The Ferocity of Self-Regard

Two generations respond to Late Admissions

My memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, has been out for the better part of a year, and reviews are still coming in. I wanted to highlight two that came out last month, one from a young YouTuber named Swardiq Mayanja and another from the great Gerald Early, who is around my age. Both link the book’s political content to the more personal, psychological material, but with different emphases. Observing the generational divide between Mayanja and Early, the political and historical resonances that chime with them, and the insights they draw from their reading actually taught me some things about my own book.

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Perhaps it’s natural that Early focuses his review on the race politics of the 1980s—he lived through them, too. As a black writer and intellectual, I imagine one of the book’s central images—Coretta Scott King reduced to tears by my criticisms of the failures of the then-present-day Civil Rights Movement—hit him harder than it might a younger person. Coretta Scott King was the unofficial inheritor of her husband’s legacy. Making her cry did not feel good, no matter how wrong I thought she was, and I imagine it was easy, if not very comfortable, for Early to put himself in my shoes in that moment.

But he has a different reading of that incident than I do. In the book, I write,

It does not occur to me reflect and to try to understand the role that my speaking in this way plays within the larger social drama, to contemplate the difference between merely being right about the movement and being helpful to it. At this moment, I have not even begun to consider which of these alternative might be more important to me.

I introduce a distinction between “merely being right” and “being helpful,” an indication that I now think I was not as constructive in that meeting as I could have been. But Early rejects the distinction. “Being right is being helpful,” he writes. “Call what Loury was trying to do creative destruction.”

Now, my heart flutters at the allusion to the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction,” the idea that new market innovations create value by, in part, laying waste to old and obsolete models and practices. That’s one way to think about what I was trying to do to race politics back in 1984. But Early links the destruction necessary to new growth not only to economic markets (including the marketplace of ideas) but to the kind of destructive and self-destructive behavior in my personal life I was then engaged in—flagrant adultery, familial negligence, and, later, drug addiction.

My self-destruction, Early seems to say, was necessary in order for new creation. He sees Late Admissions as “a story about how embracing one’s self-destructive tendencies, one’s voracious selfishness and appetites, gives life meaning because, if nothing else, they make life interesting to oneself and they actually make you interesting to other people.” In Early’s reading, the “ferocity of [my] self-regard” fueled whatever productive contributions I have made to economics and social criticism.

It’s a mark of Early’s perceptiveness and subtly as a literary critic that he connects these two tendencies in my life while I had not. And yet, I find myself resisting the insight. Was the hell I went through and put my family through really necessary in order to achieve everything else? The text may suggest it is—perhaps it even inadvertently encourages the connection—but given the choice between getting addicted to crack and not getting addicted to crack, I can’t recommend the former. And yet I can’t deny that, after cleaning up, recommitting to my family, and finding God (however temporarily), I found myself recentered, focused and, soon after recovery, more intellectually productive than I had been since my late twenties. I wouldn’t like to think that I needed to “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” in order to get back to publishing in the top economics journals, but perhaps I’ve said as much without realizing it.

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From what I can gather, Swardiq Mayanja is a professional nurse who has a sideline on YouTube, where he talks about his profession, books, and films.

As someone who was, I’m pretty sure, not yet born during the events Early highlights, it’s perhaps natural that he doesn’t focus on them. The self-destructive behavior that Early describes as a necessary part of my life, Mayanja often describes as simply “insane.” And I can’t blame him! What was more interesting to me was his reaction to book’s politics.

First, he compares Late Admissions favorably to Kamala Harris’s campaign autobiography, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. I haven’t read Harris’s book, but Mayanja describes it as a fairly typical politician’s book, an airbrushed account of a blameless life lived in service of high ideals. Maybe that’s accurate, but it’s doubtful—she’s a human being, after all, with all the flaws that come with being human. I was striving to be as honest as possible, which Mayanja clocks immediately and correctly understands the pursuit of honest self-examination as the book’s raison d’etre.

I was bracing myself for the end of the video, where he gets into my politics more explicitly. But I was surprised to find that he saw value in my critiques of Barack Obama. From browsing through Mayanja’s YouTube channels, Mayanja comes across as an earnest and intellectually promiscuous reader. And yet he was surprised to learn that one of the central pillars in the Obama myth—his identification with Chicago’s South Side—is, if not totally false, then greatly exaggerated. (I can thus forgive Mayanja for mixing up Nixon and Reagan—I don’t think I would have wanted to work for Nixon!)

You never know what a reader is going to get out of your work. When I began working on the version of the book that became Late Admissions, a colleague asked who I wanted to read it. I wanted every person on the planet to read it, of course. But I was specifically interested in what a young black reader who feels alienated by our present-day race politics might think of it. I now have an answer, and it’s incredibly gratifying. Mayanja says he’s a TGS listener, so there’s a chance he’s reading this. If so, many thanks, my friend.

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