Bravo! Substack comes through with another powerful free and paid voice!
Professor Loury seems to me to be a politically independent thinker who takes apart ideas and policies whether they skew right or left. And he raises important questions with no easy answers.
The colorblind issue is a good example. When blindness to skin color in admission or hiring or promotion is a policy issue, when optics and appearances sit at the core of policy, powerful (white) people benefit from setting up a set of statistics to make them “look good” no matter what the consequences. Let’s look at who gets off the hook and who gets the shaft.
When blindness to skin color means ignoring real differences in the real world (the United States has a long history of color-coded supremacy and oppression), unfair color-coded differences in life chances are enacted culturally and politically.
This is powerful stuff. Thanks to all of you who are making this happen.
I really enjoyed the interview. Thank you for sharing it.
Kudos and thanks to Professor Santurri for his stand. It will be because of people like him that we will eventually be able to move beyond the current illiberalism in our discourse on and off campus.
Great interview and responses! When it comes to racial equality, we have to think about the difference between words and deeds. E.g. many liberal politicians want to "defund the police" (and many of them may well believe that it's the best thing for black Americans), but when pollsters ask actual black people living in the "rough neighborhoods", they consistently say they want more police presence, not less. After all, it's these black folks who have to actually live with the consequences of violence, and the incentives towards violence with a lax criminal policy (look at San Francisco!). Affluent white liberals have the privilege of posting on Twitter about Black Lives Matter and so on, but they're not the ones living in those neighborhoods and dealing with the actual problems, which means a lot of them get to posturing for signaling purposes.
The same is true of affirmative action in many ways. (I’m not talking about the actual racism of disparate treatment, including for example "legacy admissions" i.e. nepotism – that I disagree with wholeheartedly.) Thomas Sowell has famously written about the "mismatch theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Mismatching) where colleges may think they're helping people succeed, but in reality are only helping them underachieve their potential over the long-term.
The author has a section about educational impacts during the pandemic, including an examination of charter schools: "Haberman recognizes the incongruity between the “stated values” of policymakers and the real-world effects students experience, demonstrating that these differences in achievement were and continue to be intentionally designed, and with the true intent of a bifurcation in racial opportunities and outcomes.
This true intent can also be observed through the revealed preference of white liberals’, parents and educators alike, opposition to charter school expansion, when it is widely known that the “research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes. The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.” Of course, “the charter school student population is disproportionately nonwhite,” and significantly so, and it wouldn’t do for these non-white children to one day pose an economic threat to the representatives of white liberal supremacy and their progeny.
Note that it is uniquely white liberals, not any other combination of race and political orientation, who stand in opposition to one of the few non-symbolic and genuinely effective educational reforms."
Bravo! Substack comes through with another powerful free and paid voice!
Professor Loury seems to me to be a politically independent thinker who takes apart ideas and policies whether they skew right or left. And he raises important questions with no easy answers.
The colorblind issue is a good example. When blindness to skin color in admission or hiring or promotion is a policy issue, when optics and appearances sit at the core of policy, powerful (white) people benefit from setting up a set of statistics to make them “look good” no matter what the consequences. Let’s look at who gets off the hook and who gets the shaft.
When blindness to skin color means ignoring real differences in the real world (the United States has a long history of color-coded supremacy and oppression), unfair color-coded differences in life chances are enacted culturally and politically.
This is powerful stuff. Thanks to all of you who are making this happen.
I really enjoyed the interview. Thank you for sharing it.
Kudos and thanks to Professor Santurri for his stand. It will be because of people like him that we will eventually be able to move beyond the current illiberalism in our discourse on and off campus.
Great interview and responses! When it comes to racial equality, we have to think about the difference between words and deeds. E.g. many liberal politicians want to "defund the police" (and many of them may well believe that it's the best thing for black Americans), but when pollsters ask actual black people living in the "rough neighborhoods", they consistently say they want more police presence, not less. After all, it's these black folks who have to actually live with the consequences of violence, and the incentives towards violence with a lax criminal policy (look at San Francisco!). Affluent white liberals have the privilege of posting on Twitter about Black Lives Matter and so on, but they're not the ones living in those neighborhoods and dealing with the actual problems, which means a lot of them get to posturing for signaling purposes.
The same is true of affirmative action in many ways. (I’m not talking about the actual racism of disparate treatment, including for example "legacy admissions" i.e. nepotism – that I disagree with wholeheartedly.) Thomas Sowell has famously written about the "mismatch theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Mismatching) where colleges may think they're helping people succeed, but in reality are only helping them underachieve their potential over the long-term.
This also reminded me of an intriguing essay I read recently about the disproportionate impacts of COVID policies: https://geraldrogue.substack.com/p/medicalization-and-colonization?s=r
The author has a section about educational impacts during the pandemic, including an examination of charter schools: "Haberman recognizes the incongruity between the “stated values” of policymakers and the real-world effects students experience, demonstrating that these differences in achievement were and continue to be intentionally designed, and with the true intent of a bifurcation in racial opportunities and outcomes.
This true intent can also be observed through the revealed preference of white liberals’, parents and educators alike, opposition to charter school expansion, when it is widely known that the “research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes. The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores.” Of course, “the charter school student population is disproportionately nonwhite,” and significantly so, and it wouldn’t do for these non-white children to one day pose an economic threat to the representatives of white liberal supremacy and their progeny.
Note that it is uniquely white liberals, not any other combination of race and political orientation, who stand in opposition to one of the few non-symbolic and genuinely effective educational reforms."
“One”
Professor Loury, you are on of the few intellectuals who rethinks their positions based on facts rather than look away.
The best argument for affirmative action I ever heard was that it busts up existing favoritism for alum and such.