Obama Cheapened the Race Conversation | Big Think

Obama Cheapened the Race Conversation

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Economist Glenn Loury is angry that the President’s handling of Louis Gates’ arrest distracted from the real issues.

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Glenn Loury:

Glenn Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is one of the nation's foremost black intellectuals, having held positions at Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Boston University.

Loury's sometimes controversial dissection of racial disparities, systemic racism, and economic justice have often landed his views at the center of attention. Early in his professorial career, Loury made his mark as a distinguished academic economist with specific focus on the fields of welfare economics, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution. Once earmarked as the leading candidate for the position of under secretary of education in the Reagan administration before withdrawing his name from consideration, Loury also gained notoriety as a controversial social critic with right-wing perspectives that led to his designation as "one of the black darlings of the neoconservative intelligentsia" by Africana.com.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Loury became known for his abrasive critique of affirmative action and his propensity to blame racial inequality on the dysfunction and corruption within the black community, as opposed to the racist attitudes that some argued gave rise to this scenario.

In the late 1990s, however, Loury divulged a much-publicized split with the right, revising former viewpoints and attacking former colleagues. This break was formally ushered in with the release of his new book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, in February of 2002.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What did the Gates incident teach us?

Glen Loury: I don't know that it can teach us all that much. I thought it was overblown as being emblematic of race relations or profiling, or anything of that sort. I didn't read it as insightful or really useful in that regard.

Though I do think how we reacted to the incident, what it became, drawing the president in and so on; perhaps would tell us something about, and this was my argument in the piece, how we process racial issues. How we talk and don't talk about them, maybe how we are quick to repair to some conventional and pat storyline about them.

The country has had a problem, is trying to overcome it. Some people are slower at that than others. There's a racist behind every bush. Let's not tolerate the racists; this kind of talk.

And I just thought the Gates' incident, and again, the president's handling of it, showed the thinness of that narrative; how that line was probably not any longer, if ever it was adequate, to capture the reality of our racial condition, if you will.

Question: What’s the reality of our racial condition?

Glen Loury: I don't want to pretend to omniscience here, but I'd say there are several aspects of it that I would point out.

One is the continuing fact of a developmental lag, or a gap, between the African-American population taken as a whole, not of course, including every person, on the one hand; and much of the rest of the country, on the other.

But actually, not the only group of people who manifest certain of the kinds of problems that I would talk about here and that are reflected in policing and prisons. Problems of poor education and intermittent employment and limited full human development. Problems of fragile and fractured communities and families of large numbers of under-socialized and under-developed young people who end up getting into trouble.

I could go on, and you see the line that this would draw. It would say that the African American population, taken as a whole, lags behind on the average along many of these dimensions. This is a stubborn reality and it has consequences. It can't be easily reconciled with a pat account about racism and discrimination that lets us relax into saying when we finally get this right, when we get rid of racism, when we reach the post-racial society, everything is going to be okay.

Well, no, because along the way here, as we've not yet been in this racial nirvana, facts on the ground have been created.

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