Sidebar with Economist and Professor Glenn Loury! Viva & Barnes LIVE!
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I was going to start with a Justin Trudeau or Melanie Jolie clip.
You've all been spared.
You've all been spared.
I'm going to do it tomorrow.
We only have an hour.
Maybe I'll be able to squeeze an extra few minutes out of Glenn.
We have an hour, so I'm not going to waste any time with decrepit Canadian politics.
I'll do that tomorrow.
Both Glenn and Robert are in the backdrop, so I'm going to bring them in right now.
This is going to be amazing.
Share the link away.
And I've got questions for Glenn.
I've been listening to interviews all day.
My kids now have absorbed more information than they knew they were ever going to absorb about Glenn Lowry in one day.
So, okay, I'll bring Robert in first.
Robert, how goes the battle, sir?
Good, good.
All right, and I'm going to bring in Glenn.
But Glenn, what I'm going to do is this, and I'm going to put myself down here so that I can bring comments up over.
All right, gentlemen, this is going to be amazing.
Glenn, thank you very much for coming on.
Everybody in the chat knows that I delve into childhood, but first, for anybody who's watching who may not know who you are, Glenn, we asked for the 30,000-foot overview before diving into childhood to understand how you became the adult that you are.
30,000 feet, and then we get into the details.
Okay.
You want me to say who I am?
Please.
Okay, well, I'm in my 70s.
I was born in Chicago in 1948.
I'm an academic economist who has become a public intellectual and social critic.
I write books and articles and papers.
I have a podcast that has some cachet.
I've been writing and talking about race and racial inequality in the United States for years and years.
I have an autobiography that's coming out next year, May of 2024, from Norton called Late Admissions.
Confessions of a Black Conservative.
So that should be enough to get your juices flowing.
You've settled on a name because one podcast I listened today, it was on human centers.
Human centered.
And you hadn't hammered down a name for the memoir yet.
Yeah, yeah, we got a name.
Okay, that's fantastic.
Okay, now Glenn, I start with the basics.
I go to Wikipedia, but I watch a lot of interviews.
One thing that I didn't hear in any interview, you're born in the south side of Chicago.
I know you said historically your last name, Lowry, could be of Scottish descent, meaning that even within the black population in America, there's European ancestry.
How far back have you been able to trace your family ancestry in America or in general?
Not at all far.
I know who my mother and father are.
I know who their parents are, although both of their mothers, my mother's mother and my father's mother, were dead before I was born.
My father's father, I never really knew well.
My father didn't meet his father until he was already an adult.
They developed a relationship, but it was touch and go.
My mother's father...
And I had something of a relationship.
He was around, but we weren't close.
Now, if you ask me about great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, it would all be a certain amount of speculation.
On my mother's side, people moved up to Chicago from Brookhaven, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee, in the years after the First World War.
It was a large family, my mother's mother's family.
On my father's side, I really know very little.
As I say, I didn't really know my father's father at all, and neither did he know him when he was a kid.
In fact, there's a story.
I spell my name L-O-U-R-Y, and I pronounce it Lowry.
But it was originally spelled L-O-W-R-Y.
That's my dad's dad's name.
That's how he spells it.
And when a teacher...
I misspelled my father's name when he was in like the sixth grade or something and spelled it L-O-U-R-Y.
My father insisted on keeping the new spelling because he wanted to be, you know, his attitude was, well, if my dad didn't bother to show up, then I get to name my, you know, I get to spell my name any way I want to, kind of thing like that.
So I don't know.
Is that too much information?
Not at all.
And before, Robert, one more question, just a follow-up.
Why is it you didn't know your father's father, your grandfather, because died early, was not involved in your dad's life?
Or is there another reason?
Well, no, he wasn't involved in my dad's life very much.
He didn't die early.
My father developed a relationship with him, but it was always kind of touch and go.
There was a lot of distance there.
And so he was this vague figure who I never had a real relationship with and whom I never sat and talked, you know.
About the old people and the old country and stories like that.
I mean, there wasn't a connection there, and therefore I'm not able to tell you much about his ancestors.
It seemed like one great influence on your life was your uncle.
Who reminded me of the tradition, similar to Clarence Thomas, going all the way back to the black populist movement of the late 1800s, that sort of the black independent working class that was big on self-reliance, self-empowerment,
was realistic about racial oppression and issues regarding race, but their response to it was not victimization, but instead used it as a Well, this is Uncle Mooney.
This is my aunt's husband, my mother's sister's husband, Uncle Mooney.
We called him Mooney because he had eyes that kind of half moon-shaped eyes.
He was a barber and a hustler, a small businessman, a tradesman.
He did what he needed to do to make a buck, and they ran a dry cleaner.
They were very entrepreneurial people.
And yeah, he did have this attitude of self-reliance, and he had no time for deadbeats and the people who were not serious about getting ahead.
He was not a bellyacher.
He knew what racism was, but he didn't spend a whole lot of time worrying about it.
He was too busy taking care of his family.
He'd kick us out of bed at 10 o 'clock on Saturday morning, you know, telling us to get up and get busy, you know, thinking, you know, the half the day is gone already and you're still lounging around in the bed.
He was an admirer, although not a follower of the so-called Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam, which was headquartered in Chicago, though he was not a religious man at all and certainly not a Muslim, but he admired the straight-backed Self-reliant, defiant kind of attitude of the Muslims.
So, yeah, I mean, he had friends.
He took me once to visit a friend who was incarcerated in the prison in Joliet in Illinois, you know, who walked on both sides of the line, played the game on both sides of the fence.
And, you know, my uncle was not a hoodlum or a criminal by any means.
Yeah.
He had all these different connections and whatnot.
Yeah, great man.
Great man, my uncle.
And he did have a big influence on my life amongst others.
Yeah.
You lived with your uncle, from what I heard on Lex Friedman, you lived in your uncle's house.
They gave you a spot in the back where you were living with your family in your uncle's house?
Yeah, my mother, my sister, and my mother was divorced by that time from my dad.
We were living with her, and she had kind of bounced around.
And my Aunt E. Lois, my mother's sister, Uncle Mooney and Aunt E. Lois, they were one of the first Black families to buy a house in this neighborhood on the south side of Chicago called Park Manor in the 1950s.
And they brought us in, carved out an apartment upstairs in the back of this large house.
A two-bedroom apartment.
I slept on a couch.
My sister had the bedroom.
My mother had the bedroom.
I slept on the couch.
It was a very big, beautiful house.
My mother's sister and husband were a successful middle-class Black family.
There were fruit trees in the back and lawn in the front.
No gunshots to be heard.
I can't say that I came up hard.
But it was largely through the connection between my mother and her sister that, you know, that I had a more or less middle-class upbringing.
You know, one thing I'm intrigued by is, in general, as the civil rights movement shifted from Martin Luther King in the 1960s to aspects of more racial grievance and sort of the...
Democratic Party policies on war on poverty.
When I was trying to figure out why there's been a decline of working class kids going to law school, I ended up on this deep dive.
There's all these studies that show the main thing for working class kids to overachieve is that they disproportionately have an inner loci of control.
They believe they control their own future and their fate.
Whereas those that believe there's an outer loci of control, that they have no control over their own lives, don't tend to achieve.
And it seems to me a lot of the victimology narrative that the racial grievance communities have embraced and the Democratic Party's policies often implement are designed to tell black Americans, as well as others in that position, that they're victims,
they're weak, they're incompetent, they can't do anything, that aspects of affirmative action seem to have this sort of, what Justice Thomas referred to, the stigma effect, that it seems all designed to keep Black Americans repressed and dependent and wards of the state and wards of the system.
And rather than promote an interloci of control, promote self-empowerment, promote independence.
And to some degree, a reason for that could be that if you're the Democratic Party and you want a reliable voting constituency, what happens if you give them the tools of self-empowerment that lead to them no longer needing you as a political party, as a ward of the state?
How much of that...
If you look at Nation of Islam, you look at Malcolm X, even that part of the tradition, very much self-reliance, self-empowerment, not for...
Reducing the independence, the old black working class tradition that Clarence Thomas represents in part that he grew up in, the tradition of the black populist movement in the late 1800s, early 1900s, that that tradition seemed to be lost in the civil rights community and the Democratic Party as it embraced a kind of a desire to treat all black Americans as permanent victims and seeing everything as color-based to the degree that...
Being successful means you're being white.
What are your thoughts about that?
My thoughts about all of that.
I see that you have a theory of the case.
A well-developed model or model, a framework.
I don't necessarily disagree with the basic thrust of your argument.
In fact, I find a lot to agree with there.
I think it's incomplete.
I think it doesn't explain why Black people go for it.
It doesn't explain why we're as comfortable as we are with this half-baked escape from freedom account that we're the victims of history and that there's nothing we can do for ourselves.
It doesn't explain why we're content with that.
But I think it does explain a lot about why it is the President of the United States would Promise America that he was going to appoint a Black woman as his vice president and a Black woman to the United States Supreme Court.
Or why it is that Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-American president, would make Al Sharpton his ambassador to Black America and would say stupid shit like, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon, when no son of Obama's would be anywhere close to the sociological characteristics of Trayvon Martin in Central Florida.
I think it explains why Joe Biden would go around saying, I'll put you all back in chains.
And if you don't know whether or not to vote for me or Trump, you ain't really black.
Or it's Jim Crow 2.0 when he's talking about ballot security laws in the state of Georgia where more black people came out to vote and where they elected two Democratic senators in 2022 and they're talking about taking the rights to vote away from black people.
They're waving a bloody shirt in our faces and trying to scare us to death that the Ku Klux Klan is coming to get us.
It might help to explain why the Democratic candidates for vice president and president in 2020 called Jacob Blake.
This is Kenosha, Wisconsin thug who was stealing his girlfriend's car and kidnapping her children and had a knife in his hand when he got shot in the back.
And they're calling him to console him at his hospital bed.
Okay?
They're pandering by waving the bloody shirt of anti-Black racism to Black people.
It would explain some of that.
But it doesn't explain why when you talk to a celebrity, a rapper, an athlete, a movie star, or one of these African-American people, and you ask them what's going on, they'll tell you.
Like LeBron James will tell you, I'm afraid to walk out of the hotel.
The cops are going to get me.
It does not explain that.
So I'm partly with you on your account, certainly in terms of the motives of the Democratic politicians, in terms of their reliance on the African-American vote.
But I'm not sure why my people have been prepared to settle for stewardship.
For being wards of the liberal state, for living in the 19th century, 1619 Project, reparations, when all the action is in the 21st century, like the Chinese are coming.
If you can't read and count, you haven't got a chance in the 21st century?
You're trading on Tulsa 1921, 1923?
That's your story?
It doesn't explain why that's all we got.
Glenn, I'm only understanding a lot of things now in retrospect or in hindsight.
Looking back, Robert and I have talked about the origins of Planned Parenthood and eugenics and a lot of other things.
I don't understand how certain demographics, and I'll say the Black population in America and the Jewish population in America, vote.
Almost predictably Democrat.
It seems to be a tool of marketing and a tool of appealing to one's sensitivities and also a tool of promising that the government will take care of you.
But to bring this back to something in your personal life that I'll kick myself if I don't ask the question for.
Wikipedia says, it's not a controversial fact, but that you were a young father to two kids.
And I ask this because, you know...
Knowing the history of Planned Parenthood, who the targets were for that, and it was always cloaked in benevolence.
Well, it's reproductive care when some people call it something far worse in terms of targeting a specific population.
If I may ask about that, is Wikipedia accurate?
How did it go about that as a young adult, your father, two kids?
How did the decision come to work and to pay for those kids?
And how did it all turn out as far as your life experience goes?
Yeah, well, my life should not be taken as a model for anybody.
I was a father at 18 and again at 19. And again at 21, I had a son born out of wedlock when I was a young, a very young man, Alden, whom I didn't recognize until he was in college.
And we've developed a wonderful relationship, he and his three daughters and I, my grandchildren.
But that's another story.
My girlfriend became pregnant.
It wasn't legal to terminate the pregnancy, but it was certainly possible to do it.
It didn't feel right.
The year was 1967.
It just wasn't the right thing to do.
We didn't marry right away.
In fact, both of my daughters, my oldest two children, were born before their mother and I were married.
We got married after the second kid was born.
I mean, it was the world that I came up in in Chicago.
I mean, I was a virgin when I was 16 years old and graduated from high school, valedictorian in my class.
But I had some catching up to do.
We considered terminating the second pregnancy.
I talk about this in the book, but we just couldn't.
So we married and my son, my third child, Alden, came along and respected.
Respectability was important.
Putting one foot in front of the other, staying on the right side of the line, living decently.
It was important.
I went to work.
I dropped out of college.
I got a job at a printing plant.
It was 1967, '68, '69, boom economy in the United States.
I did okay and was able to put one foot in front of the other and then start taking classes at a community college and got discovered by one of my professors and ended up at Northwestern University and became a star student and then went to graduate school at MIT and became my academic.
So it's not your everyday story.
It's a pretty extraordinary tale.
I had some talent.
I had some luck.
I had some great teachers.
I had support from my first wife and whatnot.
Our marriage didn't survive graduate school, and I remarried, and so on.
It's a long story.
But in any case, yeah, Planned Parenthood.
Abortion rate amongst African Americans, you can look at the statistics, it's pretty stratospheric.
I don't know.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories.
I prefer to just say I don't know.
So where are the progressives coming out of the era of Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger and all of that?
Laying a kind of eugenesis foundation for the limitation of certain populations, echoes from which we could find all the way into the late part of the 20th century and into our day?
Certainly possible.
But I don't know.
Now, what was it like growing up in the south side of Chicago in the 1960s?
I mean, you got Fred Hampton, you got the Black Panthers, you got the Democratic National Convention that held in Chicago in 1968.
What was that like?
Well, it was interesting.
And you talk about 68, 69 Hampton.
I think Hampton is 69. And the Black Panther Party and whatnot.
And you had Malcolm X around the Nation of Islam.
Of course, his ministry was in New York after it matured, but he was in Chicago for a while.
It was hip.
It was a lot of style.
The music was amazing.
People, you know, the way they dressed, the parties.
Very dynamic.
It was jazz.
It was blues.
It was good food.
I'm not answering.
I'm sorry.
You're leading me into a question.
Follow-up on this.
You've seen what Chicago...
Chicago has transformed into something wildly different than what it was when you were growing up there.
It's a big city.
But yeah, the neighborhoods that I used to spend time in are now places where I wouldn't dare to walk after dark.
And, you know, everybody can read the newspaper.
You know about what's going on, the crime and stuff like that in Chicago.
And they just elected this ultra-progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson.
And, you know, there's a struggle for the future of the city going on.
And I don't live there.
I haven't lived in Chicago since 1979.
So, you know.
I'm slow to draw conclusions.
Actually, and ironically, my son Alden, whom I've mentioned, my firstborn son, is a journalist for WBEZ, which is the public radio station in Chicago, and he writes a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times.
And I love my son.
I'm grateful for the relationship that we enjoy and his three beautiful daughters and everything, but I tell you, I don't agree with the line that he's taken.
And in the Sun-Times, which is the predictable liberal line.
So, for example, well, I don't know how much to go into this.
Anyway, I mean, it's kind of funny because he is Alden Lowry, L-O-U-R-Y, and I am Glenn Lowry, L-O-U-R-Y, and that's my son.
And his byline will be found in one of the city's flagship newspapers on a regular basis, and he'll be saying stuff that is exactly the opposite of what I'm saying.
I won't ask what Christmas dinners look like.
But on that issue, how does it come to be that demographically large swaths of the population still buy into it and those who critique it, such as yourself, actually get demonized for being the race traitors or the extremists?
And oddly enough, it's totally analogous with the Jewish community as well.
They vote Democrat.
I should say, we vote Democrat.
We vote liberal in Canada.
And the loudmouths like myself get called the radical far right.
And I don't understand, A, why it's true of an entire demographic statistically and how you talk people out of it.
But more importantly, Glenn, do you have any insights as to how and why it happens?
I wish I had more to say about this.
Steadfast Democrats.
Steadfast Democrats.
That's the name of the book.
I don't remember the authors.
Political scientists.
They did some surveys.
And they're basically talking about peer pressure and conformity.
And it somehow becomes an indicator of loyalty to the solidarity with commitment to the cause of racial justice that you vote Democratic, that you support the...
Progressive cause.
I mean, now, the academics, they have their theories.
They have their racial capitalism and, you know, their CRT and whatnot, where they end up on the left out of some kind of identitarian exegesis.
But the working stiffs, it's hard to say.
I mean, you know, journalists have made a lot out of the fact that Black men have...
Drifted away a little bit from the Democratic Party.
I don't know the statistics offhand.
So instead of 10%, maybe it's 20% who are considering voting Republican or whatever.
For Black men, Black women less so.
But that's still not any kind of major movement.
I mean, you could go historically.
I do remember this author.
Her name is Nancy Weiss.
And the book is called Farewell to the Party of Lincoln.
And it's a history of how FDR got Blacks to flip from voting Republican because most Blacks were in the South and because the Southern Democrats were segregationists and Dixiecrats and the Republicans were the party of Lincoln.
And, you know, by the time you're at 1936, the numbers have shifted dramatically.
And by the time you're at 1948, you know, it's kind of all over the party of Lincoln in terms of Black support for Republicans.
So there's a story there, and you could probably make some sense of it.
And then the civil rights.
I mean, it's true that Democrats were standing in the schoolhouse door throughout the South for a century.
But by the time you get to 1964 and it's Lyndon Johnson and it's the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the War on Poverty, you kind of have the Democrats cornering the market on who's behind dealing with the legacy of racism and discrimination.
I don't know.
The.
I'll leave it at that because I'm just making this up.
To what do you ascribe your methodology?
Like in a sense of what I have found in people that are very independent of thought.
Is that they tend to have two traits in abundance.
One is natural curiosity.
And the other is a willingness and a capability to step into other people's shoes, to empathize, to be able to see the world through a different perspective.
And watching all of your discussions over the years...
You have an exceptional capacity to explore all the different alternative hypotheses and to almost advance them as if you were its own advocate, even when they're often opposite positions within that.
Is that something you developed?
Is that something you learned growing up?
Is that something you experienced?
To what do you ascribe that origin of independence of thought?
Okay, this is going to sound funny, but I was a mathematics major in college.
And I did a PhD at MIT when I left college.
It was in economics.
But it was mathematical.
It was formal.
You had to have a model.
You had to know what your assumptions were.
And you couldn't say anything that you couldn't derive from the previous axioms and limas.
I got a really, really good education in college and in graduate school.
I had teachers who were not just technicians.
I mean, some of them were very broad people.
And so, you know, I was reading books.
I was reading novels.
I studied the German language.
I was reading existential philosophy, you know, Camus and Sartre and those people and Wittgenstein and those people.
And, you know, I read Marx.
I read Hayek.
I read Friedman.
You know, I read Keynes.
I read Galbraith, you know, kind of...
Again, I don't know if I'm answering or not.
I got a really, really good education that took me out of the sloganeering, spouting rhetoric, talking about what you feel, the kind of epistemic authority.
I had lived experience.
I mean, lived experience didn't mean a damn thing at Northwestern University in 1969 when I was a student.
Didn't mean anything.
Goethe, Mann, Kafka.
I've never been one to settle for the party line or the story.
I've always wanted to go deeper and to think for myself.
I had the experience early in my career of going to Harvard.
As a professor of economics and of Afro-American studies, this is one reason why I understand the other side, because I, you know, I lived among them, you know, and I had sociologists and historians and literature people and philosophers who were of the Afro orientation in terms of the academics.
And these are smart people and, you know, the books that they were writing and reading and all of that.
So I got to some degree immersed in that.
A decade at Boston University in the 1990s as a university professor when John Silber was president of the university, late John Silber, who was, you know, quite a character.
And he built a great university there, and I was part of that university professor's program.
So I got to meet people like Roger Scruton, who, you know, the great conservative, late great conservative British philosopher who was a...
Professor, he would fly over from London and spend three months of the time, you know, teaching at DU, collecting his salary and whatnot, and others, and others, and I kind of got out of the ghetto, the intellectual ghetto of, you know...
So, again, I'm not sure if I'm responding effectively, but I've had a broad education.
The other thing I'd say is, you know...
What passes for the consensus on the racial questions in the United States has been bankrupt for nearly a half century.
So it's easy pickings.
And, you know, I've been out there, I mean, you know, Confessions of the Black Conservative, I was a Reagan conservative in the 1980s, so it's not like Donald Trump flipped me.
So the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that attend You know, being a neoliberal economist, which is what I am, and a cultural conservative, which is what I am, and being willing to associate with Republicans and conservatives even on racial issues and opposing affirmative action and reparations and thinking that the mass incarceration narrative is only half the story and that one is oversold.
That half is oversold.
It's not new to me.
I've got my scars.
I've been through the valley of the shadow of death, you know, whatever.
And I'm still kicking at 74, be 75 in a couple of months.
So there's not a lot they can do to me now.
Glenn, I was thinking, my wife's a neuroscientist, and I had this discussion with one of her.
I won't identify the person too much, but, you know, is there a brain to politics?
And growing up, I was always told, you know, liberalism is a mental disorder.
And if you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart.
And if you're not conservative when you're old, you have no brain.
And I see the truth in this now, but from a policy perspective, I can understand how the policy of a narcissist, or that type of brain, creates, on the one hand, the dependence relationship, the insecurity of living alone, and the sort of moral, spiritual, ideological blackmail, which I think are all the underpinnings of affirmative action.
Now, I know how you feel about affirmative action, but we're going to get into it.
But that would be like the perfect example of a narcissist, sort of a brain disorder type policy, which then gives the person awarding that affirmative action power over the person over whom they bequeath it.
And so they end up saying to the Clarence Thomases, we own you and you can't deviate from this policy because you benefited from it.
Whereas Katanji Jackson-Brown, she can come up with a decision that praises it and she's good.
I don't know if this criticism was leveled against you, but have you had this criticism leveled against you in terms of your experience at MIT, where some will say you benefited from what was affirmative action, and therefore you can never claim to have succeeded on your own merits, and then just flesh out your utter disdain for the policy of affirmative action?
Yeah, I have had that experience.
I still get it from time to time.
Didn't you benefit from affirmative action?
In fact, an old friend of mine, I don't want to name him.
He's a distinguished scientist.
He's Black.
And we're roughly the same age.
He said, after the decision, he's been prodding me.
You know, why are you conservative?
Why are you conservative?
We've had a series of emails going on over different issues.
And after the decision came, he wrote and he said, I don't know what would have come of me if that decision had come down in 1968, you know, going back 55 years.
How about you?
And of course, the truth is, if Northwestern University hadn't been looking for bright kids from the south side of Chicago who had maybe...
I had two kids.
I had dropped out of college.
I was married.
I wasn't your typical college matriculant.
I probably wouldn't have been on the career path that I'm on.
So that's a given.
And you say it's a kind of...
You know, where you trap the people intellectually by making them all kind of complicit in the thing, and then they can't stand outside of it.
I mean, I think the argument, you benefited from it, therefore you can't criticize it.
It's just wrong.
I mean, I think it's just a non sequitur.
You can change your mind.
You might not have had any control over what you've been for.
Are you telling me a person who represents a farm district in Kansas can't go to Congress and vote against agricultural subsidies because their family received agricultural subsidies?
That's ridiculous.
It's ad hominem.
Instead of, if we're arguing about affirmative action and the issue on the table is, does it violate the 14th Amendment, which is what the Roberts opinion declared.
Rather than make a case about that one way or the other, you try to discredit the person who has criticized affirmative action.
You're a Black and your motives, you know, you're Clance Thomas, you're a grifter, you're pulling up the ladder after yourself, you don't have any concern for your fellow Blacks.
I mean, man is a sitting Supreme Court justice.
He's supposed to have his opinions driven by Racial fealty?
Don't they understand how ridiculous that is?
So, like I said, I'm way past worrying about that kind of thing right now.
They can say whatever they want to.
Affirmative action?
I told Lex Friedman, I don't just...
I disagree with affirmative action.
I hate affirmative action.
I remember saying that, and I guess you probably heard that.
I was trying to clip that six-minute section of two hours and 39 minutes to 2.45, and then I realized you can't record off-podcast, off-spotify on your phone.
And your reasoning was phenomenal, for those who didn't hear it.
Yeah, okay.
Well, first of all, it's a distraction from the real issue.
So the real issue is the...
Relative underdevelopment of intellectual performance in the African-American population.
So you have a place like Harvard or UNC.
Harvard, I don't know, they get scores of thousands of applicants and they admit a few thousand students.
They admit like 1,800 out of 35,000 applications, something like that.
So they're way in the right tail.
They're selective.
They're hyper-selective.
They're way in the right tail.
And you've got these distributions that overlap, but, you know, they're different.
The Black distribution of intellectual mastery and academic performance is to the left of the Asian and the white distribution.
That's the problem.
Affirmative action doesn't do anything to address that, but it skins cream.
It is a bunch of hyper-elite and selective and precious and exclusive and ultra-ultra elite clubs that have decided that for aesthetic purposes, they want a certain kind of ethnic composition in their student body.
And so they skim cream, and in doing so, they have to implement their selection decisions in a way that's racially discriminatory.
This is what the court found.
It doesn't do anything to address the problem.
Secondly, it's humiliating.
It's undignified.
It's a surrender of your dignity.
If you are an African American and you accept that you will not be judged in elite competition for...
You know, who are the best and the brightest?
By the same standard, because of something that happened to your great-grandparents?
That's not equality.
That's a client-patron relationship.
You are there by their leave.
They're looking the other way at your inadequacy.
Now, you can't say this.
Of course, this is racist.
And the only reason I can get away with sin is because I'm Black.
But you cannot tell me that two or three hundred point difference on the SAT combined score doesn't manifest itself in terms of differences in the performance of people after they've been admitted.
So you're creating this environment at these hothouse, hyper-competitive places where the other kids who didn't get the benefit of affirmative action all had to bust their butts to get there.
And they got there by their fingernails, most of them.
And they're hungry.
I mean, I'm talking about the calculus course.
I'm talking about the biochemistry course.
I'm talking about the analytic philosophy course.
And these kids are there, and their standard deviation are more below.
Now, why are you doing that to these kids?
It invites us to lie.
It promotes great inflation.
It's kind of corrupt.
It's corrupt.
You want to have it both ways.
You want to be elite, selective, ultra-exclusive, and you want to be racially diverse, which requires you lowering the bar for the Blacks.
And then you want to put it beyond criticism.
The only reason we know anything about what's going on at these places is because of the discovery requirements of lawsuits.
They have to be forced to reveal the data.
It's a scandal.
When Sandra Sellers, this is a lecturer at the Georgetown Law Center, law school, teaching a negotiations course, said into a Skype microphone when she thought nobody was listening to her colleague, you know, the kids that are at the bottom that did the worst on my last test, I mean, they're almost all Black.
I don't know what to do about it.
It's terrible.
And she's practically crying to her colleague.
She's sad about it.
It's heartbreaking to her.
She's confessing.
And the thing gets out.
It was on one of these course things, and they kept the recording going beyond what she realized it was going.
One of the kids got it, and they put it up on Twitter.
They called her a racist for observing the fact that the Black kids were concentrated at the bottom of her class.
Now, this is Georgetown Law School.
This is one of the top 20 law schools in the country.
Those kids are going to go out of there and try to clerk for judges and try to be associates at firms and whatnot?
It was a predictable consequence of their affirmative action policy admitting Black students with significantly lower credentials that what that woman reported would be the case.
That is not equality.
There's nowhere close...
Of course, the Black kids, once it was revealed, made a federal case out of it and accused the institution of racism.
They fired that lecturer!
They fired her!
And her colleague, who heard her say these things and did not admonish her in real time, resigned under pressure.
Phony, lies, corruption, bankrupt, hide the ball, pretend that what's true isn't true.
You still not address the problem.
The problem is that there's a difference in the rate at which African Americans are acquiring this upper-tailed, specialized, extra...
Special ability, which is what makes these elite places go.
You wouldn't do it in any other arena.
It's going to seem like a cliche, but think about it for a minute.
Suppose you did a professional sports thing where you did this kind of thing, and everybody could see who could run fast, who was dropping the ball, who was getting their shots blocked every time.
So.
Give me equality.
I thought that the opinions written by Justice John Roberts and the concurring opinion by Justice Clance Thomas were magisterial in defense of the interpretation of the American Constitution that they offered there.
And I thought that the arguments, the sociological arguments offered by the dissenters of Justice Sotomayor and concurring Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson were completely unpersuasive on the legal point.
What they said was, it's not a colorblind society.
Race still matters in America.
Well, everybody knows that.
The question was not whether or not it's a colorblind society.
The question was whether or not it's a colorblind constitution.
So by then observing race still matters, they still bear the burden of showing why that should influence our interpretation of the Constitution, a burden they don't even attempt to bear.
So...
Robert, go for it.
I know you got something.
Well, along the same lines, my theory has been that, you know, I had my own experience with this.
I was a scholarship student at Yale, and it was clear that there wasn't what we called real diversity at Yale, not diversity of thought, not diversity of socioeconomic status.
Got into how legacy admissions was, in fact, being facilitated by affirmative action policies.
But one of the other components of this was, ways to put it is, if Nat Turner got a scholarship to Harvard, he probably doesn't lead a slave rebellion.
That I don't think Malcolm X would be a fan of affirmative action.
That it was another effort by the system to not only strip potential leadership from a potential group of people, but also to continue to create this dependency by deliberately making sure people came in that would struggle once they got there.
They were effectively making those individuals even more dependent on their...
So-called benefactors and also being able to cover up the fact that they're not meaningfully investing in the ongoing capacity of the community to develop independence in economics, culture, politics and society by encouraging real education, quality education at the earliest stages.
Any thoughts on how much affirmative action actually facilitated undermining the independence of the black community?
If I were the president of a historically Black college and university and was, you know, looking to make a name for myself, to build an endowment to enhance the reputation of my institution, I would make a federal case out of the cream-skimming robbery of the Black community.
That these institutions with multi-billion dollar endowments who want to wear a charm bracelet with a different colored charm for every color of the rainbow around their precious, elite, exclusive wrists.
And I'd say, if we in Black America want to create scientists...
If we want to create lawyers who can mount a civil rights movement, if we want to create entrepreneurs and industrialists who go out and start companies and will build something in our community and will make something happen, as we have been doing since the days of Booker T. Washington, send our best and brightest here.
Okay, so that would be one point that I would make.
So yeah, there is a co-optation aspect to it.
But another point that I would make is that...
Affirmative action is actually parasitic on a pre-existing strata of stratification, a pre-existing structure of stratification and inequality.
It argues we're going to have these elites.
If you're going to get an interview from Goldman Sachs, you better be an undergraduate at Yale or Dartmouth or Penn or Brown or Princeton.
You better not be an undergraduate at Illinois State University, or Wyoming, or Ms. U, or Kansas State, or whatever, because that's flyover country.
Now, I'd be willing to bet that there's some pretty smart people at Kansas State.
You know what I mean?
But, so, to create the Black leadership cadre, say the affirmative action advocates, We have to make space within our precious institutions for some African Americans, even though we have to discriminate in order to do so.
But never question that you have to come to our place to get into the inner sanctum.
We're the only portal into the elite.
That pre-existing inequality doesn't even get questioned.
So that's the kind of thing I would say.
I jokingly sometimes say that the only people who never let you forget that you're Jewish are Jews, and I say anti-Semites, but I mean it more in the sense of people for whom identity always plays that pivotal role.
So they'll never let you see you for anything other than what you are, which is what I see as being the outcome of affirmative action.
The community will only see you for that, and those who let you in who are obsessed with that will only see that.
But bringing it back to the analogy, and you used it in Lex Friedman, and people use it all the time, that you don't see many Jews in basketball.
There's a certain demographic in sprinting.
And the reason why people don't have much of a problem with that, A, it's measured by fractions of a second, and it's methodical.
You can't argue with it.
But on the other hand, nobody takes that failing to be one of intellect.
And taking a less controversial example where you say there's not enough women, You're not selecting from those who would voluntarily do it.
You are skewing the results but also skewing those who you would elect.
When it comes to things like getting into school, people say, well, if there's an inequality of outcome there, then it reflects on intellect, and therefore I must interpret that differential of results as reflecting on the intellect of the group that doesn't make it in with the same numbers as their statistical representation in society.
And so how do you get past that fear of it?
How do you get past that stigma where it's not basketball, it's not sports, it reflects on intellect, and we refuse to accept that one demographic doesn't have the same results by way of outcome.
Well, you grow up.
That's the way you get it because it doesn't have to come out equal.
I mean, you say you're Jewish.
I'm an economist.
Let's look at the list of Nobel Prize winning economists and see how many of them are Jewish.
I don't know the number offhand, but I know it's high.
I meant to look that up.
I know it's high too.
I know it's high.
I mean, if you were to say 40 or 50%, I would not be surprised.
I mean, not all...
Populations are going to be excellent at the same thing.
Now, you say intellect.
Now, intellect is partly natural talent, and it's partly what you spend your time developing and cultivating.
And I think there's enough disparity in the structures of development and cultivation of intellect as between these populations.
I talk about racial populations.
There's enough cultural difference and background historical difference that, you know, I don't know.
I'm trained statistically, but I haven't actually tried to, you know, analyze data to parse out, you know, what proportion you can explain by this or by that.
I've read people who have done so.
I agree with you that the specter of inferiority, of intellectual inferiority, sort of haunts this whole subject.
And therefore, it leads to some people to insist on proportional outcomes.
This is the Ibram Kendi kind of view of the world.
If you don't get proportional outcomes, you must be a racist because you're saying that Black people are inferior when you know that they're not, and therefore there should be proportional outcomes, and hence any disparity is evidence of unfairness.
The logic of that is just obvious.
I mean, there's disparity everywhere.
Everywhere you look, there's disparity.
The Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Igbo in Nigeria, the Jews, etc.
Yeah.
Groups are different.
This is one of the things that Thomas Sowell has spent a lifetime in his work documenting.
I mean, I think there is a challenge here for we African Americans and for people of goodwill who want to see social justice.
Where you have to let the chips fall where they may.
And you have to be willing to accept that the outcomes may not all be equal.
I mean, we may never get to the bottom of it.
But the insistence on equality and the effort to engineer it between these populations is, you know, it doesn't work.
It's a formula for tyranny, frankly.
I mean, I think there's a kind of inherent contradiction built into the identitarian slash egalitarian worldview.
That's the people who believe in groups and who also think that all groups should be equally represented in every pursuit of achievement.
Because if groups are real things and have integrity, they have their own culture, their own dynamic, then People in different groups are going to end up being acculturated in different ways.
They're going to have different preferences.
They're going to spend their time differently.
They're going to interest them differently.
And that being the case, they're going to acquire the capacity to perform different aspects of human endeavor to different degrees on average.
That's a natural consequence of the fact of groupness.
So if I insist that the ethnicity actually matters for the orientation of the human being, and then I also turn around and insist that people with these different ethnicities have to be equally proportionate, that's a contradiction.
And the effort to try to manufacture the equality of profile after the fact is going to either override people's autonomy...
Or impose something on them that is inconsistent with their liberty.
That's what I think anyway.
Robert, before you get your question, I just want to say one thing.
I was smirking during the Jewish over-representation in Nobel Peace Prize only because I've since become more sympathetic to the argument that these environments create their own cliques where there tends to be something of like...
An insider-type nomination process.
And having seen who they've given Nobel Peace Prizes to, I no longer consider that.
I'm talking about the economics Nobel, is what I was talking about.
And then there's an interesting thing that, you know, like demographics, and I'm speaking of my own here, they pride themselves on statistical over-representation when it's a good thing, and then want to ignore statistical over-representation when it's not a good thing, which is an interesting phenomenon that I've gotten sensitive to growing up.
Sorry about that.
Robert.
I know you have something there.
I mean, speaking of sort of the intellectual class and the way in which affirmative action assumes the underlying premise of these elite institutions getting to govern us, and it becomes a ticket to power to get admitted to those schools.
And I think that maybe the best example, I mean, after I was the same student at Yale as I was at UT Chattanooga when I left Yale in protest of its policies, but I would be treated entirely differently.
Going forward in life based on where that degree was from.
And I always thought that was sort of emblematic of the underlying problem that I had raised as a student at Yale.
What if 100,000 equally deserving kids are not here?
What if this is almost somewhat random that you're chosen?
But the core problem of this particular elite that has been curated over the last generation to me was reflected in how COVID policy was handled.
That we saw what...
This sort of combination of safe space culture, don't tolerate dissident voices, privileged people based on ancestry, whether it's legacy admissions or race-based admissions or donor-based admissions, this whole set of corruption of our intellectual approaches has created a corrupted intellectual class that mishandled and mismanaged COVID about as bad as it could be.
Do I have a point in that regard?
Yeah.
I'm thinking of a letter that circulated from a member of the Board of Overseers at Harvard or a former member.
His name is Jacobson.
I can't remember.
Michael Jacobson, I think, is the name.
He's a financier in Boston.
And it was to the former president of Harvard.
I'm sorry, I'm blocking on his name now.
The one who, Larry Bacow.
Lawrence Bacow was the president of Harvard at the time, and this gentleman, Jacobson, wrote the letter.
And the letter complained about a lot of things at Harvard.
It complained about Harvard not standing up for Roland Fryer when he got railroaded on the Title IX thing.
This is the great young African American economist who we could talk about.
But in any case, It complained about not standing up to the boycott, divest, and sanction people who were trying to get a movement against Israel on campus.
And then it complained about not having a measured, balanced, scientifically grounded, independent, judicious assessment of what was necessary to do in the face of the pandemic, but instead panicking and shutting down across the board and sending kids home.
And whatnot.
And instead of leading, he says Harvard should be a leader, we became a cheerleader and a kind of bandwagon rallier, and then a lot of other places followed and trained.
So I'm not an expert on public health issues.
I did interview a few people for my podcast and learned a little bit from people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya out at Stanford, the Great Barrington Declaration author.
You know, estimable figure who also has a PhD in economics.
So, I mean, I'm prepared to believe that it was mishandled.
And yes, it's true that the leaders of our most elite institutions, they panicked and they jumped on the bandwagon.
They also did it after this George Floyd thing.
I mean, my president, the Honorable Christina Paxson, who's president of this university, she's my colleague in economics.
Had a distinguished career at Princeton before she came to Brown.
She's been president here for a decade.
And the George Floyd thing happened, and she writes one of these dear colleague letters signed by every administrator, like 40 signatures, every dean, every center head, the general counsel of the university, the person managing the portfolio, etc.
Saying, basically, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.
And our values are that Black Lives Matter.
And the narrative of yet another 400 years of anti-Black racism, systemic, whatever, rhetoric.
And I read this thing and I thought, this is a...
This is monumental exercise in virtue signaling.
We're supposed to be an academic institution.
The whole question here is how do we understand these things?
Not cheerleading, not banner waving, but there was so much of that that went on.
So, no, I don't think our academic elites have weathered the storms that have been falling on the United States in the last five years in any way that redounds to their credit.
Big question, and I hope this time now.
What is the solution to all of this?
I have an operating theory that laws that prohibit...
Having movements like BLM actually exacerbate racism.
Having presidents like Obama and prime ministers like Justin Trudeau exacerbate all of this division by focusing on it.
I mean, other than the grow up, how do you get people out of the perpetual sense of victimhood?
Looking for someone to blame.
How do you get a culture out of that?
I'm afraid that you don't get there without going through the valley of the shadow of death.
I think there's going to be, there is building, reaction, blowback, pushback.
I think that the, you know, the Brexit slash Donald Trump 2016 revolution is not over.
I think that they pushed the envelope on all these things, this transgender thing.
I'm not even going to discuss it.
They took down one of my videos on YouTube when I had somebody on who discussed it.
I'll just say you're asking an awful lot of a lot of people to have them buy the stuff that you're shoving down our throats here and you're daring us to say anything about it.
You're asking an awful lot.
I think when kids in Chicago...
You know, come out of the housing projects and the tenements in the low-income neighborhoods and they come downtown and they're shooting up the place and you can't even have a 4th of July thing and they're chasing tourists out of restaurants and turning over buses and setting cop cars on fire.
You know, everybody can see what that is.
I think nobody believes that 7 in 10 kids born to a black woman being born to a woman without a husband is a good thing.
Nobody thinks it's noble.
Nobody thinks it's honorable.
Nobody thinks it's efficacious.
We all can see that that's a disaster.
So, you know, I think what happens is you have to be completely rejected at the electoral process.
You have to grapple with the ugly, dark side of some of this reaction, some of the anti-CRT stuff and whatnot.
But that's what I think is going to happen.
I don't think people are going to go happily into that good night.
I think they're going to have to be driven into it.
I think the Soros-funded DAs in Philadelphia and in Manhattan and in Chicago and in Los Angeles and in et cetera, et cetera, are going to have to be run out of office by people who are tired of picking up the bodies on the street corner and tired of being carjacked.
And in the fullness of time, you know, people would be forced to reconsider their positions.
But I don't think it's going to be easy.
I think it's going to be ugly.
All right.
Last question before we let you go.
Thank you for your time today.
And, you know, and to also make sure that remind people of your Substack podcast YouTube channel.
I watch it a lot, read it a lot.
It strikes me that a lot of what you've described over the last several years is the thematic, or at least what I took, is the thematic aspect from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
That in many respects, the individual humanity of a community is still being disrespected and disregarded for obsession with looking at the color of things and the face of things rather than the substance of things.
If Ralph Ellison was alive today, would the Invisible Man still be as relevant as it was then?
Yeah, I think so.
And I think actually there's somebody who kind of carries that banner.
His name is Shelby Steele.
He's controversial, but I think he's actually very much living in the spirit of Ellison and insisting on the priority, the primacy of our humanity and the fact that that It actually bridges the gaps between the various ethnic and racial,
you know, sex because of the commonality of our struggle to find dignified and meaningful lives.
So, yeah, I think, Ellicent, you know, I'm not my skin.
Skin and blood, don't think.
I'm not my skin.
I'm not, you know.
I'm not a literary expert here, but I have read Invisible Man and thought a lot about these kind of issues, and I do very much admire the legacy of Shelby Steele.
He's in his late 70s now.
We're all getting older.
But Shelby, from the very beginning, from his book, The Content of Our Character, and his early pieces in Harper's Magazine back in the 1980s, I remember, I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent, has blazed a trail in the Ellisonian spirit.
So you guys, thanks a lot for having me on your show.
Absolutely.
Stick around.
We'll say our proper goodbyes.
It'll take no time at all.
Your Substack is named what?
And I'll put the links in afterwards.
It's glennlowry.substack.com.
I'm the Glenn Show.
glennlowry.substack.com.
And not the Glenn Lowry with a W. That's the director of the MoMA who I discovered while there's another Glenn Lowry.