Is the Work Done?
with Mark Sussman
Since beginning work on my memoir, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the changes in my political trajectory. One way to trace that trajectory looks like this: I began my life as a public intellectual as a conservative, moved to the left in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and found myself moving back to the right in the last decade or so.
But that narrative is a little too neat. In reality, there may be as much continuity in my thinking over the years as there is discontinuity. The Glenn Loury who published “A New American Dilemma” in 1984 and the Glenn Loury who published The Anatomy of Racial Inequality in 2002 and the Glenn Loury who delivered the speech “The Case for Black Patriotism” at the National Conservatism Conference last year are all the same guy with the same set of concerns. The difference between all of those Glenns is, more often than not, a shift in emphasis rather than a wholesale exchange of one set of beliefs for another.
Looking back on some of my prior articulations of those beliefs, then, can help me illuminate where I stand today. That search for illumination was the impetus behind what we’re calling here at the newsletter “Old Glenn / New Glenn.” Does the more liberal “Old Glenn” have anything to teach the more conservative “New Glenn,” or vice versa?
The latest entry in this category of posts is a conversation I had with my newsletter editor Mark Sussman. In this excerpt from a longer conversation, Mark presents a clip from a lecture I gave at Baruch College in 2000. It’s a version of the W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures I delivered at Harvard earlier that year, which provided the material that would become The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. You can see my full conversation with Mark (and myself) here, but you’ll need to be a subscriber to gain access. We’re planning to produce a lot more “Old Glenn / New Glenn” content, and you won’t want to miss it.
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In a country founded at the end of the eighteenth century, inspired by Enlightenment ideals, an account had to be given of how it is that such an institution of human degradation could be consistent with those ideals. And in short, that account was, these are not fully human beings that we deal with here. That's the only way. They had, at least tacitly and more often than not explicitly, to be understood as not quite fully human beings, lest the question would arise and could not be put to rest: “How, then, can we treat them this way and still call ourselves a nation that loves freedom?”
Well, I say this about that. Orlando Patterson, the great historical sociologist at Harvard, in his 1982 book Slavery and Social Death, has said much better than I ever will. I say this: Slavery, then, is not just the relation of property. It's not just ownership in human bodies. It is that, but it's not only that. Because property relations can be abrogated by changing the rules of of a law. You can amend the constitution. You can emancipate. You can make it so that people are no longer property. You can refuse to enforce those contracts at law.
Slavery was also a social system of racial domination, a hierarchic ordering of society, an etching into the fabric of the nation's symbolic life of the hierarchic ranking of these persons. And so it was possible for me, sitting in my hotel room watching AMC just the other morning, to see one of those early Shirley Temple movies come on the screen. This is 1932, '33, or '34, whatever. Okay. It's early. And there's a black character in the movie who is a buffoon. He's there for comic relief. He and the dog are there for comic relief. That's in this century. Again, this is not a harangue. I don't want to be misunderstood. I'm talking about how profoundly deep was this symbolism of hierarchy, how taken for granted it was in the ordering of our nation's affairs.
This might help us to understand how it was possible that as industrial capitalism was expanding at the end of the nineteenth and into the beginning of the twentieth century, increasing profoundly the demands for labor, how it was possible that those factories could be manned by peasants from Southern and Eastern Europe who came in the tens of millions—and God love them—while the American five, six, seven-generation born peasants in the South of our own great nation could be kept at the social margin. How it was possible for there to be a race debate in the first decades of this century, when the question was, “Could the races of the Italians, the Greeks, the Jews, and the the Slavs be integrated into the nation of North Americans?”
That was the debate. That was the melting pot debate between 1890 and 1930 in this country. While tens of millions of Americans—well, a good ten and a half million of them anyway—sat outside the debate, their race so profoundly other that the question of their place within the larger polity wouldn't even come up for another 25 years. Wouldn't come up, indeed, until we had defeated the Nazis—a racial regime—bid in a cold war against an implacable communist foe to present ourselves as the leader of the free world, and then said, “Oops. Well, I don't suppose we can do that and preside over a regime of apartheid at the same time, can we?”
And only then, in the middle of this century, only then in the middle of this century, do we begin to get that work started. Can it be any surprise, then, now here we sit at the end of the century that, that work's not done? That's all I say. The work's not done.
GLENN LOURY: He's got a strong argument.
MARK SUSSMAN: Now. So I picked this one because I think I'm right in saying that you probably would not disagree with that history that's laid out today. It's the end.
Yeah, exactly.
That's my question: Is the work done?
Yeah. So I would not disagree, certainly, with the characterization of the history. I was defending the framing of the book as having racial stigma as one of the elemental factors. And I was basically just repeating the argument from the book about where I think that stigma came from. I think it came from slavery, and I think it was an absolute necessity in the sociopolitical, cultural makeup of the United States that the Africans had to be seen as not quite our full human equals, otherwise you couldn't square holding them in bondage while at the same time, you know, your ideal is the land of the free and the home of the brave. That's just basic logic.
And I do follow Orlando Patterson in this, and I think it's a profound insight about American political culture coming out of the eighteenth century. So standing by that and the history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that I gloss at there. I'm not a historian, but I think I'm standing on pretty firm ground to say. I think of Khalil Muhammad's book The Condemnation of Blackness as an illustration of this point. His book is written and published after I gave that lecture, but it's confirmation of the point of view I take in that lecture.
I mean the blacks and the Southern and Eastern European immigrants weren't seen on the same ground. The immigrants were suitable for settlement house administration to be incorporated into normal American polity. The blacks were an indigestible lump in the cultural deviance, not reformable in some way.
Has the work been done? It was only 20 years ago—that's not such a long time, is it?—that I was saying the work's not yet done. Has the work been done? It seems pretty clear that there remains work to be done. I think I can learn something from the old Glenn about that.
I'm much more focused on the work that we African Americans need to do, much less clear about what the social public national work is with respect to this issue, and certainly not signing on to “let's do the work” the way that the Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility or Kamala Harris in a speech, “let's do the work,” would mean. “Let's do the work” is let's do the work implementing the racially progressive vision of 2022? I wouldn't say so. You're giving me a lot to think about here.
It's a question about what the work is, right?
Yeah.
If we agree. And I don't think there's anything in that narrative that you presented that progressives would disagree with today. And there's nothing that you disagree with, more or less, today.
That's right.
So one of the interesting things is someone like you can say, “Oh, we agree about the history.” At least to a point. Maybe around the mid-Sixties, early-Seventies, you start to diverge a little bit. But up to that point, that is for most of the history, we agree. So the question is, what does the work consist of? You're going to get one answer from Robin DiAngelo, you're going to get another answer from Glenn Loury.
And you've answered some of that in your recent essays and speeches and things like that. But I think that maybe if the old Glenn could talk to you, he'd go like, “Well, okay, that's all well and good, like on an individual level. But the work is the work of a national project. And let's say that every person in the country magically started abiding by your recommendations, I have a feeling it still would not pan out the way that maybe we'd like to see it pan out.” So what is that remainder?
Well, so if I were a leftist—I'm not, but I am not without sympathy for the project I'm about to describe. Let's create a decent society. Because I'm married to a woman who enunciates this project on a daily basis.
Yeah, when are we gonna get LaJuan on the podcast, Glenn?
We're working on that. We're working on that.
The people demand LaJuan!
They do, they do indeed. And she's constantly saying to me, “Will you please put down the culture war cudgel and get busy building a decent society. People need healthcare. People need income security. People need education. People need housing. Our sentences are too long and our response to criminal deviation is too punitive, et cetera.” She's a Bernie Sanders, socialist-leaning, left-of-center political junkie. And that program could be the work.
The work could be, let's take a good look at the social safety net in the United States. Let's compare it to what we see in other wealthy countries in Northern Europe. There could be more social security, broadly understood, more of a cohesive compact of mutual support. And we can quibble about it. I know taxes can't be 90% because there are incentive effects, and we have to think about the consequences of any regime of public provision.
But if you did that work, then the terrible blight in the lives of so many people of color that can be attributed to our ignoble history would be significantly ameliorated. That could be the work. So I mean, I'm not foursquare behind that program either, but perhaps I should be. But one thing's clear in my mind: I'm much more sympathetic to that progressive program than I am to diversity and inclusion seminars that teach white people about how not to be racist.
I think you'd find—I know you'd find—a lot of people on the left who agree with you about that.
Who agree with that.
For the most part. And it seems like those people are getting a little bit more traction. Their voices are getting a little bit louder. And I think it'll be really interesting to see what happens when that position gets a little bit more mainstream.
"People need healthcare. People need income security. People need education. People need housing."
This statement carries an underlying implication: the people who "need" these things expect to have them at someone else's expense. If someone wants the US to behave like, say, Norway, then show me the plan to 1) tax the US like Norway and 2) make it look like Norway. Those countries are very homogeneous culturally, there is a high level of trust in societies because people see themselves as Norwegians period, not as hyphenated people, and there is an understanding that the ship only moves if everyone grabs an oar.
We are nothing like that. Whatever shared American experience existed is barely hanging on today. The people who used to wax on about multiculturalism are the first to accuse someone of "appropriation" as if that's an outlier event. No, appropriation is a feature of a multi-culti society, not a bug. How can it be anything else? When people from other cultures introduce interesting things, imitation is a form of accepting those things, of saying "hey, that's pretty cool. I want to try that food/art/clothing style/etc."
When I hear that Glenn's wife, the Bernie Socialist, wants to see a social safety net as good as the Europeans have it, two things come to mind. The first is that Americans have an unrealistic viewpoint of what is offered in various European countries. Sweden has been generous in its benefits but over time has amended them to keep people motivated to work and participate in society. As of late, aspects of Sweden's welfare state, as well as Denmark & Norway are being challenged by immigration, rising crime, sluggish economic growth, and, perhaps surprisingly, the welfare model itself.
The second point is that of immigration. Northern European welfare states, like Sweden, Norway & Denmark, worked well because up until recently their societies were homogenous, Swedes lived in Sweden, Danes in Denmark, etc. There seemed to be an implicit societal contract of how to behave and what was expected of citizens; Everyone could identify with everyone else, ie they were all in it together, working together. Recent immigration from the Middle East and Africa and even Eastern Europe has changed that. New arrivals have not only placed financial pressure on these countries but increased and even disrupted the local way of life. Some question whether they should supporting new arrivals many who don't have the skills or desire to work (women in societies where they are expected to remain at home).
In the USA, over the past decade, there have been record numbers of refugees & migrants (legal & illegal) that exceed the highpoint of 1915 immigration levels as well. One could argue there are pluses to this vast new numbers arriving, but on the other than hand it also makes for torn and disassembled communities, so much so, that it can be hard to argue for a greater safety net because it would demand much higher taxes. It's not clear Americans want to pay for more immigration - to pay for someone they don't really know; as it is we've been told that it already costs about $100K to sustain each new arrival. In fact, polls show that Americans are not prepared to pay the high levels of taxes that European countries do to continue supporting this burden beyond the initial arrival costs. And finally, the development of welfare states in Northern Europe had a lot to do their Protestantism, much like early days in the USA. However, as Protestantism abates in the USA and is even reviled by a growing socialist contingent, it's not clear what ethos is going to replace moral guidance going forward.