Glenn Loury Speaks

On a Thursday evening in April, Glenn Loury is talking about race, ethics, and affirmative action. And he’s getting emotional. “Don’t patronize my people,” he told an audience at the College of the Holy Cross, in Massachusetts. “Don’t judge us by a different standard. Don’t lower the bar! Why are you lowering the bar? What’s going on there? Is that about guilt or pity?” He let the question hang in silence for a moment. “Tell me a pathway to equality that is rooted in either one of those things.”

That’s the opening to a sharp and very candid interview of Glenn Loury by Evan Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Loury continues on affirmative action:

Equality is the only legitimate long-term goal — racial equality, not head-counting. I’m talking about equality of dignity, respect, standing, accomplishment, achievement, honor. People have to earn these things. What do I want to do? I want to reorient the discussion around the development of African-American capacities to compete.

On his personal life:

Q: By the late 1990s, you’d broken with many former friends on the right. You’d undergone a political conversion. Where did you land?

A: There’s an arc to this thing, and it’s odd. I describe myself today as right of center.

What happened is that I went through a trauma. I was accused of assaulting a woman with whom I was having an extramarital affair. I was publicly humiliated. I had to withdraw an appointment as undersecretary of education in the last years of Reagan’s second term. I was a crack-cocaine addict; it almost killed me. My wife at the time, God bless her, stayed with me, and we subsequently had two fine sons. But at the time, I was dying.

I found Jesus. I got my life together.

Read the whole thing.