in large part the problem, since they carry out the canceling and reinforce the “structural racism” myth by implementing the mandatory “equity” solution of proportional hiring. See QuotaCola. And this silence/complicity is self-reinforcing since the only whites saying such things are conservatives and Republicans (and certainly not all of them), and who wants to be allied with Deplorables?3. (I know I said two thoughts, but this one’s a free bonus.) Add the Democratic Party to list of cancelers in No. 2. Can you imagine any elected Democrat giving a speech echoing what Loury says?
Now I would also put Steele’s essay at the top of my list, and add it to the quiz.
