Glenn Loury
speaker
197 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Glenn Loury’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, these are statistics that people cite all the time. Black family life used to be much healthier than it is, out of what, like, births and all of that. Of course, there was crime. Du Bois, the Philadelphia Negro, at the turn of the 20th century, is quick to point out that there was crime.
But the violence, the gangs, the drugs, the lawlessness, the contempt for order, this was a development that we can see emerging in the post-civil rights environment. So it's a mixed bag, I think. I mean, you know, you can speculate, and people do, about the sources of this dissolution, and I think they are many.
I think they are the incentives of welfare transfer programs, which encouraged people to live in ways that were ultimately not socially productive. I think the change in the larger culture in which these liberatory sexual revolutions took gave the back of their hand to a set of conventions, expectations, and restraints that were, yes, freedom-limiting.
I mean, you couldn't just do anything you wanted to do and maintain the respect of your peers, but were also order-inducing. freedom-limiting but order-inducing, and provided a framework within which people could manage the difficult problem of how do we live decently? What do we do with our temptations? How do we restrain our appetites?
How do we understand and then live up to our responsibilities? And I think that's a society-wide development, not just something that happens in Black communities. But I think the politics of racial claiming, the victim psychology and mentality that ends up with reparations, as you're arguing, point, I don't think those are healthy things. These are things I've written about in my own work.
They got to pat themselves on the back about being virtuous, even if what they were doing at the end of the day wasn't helping to solve the problem.
Here's what I think, Tucker. I think, and I've written about this in essays and so on. I think that there are basically two dispositions that you can have in thinking about the persistence of racial inequality, what I call the bias narrative. And the bias narrative is that we're behind because they have kept us out.
And that affords your white liberal do-gooders an opportunity to side on the historical imperative of let's stop the bias. Let's fight racism, anti-racism. And there's the development narrative. And the development narrative basically says that
The long history of enslavement, Jim Crow exclusion and segregation has left African Americans with an imperative to develop our human potential more fully. We were denied the complete opportunity to do so. The doors, however, have opened substantially and the ball is in our court.
That is the existential challenge, in my opinion, that African Americans have faced for a half century, since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, to grasp the nettle and to seize the imperative of measuring up, of fulfilling our potential of development.
The white liberals that you were just referring to, who are interested in being on the right side of history by doing the right thing by Black people, embrace the bias narrative and give us an excuse to not take up the challenge of the development narrative. Meanwhile, the country is moving on. The world is moving on. The world gets small. You get globalization.
The world gets shaken by one after another technological revolution, which changes everything. And we're in the midst of one right now with the AI and all that that's going on. The demography changes. You get tens of millions of people coming from non-European ports of call and making their lives in this country. There are more Hispanics by far than there are Blacks in the United States right now.
The Asians... if you can speak in those generic terms, are here to stay. The world is getting small. So not confronting the development challenge, continuing to take the victim stance, continuing to rely on the largesse and the beneficence of supposedly supportive white liberals is a disaster. For black people.
It's not a disaster for the what I call Negro cognoscenti, the anointed ones, the Michelle Obamas of the world, with respect, as much as I can muster. Not a disaster for those who are the ambassadors to white America on behalf of black America, like your friend Al Sharpton. But a disaster for that kid who can't read.
A disaster for that mother with three children and she doesn't know how she's going to feed them and she hasn't gotten an education. A disaster for the gangbanger who's running around firing his pistol aimlessly out the window at a gang rival and killing a three-year-old sitting on her auntie's lap. It's a disaster for those people. There's no escaping the imperative to develop.
There's no substitute for being effective, for having a mastery over skill, for having solved the basic problem of life, which again, I say is how do I comport myself in a way that is both dignified and consistent with my own and my children's prosperity? That problem has to be faced. It still has to be faced.
I don't disagree with that.
Yeah, well, who would blame them? Conservatives. Yeah. Republicans would blame them. And they're racist, you know.
And so did King. No, I have enormous respect for the straight-backed, manly, autonomous, independent, responsibility-embracing posture of Malcolm X. You know, he says, nobody is coming to save us. we had better take care of our own. Are you raising your children? Did you pick up the trash in front of your house? Will you start a business? You don't have wealth.
You're waiting with your hand out for somebody to give you wealth. Why don't you start a business? Why don't you take care of your own community? You know, get busy.
Showing 81–100 of 197 · page 5 of 10
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