Glenn C. Loury

Glenn C. Loury is often radically opposed to the political mainstream and delights in upending what’s expected of a Black public figure. But more than the arguments themselves—on affirmative action, institutional racism, Trumpism—his public life has been characterised by fearlessness and a willingness to recalibrate strongly held and forcefully argued beliefs. Loury grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT’s economics programme and became the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of thirty-three. He has been, at turns, a young father, a drug addict, an adulterer, a psychiatric patient, a born-again Christian, a lapsed born-again Christian and a Black Reaganite. In Late Admissions, Loury examines what it means to chart a sense of self over the course of a tempestuous but well-considered, life.

There is no such thing as free, unconstrained speech. Laws and constitutions may protect us from the state when we speak our minds. But the state is just one possible constraint. Glenn Loury, one of America’s most outspoken and important intellectuals, provides a provocative and dazzling analysis of the powerful social forces that can prevent speakers from voicing unpopular views in public forums. Every society, Loury notes, has norms to enforce. That can be a good thing: There ought to be social sanctions for, say, compulsive liars. When, however, a society shows a low degree of tolerance for speech about matters of political importance, self-censorship proliferates and public discourse and policy suffer. The answer, Loury argues, is for as many of us as possible to be braver and more human – to take a risk and unapologetically “live within the truth”. Loury first presented these ideas in the 1990s in a celebrated and prophetic essay about “political correctness.” In Self-Censorship he expands and updates the account, deploying his analytical powers and psychological acuity to diagnose our current political climate. The result illuminates prevailing social dynamics with the same brilliant and startling effect that made the paper an instant classic thirty years ago.

Economist Glenn C. Loury is one of the most prominent public American intellectuals of our time: he's often radically opposed to the political mainstream and delights in upending what's expected of a Black public figure. But more so than the arguments themselves—on affirmative action, institutional racism, Trumpism—his public life has been characterised by fearlessness and a willingness to recalibrate strongly held and forcefully argued beliefs. Loury grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT’s economics programme and became the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of thirty-three. He has been, at turns, a young father, a drug addict, an adulterer, a psychiatric patient, a born-again Christian, a lapsed born-again Christian, a Black Reaganite who has swung from the right to the left and back again. In Late Admissions, Loury examines what it means to chart a sense of self over the course of a tempestuous but well-considered, life.

“Lifts and transforms the discourse on ‘race’ and racial justice to an entirely new level.”—Orlando Patterson“Intellectually rigorous and deeply thoughtful…An incisive, erudite book by a major thinker.”—Gerald Early, New York Times Book ReviewWhy are black Americans so persistently confined to the margins of society? And why do they fail across so many metrics—wages, unemployment, income levels, test scores, incarceration rates, health outcomes? Known for his influential work on the economics of racial inequality and for pioneering the link between racism and social capital, Glenn Loury is not afraid of piercing orthodoxies and coming to controversial conclusions. In this now classic work, reconsidered in light of recent events, he describes how a vicious cycle of tainted social information helped create the racial stereotypes that rationalize and sustain discrimination, and suggests how this might be changed. Brilliant in its account of how racial classifications are created and perpetuated, and how they resonate through the social, psychological, spiritual, and economic life of the nation, this compelling and passionate book gives us a new way of seeing—and of seeing beyond—the damning categorization of race.“Paints in chilling detail the distance between Martin Luther King’s dream and the reality of present-day America.”—Anthony Walton, Harper’s“Loury provides an original and highly persuasive account of how the American racial hierarchy is sustained and reproduced over time. And he then demands that we begin the deep structural reforms that will be necessary to stop its continued reproduction.”—Michael Walzer“He is a genuine maverick thinker…The Anatomy of Racial Inequality both epitomizes and explains Loury’s understanding of the depressed conditions of so much of black society today.”—New York Times Magazine

This is the book that has forever changed the debate on affirmative action in America. The Shape of the River is the most far-reaching and comprehensive study of its kind. It brings a wealth of empirical evidence to bear on how race-sensitive admissions policies actually work and clearly defines the effects they have had on over 45,000 students of different races. Its conclusions mark a turning point in national discussions of affirmative action--anything less than factual evidence will no longer suffice in any serious debate of this vital question. Glenn Loury's new foreword revisits the basic logic behind race-sensitive policies, asserting that since individuals use race to conceptualize themselves, we must be conscious of race as we try to create rules for a just society. Loury underscores the need for confronting opinion with fact so we can better see the distinction between the "morality of color-blindness" and the "morality of racial justice."