Developing the Development Narrative

From a 2016 lecture

In 2016, I had been thinking hard about the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about the present. How did we get where we are? It occurred to me that we African Americans had been telling ourselves a story throughout the twentieth century. That story said that we were oppressed by entrenched racist attitudes and policies that prevented us from transcending our circumstances and getting ahead. In order to flourish as a people, we would first have to dismantle the formal and informal structures that kept anti-black prejudice in place.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, that story was accurate. But by 2016, in my view, it no longer mapped smoothly onto reality. I was beginning to think that the only way we could explain the continued underperformance and social dysfunction in so many black communities was a failure to adequately develop their social capital. So I began working on a different narrative: the development narrative. If we wanted to pull these struggling communities up to parity with other groups, we would need to shift our energy and resources away from looking searching out bias and toward developing the human potential within black communities. Part of that would mean adopting the norms that made other communities—including plenty of middle-class black communities—successful: academic achievement for adolescents, two-parent households, full-time work, and delaying childbearing until after marriage.

As this sharp Quillette piece by political scientist Aaron Hanna makes clear, there’s nothing inherently “conservative” or “liberal” about the development narrative—it’s a pragmatic approach to a social problem. It recommends a normative approach to family, school, and social life simply because that approach has worked for other groups. In the following excerpts from a 2016 lecture I delivered at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (full video here), you can hear me sketch out an early version of the development narrative. Since then, I’ve only become more convinced that those who cling to the bias narrative are not only wrong, they’re digging us deeper and deeper into a hole that only the development of social capital can get us out of.

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MARGARET LEVI: Glenn, I am delighted to welcome you to the stage. 

GLENN LOURY: Oh, thanks so much for that introduction, Margaret. That was so sweet to hear. It really was. And I'm delighted to be able to give this talk and honored, actually, to have been asked to do so. Not so many symposiums being given during my fellowship year here, and I was asked to give one of them, so that's a big deal to me.

Thanks for coming out people. It's a nice crowd. Let me just cut right to the chase here, because our time is limited. You can see my title here “Beyond Civil Rights: What's a Self-Respecting Black Intellectual to Do?” Okay, so we got three things going on there. Self-respect. We got the identity thing going—I'm black, and I'd like to think of myself as an intellectual. So what are my responsibilities? What am I supposed to do?

I'm also ... old. I mean, I'm well into my seventh decade. I've been around for a while, and I've been watching my country grapple with fundamental issues around race and inequality, justice, civil rights, citizenship and inclusion, oppression, discrimination, racism, bias. I've been watching my nation grappling, and I sometimes get the feeling that we are not getting off of square one. I know we're getting off of square one, because square one was pretty bad. I know that we are not still in the 1940s and 1950s or even the 1960s, for that matter.

I understand that structures have changed, that laws have been enacted, that norms have evolved, relationships have developed, organizations have been formed. Work is being done. The struggle goes on. I get it. The struggle goes on. And yet sometimes I get the feeling we haven't even really gotten off a square one. It seems like we keep circling back to the same set of arguments and the same set of dilemmas and so on. So it's a little discouraging sometimes.

What's a fellow to do in the face of all of that? A number of possibilities present themselves. Get out of the race business and write about something else. Let these people have it. They're gonna be arguing until the cows come home. I'm not going to change anybody's mind. Let's get into another line of work. Believe me, that thought has occurred to me. That's one reason why I took up a position at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, because you get to see the rest of the world. There's a lot, lot more going on in the world than America's perpetual dilemmas around race. 

But that just hasn't worked for me. I find myself coming back again and again and again to these same issues. So what's a guy to do? 

So that's my problem. It's not your problem, because my equation, my little theoretical formulation here, my stab at a bumper sticker account for why the persistence is premised on that equation. Social capital intersected with racial segregation gives us permanent, persistent racial inequality. By “social capital,” what I mean is in the context of that formulation, the fact that people's ability to develop their own inherent gifts and to get the human investments necessary to enhance their product depends not only on their natural talents or on the prices and supply and demand of the resources that they might acquire to develop themselves, but it depends also on their social connectivity. Because of externalities, because of social spillovers, because of the fact that in the networks of social organization, the human development process is enhanced in various ways.

If the society is segmented along racial lines, that means opportunity is segmented along racial lines, quite apart from what might be going on in the market, quite apart from whether or not employers and so on are discriminatory. They may be, but they needn't be. Even if they're not, these informal, non-market mediated social interactions between individuals are also instrumental in fostering human development. And if we have a dynamic system, one that's going on over time and in history, we have had significant deprivation and exclusion and denial of opportunity, the ability to acquire financial resources, the ability to develop one's human potential and talent, families that are less effective at fostering their children's development because their own development had been impeded.

If we have that kind of dynamic going on and people are connected across generations as well as across social space by racial affiliation, then we have a circumstance in which historical inequality can get perpetuated indefinitely, not withstanding the relaxation of the regime of exclusion. Parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents can have been excluded, and, having been excluded, they are less well-endowed with some of these resources being connected with people who may not any longer be explicitly excluded on the basis of their race but whose human development is limited because of the social connectivity to people who themselves were not given full opportunity.

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That creates a kind of what they would call hysteresis, a kind of dynamic overhang, a kind of effect from the past onto the present. And what I was interested in, in my thesis a lifetime ago, was formalizing that kind of insight in developing a dynamic model of inequality to see whether or not, even if you let it run for a very long time, the consequences of history would wash themselves out, and finding that if social segregation is severe enough along racial lines, those historical effects would not diminish even asymptotically, even as you let time go on indefinitely. 

Here's my speculation that I want to offer. And it's really a proposal. I'm not adamant about this. I'm not sure I'm right. But I have this sense that there's a twentieth-century model that is outmoded and in need of a twenty-first-century revision. About how do we want to think about this problem of African American exclusion? And crudely, I'm referring to “bias” as the twentieth-century notion. And please, social psychologists in the room, I see you. Don't get mad at me. I've been reading you. I know that bias is real, implicit and all that good stuff. I'm for it. I mean, teach me some more about that. I really wanna know about that. 

But I'm really talking about framing. I'm talking about the way in which you conceptualize the overall problem. And at mid-twentieth century, there could be no doubt: no blacks need apply, can't live in this neighborhood, can't get this mortgage, can't get this loan, can't get into this school, can't marry this girl. There were definite barriers and they were real and they were based on bias. 

I'm not saying there's no bias over there, you guys. I'm saying it ain't like that. And I'm saying, do I want to hang my entire conceptualizing of the disparities [on bias? And the disparities are enormous, and they present themselves in many different arenas around that notion. Or do I want to modify or extend that notion in some way? And so I'm proposing something here. And like I say, I'm not sure I'm right. But a broadening of the conceptual lens of how we think about the disadvantaged position of African Americans to admit of the possibility that dealing with the lack of the full development of human potential in that population which well may be traceable, in some historic argument, to biases of one sort or another and need not be understood to be a reflection of the intrinsic inadequacies of the genetic or biological deficiencies or the problematic cultural characteristics of this population, but nevertheless are real, these developmental deficits.

I'm talking about young men who don't know how to read. Eighteen years old, they don't know how to read. I'm talking about kids who come to school who haven't been parented and so are not responsive to the teachers in ways that admit of discipline and other things that we could talk about. I'm talking about mass incarceration—and we're gonna get to it, believe me. It's massive and it's incarceration and it's unjust, in my judgment, as an institution, in the way in which we practice it. But heck, how many guys are out there at two o'clock in the morning breaking the law? I mean, it's not as if the incarceration is the consequence of a random visitation by security officers to people's houses. Situations develop in which people's behavior is also implicated. 

A twenty-first century model—on this gesture, toward an account, it's not an account by any means, it's only meant to be a suggestion of how we might want to revise our thinking—would not do away with bias, but it would open itself to a candid acknowledgement of developmental deficits that need to be addressed. 

And by the way, addressing them might best be done through a kind of expansive, progressive social policy regime that is justifiable on its own account, regardless of the impact that it has on racial disparity. If universal early childhood education is a good idea, and I think it well might be—we don't have it, it would mean changing our political priorities, it would cost something—it well might make us a better country. And at the same time, it would help to address some of the developmental deficits that manifest themselves in the disadvantaged African American populations and that are reflected in some of these statistics that I'm going to show you.

So this is part of my unease with some of the tenor of our time and this discourse because, basically, what I'm going to tell you is I don't think there's any way to get from here to there without persuading a majority of Americans to change our basic institutions that support human development in a progressive direction. And I don't think you can do that with 10% or 12% or 14% or 20% of the population. I think you need to frame your argument in a way that opens it to a much more expansive set of beneficiaries and that justifies itself in terms of universal principles that are applicable to all Americans. 

In saying this, I hope to avoid the the dead-end, the cul-de-sac of, “Oh, you're saying All Lives Matter and not Black Lives Matter.” I was really hoping to avoid that, because I'm actually saying both. But I'm saying when you're trying to actually change the policies of the state, the All-Lives-Matter spirit will get you a lot further. We can get into tactics, we can talk about particular incidents, we can go to anecdotes. And I'm not against the young people who are trying to bring our attention to to injustices. But I'm just trying to think about what the long run political game should be.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you so much. I don't know if I want to use the word “:enjoy,” but I feel like I've touched the wonderfulness of some of your work and your colleagues' [work]. But I am absolutely at a loss for what you were going say about the replacement for the terms of the framing of racial bias. And so I'm hoping you'll take some of the time we have for questions to introduce what it is you have in mind as the next framework. 

Okay. Let me just respond briefly, since maybe we'll allow a couple of more questions and there's a lot that could be said. I want to give an anecdote, and maybe I can convey what it is that I'm talking about. I'm not sure I have an answer for you.

So the anecdote is about school discipline and suspensions and racial disparity in the incidents of school discipline and suspensions. My understanding is that the Office of Civil Rights in the US Department of Education is putting pressure on local school districts to where they have their statistics that are far out of line. Now, the theory behind doing so—I see a district where the rate of suspension for blacks is much higher than for whites—is that there's either implicit or explicit bias in the practice of, the black kids are doing stuff and they're getting suspended, white kids are doing the same thing and they're not getting suspended.

And it may be true. I don't know, I haven't studied the problem carefully. But it may also not be. It may be true that there are differences in the patterns of behavior between black and white students that have a lot to do with the fact of the nature of the home lives and economic circumstances and so on—discipline, paternal abandonment, mothers overloaded and taxed, poverty and so forth and so on—so that the kids are mouthier and less restrained in the way in which they interact with teachers. I don't know. These are things that could be investigated. 

The default supposition that a higher rate of suspension for the black kids triggers an inquiry into the bias of the school district doesn't take on board the possibility that developmental disadvantages that are really gonna hurt those kids, not only in that school room but throughout their lives, are not being addressed. That the nature of the social inequality is producing kids who are, for a variety of reason, not exercising self-control, not able to behave in ways that are compatible with the collective enterprise, and so forth and so on, and that, if so, would need to be addressed.

This is only an extended anecdote meant to respond to you. People who formulate the school-to-prison pipeline metaphor—there definitely is something there in terms of connectivity—if they don't allow for the possibility that there are developmental deficits being manifested at that front end of that thing, may not prescribe the right kind of interventions to actually counteract the problem. Which is dealing—and it would take someone with greater expertise than me in social psychology and family psychology and so forth—with the behavioral manifestations of whatever background impediments that those kids might be bringing with them into the classroom.

So to me, it's so twentieth-century to file a civil rights lawsuit, having seen a statistical disparity, and feeling progressively less adequate to the twenty-first-century problem of a substantial minority of the African American population suffering under one or another kind of developmental limitation that actually accounts for the difference. This is not something one should talk about casually. These are serious matters, and there are data available for people to study them. I'm not an expert, but that illustrates the kind of thing I'm talking about.

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