Glenn and John's Origin Story

with John McWhorter

As most of you are probably aware, John and I go back a ways. But even before our first Bloggingheads conversation in 2007, we were circling each other. John had been reading my writing since the ‘80s, and I began a correspondence with him after reading his 2000 book, Losing the Race. He had admired my early work, but once I took my leftward turn in the ‘90s, we found ourselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum, at least when it came to race.

We didn’t waste time taking our differences in perspective public. In 2002, the magazine First Things published two critical responses to my book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, along with my rejoinder to the critiques. One was written by my friend the philosopher Jorge Garcia, and the other was from John, whom I might have described as more of a frenemy, had the portmanteau existed at the time. (Unfortunately, my response to the responses is not available online—I’ll post it here if I can get my hands on a scan.)

Both are deep, weighty readings of the text. And while it’s always flattering to have brilliant people take your work seriously, as I say in this clip from our latest subscriber-only Q&A session, I was a little riled by the sharpness of John’s piece. Just who did this young guy think he was, coming at me like that? To give you a taste of what he had to say, here’s the complimentary but still somehow withering last paragraph of his response:

I sincerely believe that in a hundred years the peculiar obsession of late-twentieth-century American scholars of race with black “stigma” will be seen for the unfortunate and distracting detour that it is. By then black thinkers will, one hopes, have come to see that, while the pigment is not a mere figment, African-Americans possess far more power as individuals than they do as a group fixated on the injustices of the past. Regretfully, Glenn Loury’s new book does little to promote this much-needed shift in thinking toward political synthesis. I genuinely hope that in his future projects he might temper his current fixation on historical obstacles to black progress with the considerable wisdom—not to mention the courage—contained in his earlier writings. It should go without saying that few scholars in America are better equipped for the task.

While I’m still quite proud of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, I have to say that I agree with John’s insistence that African Americans stop looking to past suffering to explain all present-day shortcomings. I might have pushed back at the time, but things change, people’s positions evolve, and foes become friends.

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This clip is taken from a subscriber-only Q&A session. For access to Q&As, comments, early episodes, and a host of other benefits, click below and subscribe.

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GLENN LOURY: Okay, we'll move on to R. Taylor, whose question is,

Have you ever gone into the origin story of your working together? How did you become aware of each other, meet, and discover that your similarities and differences could form a grand working collaboration?

I certainly appreciate your assessment of our collaboration. Yes, as a matter of fact, I think in some of our conversations past, we have gone in a bit to the origin story. But happy to review the bidding on that. What do you want to say about that, John?

JOHN MCWHORTER: I would just say that, as with most developments, it wasn't as deliberate as it probably looks. The origin story starts that it's Bloggingheads, and people are mixed and matched all the time, and Glenn and I were with each other but also with other people. I was with all sorts of other people back in the day. But then gradually he and I coalesced, because our conversations seemed to click in a way that at least mine with others did not as much. And gradually it got to the point that I was only working with Glenn—I never thought about this—because I got busier after a certain point in the early ‘00s, and I could really only spare the time to do it with Glenn. And then after a while, there's The Glenn Show. Glenn, I forget when that happened. How old is The Glenn Show itself?

It goes back to pretty close to the beginning of my association with Bloggingheads. First off, there were ad hoc visitations at Bloggingheads, where I would be asked by Robert Wright to do a show and I'd do it. And I don't know, maybe a year in—so that would make it before the election of 2008—we anointed my presence in the Bloggingheads suite as The Glenn Show. But it wasn't independent, you could subscribe to The Glenn Show kind of thing. It was one of a half-dozen or more podcasters, all of whom were gathered together under the Bloggingheads umbrella. There were other hosts, Mickey Kaus and Bob Wright prominent among them. But there were others, all of whom were Bloggingheads people. And when you subscribe to Bloggingheads, you got access to the videos that we would put up under The Glenn Show or whatever.

But that goes way, way back. We've been independent at Substack and at YouTube and, at first, at Patreon for four years now, I'm guessing. You and I had developed an extensive collaboration at Bloggingheads, and it was you who came to me and said there are other platforms and other ways of presenting your content.

Yeah, I forgot that I brought that up. That's right.

Yeah, you did. You said, “There's this outfit called Substack. Do you know what their deal is? They're signing up people. Are you interested?” And we did sign up.

But I wanna say something else, which is our collaboration or our association, started well before we started doing podcasts together. I remember corresponding with you after your book—and I think the year was 2000—Losing the Race was published, and I was in the midst of moving from my right-wing, Reaganite conservatism into my left-wing period, my radical antiracist, against mass incarceration, “I'm going to save myself in the eyes of my coracialists by repenting for my conservatism by being as outspoken, as fervent, and as sharp-edged as I can be in denouncing anti-black racism” phase, especially in the criminal justice system.

I was moving into that phase. And when your book appeared, I took exception to it. And then when my book appeared two years later, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, you were invited by the First Things magazine crew to review it. I took exception to your review of my book. You were the Coleman Hughes of that day, in my mind, which is to say a young, upstart African American social critic. You were on the right of the race debate in those days. I considered myself to be moving to the left of the race debate, and you became a fat target in my mind. You came to Harvard and you gave some lectures and you denigrated the work of the great sociologist, William Julius Wilson.

I did.

In my mind, I thought and I said, you're not qualified to do that. You're talking beyond what you know. Let me tell you something about sociology. I know something about it. Our fruitful antagonism goes back almost a quarter-century.

Remember when you came to a Manhattan Institute conference? Remember that one with Debra Dickerson and you and me and a couple other people? It was an afternoon conference. It was at Columbia, which I did not teach at at the time. You came down for the afternoon and we did a general race conversation. I have pictures of it. You don't remember that?

I don't remember. I remember Debra Dickerson, of course. I remember her.

And it was an afternoon conference at Columbia on a weekday. Actually it was a bust because ... I'm going to name them. Randall Kennedy and Orlando Patterson had said they were coming, and then ten days before, they ghosted us. Didn't even explain why they weren't coming. I was surprised that both of them did that. And I like both of them very much. This is almost twenty years ago, but they did that. So it didn't have the star power that we were expecting. Eugene Rivers was there. Clarence Page was there. Remember?

I don't remember. John. I'm blocking on that.

I'll show you pictures. You were very glum. You didn't like the things that were being said around you at the conference. You weren't nasty about it, but it was clear that you didn't like hearing the more right-wing statements that various people were making. I remember that. Roy Innis was there. You didn't want to hear those things. And I thought, wow, it offends Glenn. This is '05.

All right. I don't remember. I can't remember everything.

And then a couple of years after that, we started doing this.

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