Monday, January 21, 2002

Remora

Black and conservative...

There's a story in the NYT Magazine about Glenn Loury, the economist and former totem black conservative -- a position that has now fallen to Shelby Steele (and no, Limited Inc. means totem, not token). Almost all stories about Glenn Loury begin by a cursory survey of his ideas before jettisoning them for a more gossipy, and perhaps interesting, survey of his life. It is a life that Ellison, or Leon Forrest, might have written, literature loose in the wild hinterlands of America -- or perhaps not so wild, since Loury's lifeline goes from the working class South Side of Chicago to the Reaganite high of the 80s. Recently, Loury has defected from the conservative movement, even resigning from the American Enterprise Institute after they sponsored Dinesh D'Souza's book on race. Fair has this appraisal of the D'Souza book:

"... D�Souza advocates legalizing racial discrimination. "What we need is a long-term strategy that holds the government to a rigorous standard of race neutrality," he wrote in The End of Racism, "while allowing private actors to be free to discriminate as they wish." In D�Souza�s vision, "individuals and companies would be allowed to discriminate in private transactions such as renting an apartment or hiring for a job." Lest there be any doubt as to his intent, D�Souza states: "Am I calling for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Actually, yes."

Here's a graf from the the NYT Mag article that shows Columbus discovering the world is round:

"In a column called ''What's Wrong With the Right,'' published in the January-February 1996 issue of The American Enterprise journal, Loury wrote that while ''liberal methods'' on questions of race were certainly flawed, ''liberals sought to heal the rift in our body politic engendered by the institution of chattel slavery, and their goal of securing racial justice in America was, and is, a noble one. I cannot say with confidence that conservatism as a movement is much concerned to pursue that goal.''

When the Loury-D'Souza thrilla in D.C. was playing out, Paul Krugman wrote a sympathetic column about Loury in Slate. Krugman describes it thusly:


"But at some point Loury made the discovery that eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. The Glenn Loury who wrote that 1976 thesis was not a conservative. He criticized the simplistic anti-racism of the liberal establishment because he wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested only in the critique, not in the next step. (According to Loury, "When I told one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because he had moved on to the next case.") Loury found out that the apparent regard for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the liberal enemy. It was the loyalty test all over again."

There is something very funny about the idea that intellectuals are above a loyalty test. Of course they aren't. Krugman, an exemplary Ivy League herd man who once had the audacity to question the free trade orthodoxy and retreated, precipitantly, from his own work once it got denounced by the right people, should know better. But the Krugman article does adumbrate Loury's original thesis better than the NYT Mag article, and that thesis is definitely interesting. Robert Sobel, the business history writer, made a point similar to Loury's in his last book, The Great Boom, when he described the foundations of the great American middle class in the post WWII period. The wealth of the great middle is founded, Sobel claims, in large part on property -- namely, housing. This is as true today as it was in 1952, despite 401K plans and other investments -- when you strip the wealth of your average bourgois down to its skivvies, you find an asset -- the great American home. Well, for thirty some years, that market was simply denied to blacks. Loury's original point, if Krugman is to be believed, is that past descrimination has effects on the present racial composition of wealth. Loury's sub-point is that the limit to Afro-American achievement is currently found in black behavior, rather than white racism. This point doesn't really follow, however, from his main thesis. It defines racism too narrowly, as merely a moral fact. It can't be emphasized enough that racism isn't simply unmotivated malevolence, a wallowing in hatred done by white men in KKK regalia. Rather, it plays a social function. It operates to give a definite economic lift to a certain segment of the populace. When that populace has incorporated its advantage over time, the advantage of overt racism diminishes. What guarded the white middle class in 1950 from competition can be cast off, as an unnecessary luxury, by that class' descendents, because the competitive edge has already been won. And of course I'm not even going to talk about the upper 5 percentile, the racial composition of which can be studied by looking at the pictures in Forbes magazines. If you see a picture of a black man or woman, it is almost always either a., an ad, or b., a picture of a grateful worker or manager posed with an indulgent CEO. What can't be questioned, once the hegemony of anti-racism as a feeling, rather than an economic factor, has been achieved, is the legitimacy of present gains, even though it has been admitted that those gains were the results of illegitimate means. In essence, you get the best of both worlds -- having renounced the devil of racism, one can feel that equal opportunity reigns, while at the same time one can enjoy the devil's bounty, in the form of ten generations of greater opportunity. As a game theoretical device, White America has played an unconsciously brilliant strategy. One even Krugman should appreciate.

No comments:

From the Holodomor to Gaza: NYT softfocuses on famine - the spirit of Walter Duranty lives!

  When Gareth Jones, a former secretary of David Lloyd George, made a walking tour in Ukrainian agricultural districts in 1933, he wrote a s...