Looking Race in the Face

From a talk at Baylor University

Recently, I was invited to deliver a lecture at Baylor University’s Baugh Center for Free Enterprise on the subject of race and capitalism. The Q&A afterward was at times quite provocative. The students and faculty did not shy away from the tough questions.

And I’m glad they didn’t. The excerpt below asks me to consider a question I’ve had occasion to think about on more than one occasion: When I lay responsibility for some aspects of racial inequality at the feet of black people who are, in my view, underperforming, shirking their responsibilities, or attempting to explain away the problem with cries of “systemic racism,” am I not telling racists exactly what they want to hear? Am I not giving white people permission to think less of their black colleagues? Am I not, in some sense, giving aid and comfort to the enemy?

I understand where the question comes from, but I don’t think anybody actually listening to what I’ve been saying for last several years could honestly say that’s been my intent. Racial inequality is a much more complicated problem than most people are willing to admit. It’s my responsibility as a thinker, as a public intellectual, and as a citizen to look that problem in the face and call it by its name. Wrongheaded people may try to misuse my words, opportunists may misappropriate my message. But that’s the cost of doing business. If I toed the line about race in this country, I’d be betraying myself and anybody who took my words to heart. So I can’t worry about bad actors glomming onto a soundbite. My responsibility is to the larger truth as best I can discern it, so I’ll continue to speak it.

A New Home for TGS

TGS now has its own YouTube channel. I invite you to subscribe now (and click the bell button!) so that you don't miss future offerings. This newsletter will continue to publish as usual with the same benefits for subscribers.

This video and transcript are taken from a longer conversation currently available only to newsletter subscribers. It will be made publicly available later this week. For early access to videos and podcasts, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits.

---

PETER KLEIN: Let me try to paraphrase a question from a student. I mean, I know you don't shy away from the tough questions, and this one is a little bit more tough. I'm going to paraphrase and then try to tie it into a broader issue that maybe you can address, ‘cause I think you've sort of touched on this already.

But the question is from a student who identifies as an African American student attending a predominantly white institution, which I assume is Baylor. And the question relates to the concern that the sorts of claims that you're making both theoretical and descriptive can be perceived as offensive or as demeaning both for black students and maybe faculty who receive them. But also maybe they reinforce to white students and faculty this idea that, well, the black students and faculty who are here are maybe different from you. Maybe they got special consideration to be at the university. How does this affect the social fabric across racial groups within an institution like a university?

GLENN LOURY: This is an important question. I don't want to shrink from it at all, because as I understand it, the motivation behind it has merit. “If you talk like this, Loury, washing all this dirty linen in public” ... I mean, let's credit that the things that I'm saying are descriptively accurate. Now, if I'm getting it wrong, I'm getting it wrong. It's slander. It's a mischaracterization of the situation, and that should just simply be dismissed. “No, you're actually wrong about the 70% born out of wedlock. You're actually wrong about the academic achievement gap. You're actually wrong about the homicide rate.” But I don't think I'm wrong about those facts. I think those facts are accurate.

“You bring those facts to the table here in a mixed environment, don't you know you're giving aid and comfort to racists, and you're humiliating people of color?” So, I don't want to aid racists, and I don't want to humiliate anyone. That leaves me with a difficult problem. I can sugarcoat, look away, obfuscate, lie, or I can stay in touch with reality and put the truth as I see it in play for debate and let the chips fall where they may.

Everybody's going to have to make their own call about that. I can't be sure—say that I don't go down the road of talking about the hard stuff, say I don't do it, say I sugarcoat it—that the person who hears it (I don't go down that road, so they don't hear it) isn't already thinking whatever it is that they're thinking. I mean, you know, newspapers. I'm trying to search for the right example.

Here's one from my home institution, Brown University. We're an urban college. We sit in the middle of Providence, Rhode Island, up on a hill. Providence is mixed socioeconomically, and there are poor people in Providence. Some of them are black, some of them are brown, some of them are white. Crimes happen up here on our campus. Kids get mugged, their stuff gets stolen. It used to be that when the university would report about an event, it would be an announcement that would go around by email to everybody in the community: Burglary has occurred, robbery has occurred, assault has occurred. A description will be given of the assailant if one was available. So: tall, male, female, dressed in this, hispanic-looking, black-looking, et cetera.

A few years ago, the university decided that the department of public safety could no longer give that information. Now, they were intending, of course, in so doing, to stifle the stereotyping. They didn't want to have kids in the community, because most of the offenders actually were of color, thinking that anyone of color is a threat to them, because most of the people […] kids are seeing of color are other students, not potential assailants. So they were trying to manage the information in order to avoid a stereotype.

So now whenever there's an event, here's my theory. My theory is that the typical observer who picks up the newspaper and sees that there was an event assumes that the assailant was of color because they're not provided with the information about it one way or the other. And because the background data suggest that, more likely than not, the assailant was of color. What's better: Actually saying what happened or letting people make their own assumptions about what happened?

Okay, maybe that wasn't the best example. But the thing I'm trying to defend here is that we're not public relations agents in the university. We're not image management people. We're not in the advertising business. We're in the truth business. We're in the business of getting to the bottom of things. That is the only path to a durable management of these problems, is to stay in touch with the objective conditions.

Now, would I without qualification say, you know, black kids are just not doing very well or something like that? No, I would want to be careful about that. But if affirmative action is creating—as I gave the example of the Georgetown Law Center, I don't know anything about Baylor—but if it's creating differences after the fact in the actual performance of students by race, you can believe that people see that. Not speaking of it doesn't make it go away.

So forgive me for being … I said I was not going to pull any punches. I said, you know, I wasn't going to mince any words. And maybe I'm taking too much of a kind of pleasure in being the town crier who comes out and says the emperor has no clothes, and I should be more circumspect about that. I don't know. But what I do know is that the facts will out in the end, no matter what. And we can spend our time trying to prettify something or we can look at it deadly in the face and then try to deal with it the best we can.