Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
1. Judgement Day
In the summer of 1984, economist Glenn Loury goes to Washington, D. C., to meet with the Black leaders of the day: Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, John Jacobs of the National Urban League, Eddie Williams of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Roger Wilkins, Julian Bond, and Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (168) Loury is the new, hotshot Black intellectual on the scene, PhD from MIT in 1976, first job at Northwestern, then Michigan, then Harvard’s Black Studies Department as its chair in 1982 with a joint appointment in economics, at 33, the first Black ever to be tenured there in economics. Six years before earning the PhD from MIT, he was a married community college student working a full-time job with two children by his wife and one by a paramour. Quite a story!
The Black leaders have read a draft of an article he wrote entitled, “A New American Dilemma” (intentionally echoing Gunnar Myrdal) that will appear in The New Republic. It is one of his “little essays” (167), not the highly technical academic articles he is required to write for scholarly journals to maintain standing in his field. He comes to the meeting with the old civil rights guard with a swagger, even a level of arrogance. But underneath he is sweating. Things were not quite as they may have seemed for the man who had emerged from graduate school as the Black boy wonder with a couple of impressive pieces of scholarship. He has hit a wall: he cannot write any more scholarship. He is like a ballplayer who had a sensational rookie year, then comes the sophomore slump that he cannot shake, the scholar’s version of writer’s block. “I had published some noteworthy work already, no doubt. But what was next? I sat there in my departmental office in Littauer Hall, waiting for insight to come, and I didn’t see any sign of it on the horizon.” (156) Is he a fluke or a fraud?
By 1984, the year of Reagan’s second-term landslide win, Loury has been identified with a new cadre of Black intellectuals, nurtured by rightwing and Republican money, who, for lack of a better term, are dubbed Black conservatives.
Part of the blame is affirmative action, about which Loury in later years will harbor “a visceral skepticism.” (309) “… my Harvard appointment as full professor with tenure at age thirty-three, before my research program had matured and with parallel responsibilities in two very different fields, was also a case of my career trajectory being altered by affirmative action. Did I have talent and work ethic to make good on Harvard’s bet? I cannot know what others thought, but I know I was less certain about that. I know I choked, and I know paralyzing doubts almost got the better of me.” (310) The late critic Stanley Crouch told me that affirmative action completely beclouds and befuddles a Black person’s understanding of the true measure of his or her worth. Loury felt the two edges of the affirmative action sword, yet he always had the choice of saying no to Harvard. Why did he not do so? Did he feel powerless facing such an offer? But I digress.
“My self-consciousness and insecurity had gotten the better of me in the economics department,” he writes in Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, “I didn’t know if I was failing there because I really wasn’t good enough or because I merely feared that I might not be good enough. The outcome was the same, regardless: I wasn’t producing. And I couldn’t just sit there not producing. That wasn’t me. I had to do something.” And writing as a conservative culture warrior for The New Republic was better than doing nothing at all. Moreover, however much he has short-circuited as an academic, he is still important enough to have an audience with these Black leaders. As a tenured economics professor at Harvard, he is a racial achievement, a product of their civil rights efforts. It was not just his mental abilities that got him through MIT and into the hallowed halls of Harvard, it was the blood, sweat, and tears of the The Movement. The civil rights old guard was right to feel that way.
By 1984, the year of Reagan’s second-term landslide win, Loury has been identified with a new cadre of Black intellectuals, nurtured by rightwing and Republican money, who, for lack of a better term, are dubbed Black conservatives. Economist Thomas Sowell, whose 1980 Fairmount Conference in San Francisco put Black conservatives on the political map, is the midwife and leader of this movement, probably because he is the most prolific and best-known scholar associated with it. (Loury, surprisingly, scarcely mentions him in his book, perhaps out of a sense of rivalry as they are both in the same field.)
Black conservatives are self-styled heretics attacking the orthodoxy of the civil rights liberals, their fixation on racism as the primary cause of Black problems, their insistence on government intervention and regulation to fix the problems, and their unshakable belief in the massive redistribution of wealth. Black conservatives find this an unseemly combination of welfare statism and special pleading. They criticize all these notions. In fact, they say that these ideas are themselves causing the very problems that Blacks must overcome by ceasing to see them as solutions.
Blacks face twin problems in the 1980s: a growing class bifurcation between middle-class and lower-class Blacks in income and geography that seemed unbridgeable and the terrible impact of the early 1980s recession that spiked Black unemployment to over 20 percent by 1983 and so impoverished segments of the Black community that both scholarly and popular sources speak of the rise of a Black underclass permanently exiled from the job market and any bourgeois ideals of aspiration and self-betterment. Another driver for Black conservatives is a dislike of White liberals and leftists whom they see as the overlords and enablers of Black liberal and leftist thought. In short, Black conservatives see Black liberals and leftists as tools for White liberals and leftists, which is the mirror argument that Black liberals and leftists make about Black conservatives: that they are the tools of White reactionaries and conservatives. Swapping these criticisms might be simply a reflection of Black intellectuals’ self-consciousness about their tenuous empowerment in relation to the hegemony of both the White left and the White right.
In his meeting with the Black leaders, something of a showdown, Loury dismisses their view as out-of-date and out-of-touch with Blacks at the time. “I am energized by the prospect of their anger,” Loury writes in anticipation of his meeting. (169)
“I allow that racism continues to hinder black people, but I think it has been constrained by civil rights legislation and evolving norms,” he tells them. “By contrast, citing a long list of statistics, I describe the problems of black communities, and I argue that these problems—single-parent families, early and unwed pregnancy, criminalized youth, low academic achievement, absence from the labor force—now limit our ability to seize upon opportunities newly available to us. I openly call this a social pathology in the so-called black underclass. I conclude that this social pathology needs to be addressed and, crucially, that the methods of yesteryear’s civil rights protests are not an effective means of doing so.” (169)
In his meeting with the Black leaders, something of a showdown, Loury dismisses their view as out-of-date and out-of-touch with Blacks at the time. “I am energized by the prospect of their anger,” Loury writes in anticipation of his meeting.
Loury gets the response that he is expecting, anger. And he gets a response he does not expect. Coretta Scott King is crying. “Why is she weeping? What had I said that could have brought about this kind of response?” he writes. (170) It was as if she were crying over a wayward son. As he considers the moment later, what was more important to him then: to be right about the civil rights movement or to be helpful to it? At the time, it was more important to be right because Black conservatives like him aimed to destroy the hegemony of the civil rights movement, the self-righteousness of Black liberalism, and the militant pretense of Black leftism. Sons must destroy their fathers, as the old parable goes, and even their mothers. In this case, Loury must destroy them as the ideological terminator he is. Being right is being helpful. Call what Loury was trying to do creative destruction.
• • •
2. The limits of redemption
Glenn Loury seems tantalized by his self-destructive tendencies. Many people are because this is their dalliance with the fall, with failure, with evil. That is what his autobiography is about: his self-destructive tendencies and why they are useful to him in living his life. In more simplistic autobiographies, self-destructive tendencies are mere props for a narrative of redemption. Late Admissions has elements of that, but redemption is not its primary aim or pay-off for the reader. He becomes a devout Christian but falls away from that after a time, probably because it is not interesting enough intellectually. He becomes a better husband and father, but that is probably not terribly interesting to him intellectually either. Redemption does not challenge the mind but is rather a way to get it to submit to the conventional. He does submit to the conventional but that is not the point of the book. “Nothing could define me. I wasn’t reducible to ‘economist’ or ‘Christian,’ or ‘black man’ or even ‘husband’ or ‘father.’ I was those things, certainly. But I was much more than that.” (365)
The more unflattering things he reveals about himself, the more credibility he has earned with readers. The more credibility he gains, the more he can manipulate readers with his story.
For his autobiography, his self-destructive tendencies make him the hero and the villain simultaneously. That embodiment is more important to his narrative than redemption. It is the ultimate kind of self-regard and Loury warns readers at the outset that the game they are playing with him is “the problem of self-regard.” (viii) The more unflattering things he reveals about himself, the more credibility he has earned with readers. The more credibility he gains, the more he can manipulate readers with his story. His profligate sex life told in graphic detail with its serial adultery that includes even sleeping with the wife of a best friend and his crack cocaine habit are his imitations of “the player,” the cool Black guy from the streets, a persona that appeals to him because it is such a stark contrast from, a rebellion against, what he is supposed to be as a paper-producing academic. His intellectual paralysis that stymies his career, his attraction to conservatism that ostracizes him from many Black supporters or advocates, his repudiation of conservatism when he savages his friends Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in his review of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997) and his repudiation of his repudiation when he decides someone ought to say something about the Black people that Black criminals harm and not bestow so much sympathy on the criminals are different ways to experience self-destruction and to rise above it. “By insisting on seeing myself as a man above my condition—distinguished by my intelligence and accomplishments from the junkies and drunks that surrounded me, separated by my Ivy League legitimacy from the black people in the projects with whom I had associated, and yet grounded by my black authenticity in a way my academic colleagues never could be—I thought of myself as singular. And in that singularity I felt pride.” (275)
What makes Late Admissions so fascinating to read, and such an important autobiography, is its self-awareness: it is actually a story about how embracing one’s self-destructive tendencies, one’s voracious selfishness and appetites, gives life meaning because, if nothing else, they make life interesting to oneself and they actually make you interesting to other people. It is a book about the ferocity of self-regard.
