Troubled Black Communities and National Integrity

with Tyler Cowen

In recent years, I’ve argued on behalf of pluralistic American nationalism. I take great pride in this country’s achievements, and our ability to incorporate people from around the world into our population is one of them. Legal immigration has been a great boon to the US—on the whole, it’s enriched our culture and led to greater economic prosperity. And yet, I also think that if we don’t enforce strong borders, if we don’t exercise our right to say who can and can’t join our nation, we will put at risk the coherence and success of the American project. In fact, given the mind-boggling numbers of people crossing our borders virtually unchecked, we are putting ourselves at risk.

But any respectable nationalism must cut both ways. Too often, I see “problematic” sectors of our society—especially poor black communities that suffer from high crime and low social achievement—treated almost as though they’re foreign outposts within our borders. Excluding them from full consideration as our neighbors and countrymen, treating them as baleful exceptions to the equality promised to all Americans, regarding them as unwelcome guests rather than true Americans, is the “conservative” version of an open borders policy. This, too, undermines the integrity of our national project. In fact, as I say in this clip from a conversation with Tyler Cowen, these communities are not “them.” They are us.

If open borders threaten the nation from without, then excluding segments of our population from full consideration as fellow Americans threatens the nation from within. And I confess, I don’t always deal with the problems of these communities in the most constructive way. My anger when I read of yet another innocent victim of gang violence or young black men rampaging through the streets is perhaps an appropriate reaction. But it cannot be my—our—only reaction. Too often it is. Ultimately, we want to help resolve the endemic troubles of these communities, and that requires that we understand those troubles and those communities. Anger is a bad starting point for such an understanding. Empathy might serve us better. It’s not a substitute for the action and hard work it will take to make real change, but to withhold it from our countrymen does “them”—and therefore “us”—a profound disservice.

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TYLER COWEN: I have a few questions about race for you. Do you have any interest in that topic? Let's take the part of the white right wing that really likes you. And I know there are different phases in your thought, but overall they really like you. What's the main point or insight they are missing when it comes to race that you would like them to know but they don't?

GLENN LOURY: Thanks for asking that question. I think I have an answer. Those people who are languishing in the ghettos, the housing projects, the lockups, the emergency rooms of the hospital wards, the ones who are doing the carjackings, the ones who are doing the crazy shit that you see when you turn on your television and you look at what's going on in Chicago or Baltimore or St. Louis or Philadelphia—those people are us. They're our people. Those are Americans. They are us. That's us. It's not them.

That's what I'd like them to understand. My right-wing acolytes, I don't think many of them get that. I think they think this is an alien imposition upon an otherwise more or less pristine Euro-American canvas. They think they're shithole pockets of America that they need to protect themselves from. And true enough, they do sometimes need to protect themselves. But those are our people over there. That's our failure. This is an American story, not a black American story.

And why doesn't that lesson get through? Is it that it's not articulated well enough, the people are closed-minded, racism, or what's your account of why that remains insufficiently known?

Maybe human nature. Maybe it's very easy, “us and them.” I could, by the way, flip the script on that and say to the radical black activists who are demanding Black Lives Matter justic, that the working-class, struggling, white truck driver, gas station attendant guy or woman that's working who's attracted to the populist rhetoric and who might want to vote for Trump—those are people, too. They're people not so different from ourselves. They have a story. Everybody has a story. A little bit of generosity would go a long way. I could say that to black activists, and they would have a hard time hearing it.

It may be that empathy and a kind of suspension of disbelief, a kind of interrogation of your gut, visceral instinct to react with ad hominem and react with a categorical dismissal and with a stereotype, it may be that the ability to resist that impulse is difficult for anybody to come by. I would also say—and I speculate here a little bit, but you're not gonna let me stop speculating—that the political interest of various actors who have to marshal majorities of the electorate and who have to develop narratives that get the juices flowing in one way or another for their supporters militates against that kind of more moderate and self-effacing and humble posture.

I'm not the Christian that I used to be when I was coming out of drug addiction. I was much more observant and fervent. But it seems to me that in the teachings that I can recall from my encounters with Christianity—about humility, about walking, thinking, doing, and acting as Christ would do, as he would have us do—that there's just a lot there. And I think that it's a lot easier to talk the talk than it is to walk the walk on that.

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Which aspects of the US black experience do you wish that you knew more about?

I have this ongoing conversation with my friend John McWhorter at The Glenn Show where we talk about Omar. Omar is a type. He's just a stand-in representation of dysfunction, probably on the wrong side of the line in terms of law enforcement, bragging about having babies by three different women, can't keep a job, dropped out of school, problematic kid in the ghetto.

And John says, “Omar makes me sad, and Omar makes you mad.” He says this to me. This is one of our things. How do we react to the fact of this dysfunction that is so prevalent in low-income black communities, that creates such problems for others who share those communities with them and for society more broadly, that redounds to the discredit of of African American society? You can't be proud of a “thug,” can you? Our reaction to this dysfunction—he makes me mad. I don't understand him. I don't understand how you take a pistol, fire it out the window of a vehicle in a residential area where you know people are sitting on the front porches and you have no idea where that bullet is going to land, and then crow about it.

I don't understand. I don't know what those frustrations are, don't know the story. I don't know Omar's story. Not really. I know stereotypes about the story, cartoon representations of the story. Is he angry? Is he disconsolate? Does he have hope? What does he believe in? And I'm saying “he” and I'm saying “Omar,” but of course it doesn't just apply to the guys.

I don't really know. I don't really know what's going on. And when I meet people, social workers, cops, nurses, religious people who are working on the ground in these communities, they're trying to tell me a little bit about what life is like and so on. And I wish I knew more about it. I wish I could have more factually grounded empathy for the people who I am so quick to castigate for creating the problems but whose genuine life stories I don't know so much about. And I wish that the creative arts and the journalistic practice would get grittier, wouldn't be so much in the service of a “progressive” political program but would just tell me what's going on.

I want to go inside those housing projects and find out what people are actually saying to each other and doing to each other and how they feel about it. I don't trust the reportage that I get because it's all too tendentious and in the service of making sure that Donald Trump doesn't get any more votes than he might otherwise get or that Black Lives Matter comes out looking smelling like roses.

I want to know the real story. Which—if I flatter myself with this, forgive me—I think would allow me to be less mad and more sad when I encounter the mischief that Omar is creating throughout the country.

Who is your strongest critic on race, the best critic of you?

Okay, you're gonna think I'm dodging your question: my wife, LaJuan Loury

It's not a dodge at all. It's probably an excellent answer. Not that I know, but it makes sense to me.

I think it's correct, frankly. Every time I go into one of my rants at The Glenn Show and I start, complaining about whatever—affirmative action or the defund the police movement or critical race theory or whatever—she'll say something like,

The real structural issues here have to do with economics. They have to do with a decent social provision. They have to do with corporations getting away without paying any taxes. They have to do with inequality. They have to do with the defects of capitalism to which you are seemingly indifferent or unwilling to acknowledge. And all of this culture war stuff that you engage in, about complaining about critical race theory or whatever, it's just a dodge.

It's a smoke screen from confronting the underlying power dynamics that generate and sustain inequality and privilege and disadvantage and whatnot in the society. And that's what I want you to talk about. I want you to talk about why people can't pay the rent, about why the wage is so low, about why they can't get decent healthcare, and about why the fat cats on Wall Street and everywhere else practically get away with murder. And no one ever holds them to account. You're an economist. Why aren't you developing and expositing critical theories that address yourself to the real foundation of disparities of power, influence, and success in our society instead of shooting fish in a barrel?

I paraphrase, but this is pretty much her argument. She doesn't really disagree with me about a lot of this stuff. It's just that she thinks it's the wrong target.

But is she right?

That's the last chapter of the memoir.

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