Glenn Loury Quotes

[Speaking with John McWhorter] I take umbrage at the lionisation of lightweight, empty-suited, empty-headed motherfuckers like Ibram X. Kendi. Who couldn't carry my book bag. He hasn't read a fucking thing. If you ask him what Nietzsche said, he would have no idea. He's an unserious, superficial, empty-suited, lightweight - he's not our equal, not even close.

For too long, there has been no mass fight back against the multileveled assault on poor and vulnerable people, despite the heroic work of intellectual freedom fighters including Marian Wright Edelman, Angela Davis, Loïc Wacquant, Glenn Loury, Marc Mauer, and others. Yet the sleepwalking is slowly but surely coming to a close as more and more fellow citizens realize that the iron cage they inhabit—maybe even a golden cage for the affluent—is still a form of bondage.

Every now and then when I hear someone called a racist, I just mentally insert the word 'witch'. And it almost always works. What they're actually doing is they're calling you a witch.

I object to the soft tyranny of having political postures put forward as self-evident truths to which every decent member of this community should subscribe. I object to that.

There are many disparities, and for every disparity, there are alternative explanations that one can bring to bear, but structural racism doesn’t even attempt to provide an explanation. It attempts to maneuver you into a corner rhetorically so that you must concede it’s not the fault of the people who suffered the condition at hand.

I’m not saying that you won’t find many patterns or practices of racial mistreatment in history, but I’m saying that the link between them and the contemporary circumstances of African-American communities, especially at the bottom end, is woefully inadequate to explain what we see.

The election of a black president was an achievement, but it belonged to the American populace, not to Obama himself. That we could progress from a nation that harbored a virtual apartheid regime within its borders to one with a black president within my lifetime was remarkable. But the figurehead chosen to carry the torch of racial progress to the pinnacle of the American political system was, in my mind, little more than a political operator, albeit a gifted one. I did not doubt that Barack Obama was intelligent, but his self-presentation as an icon of American blackness struck me as absurd. He had no real ties to the history of black people in this country. If you took his Kenyan father (who he never really knew) out of the equation, I could see nothing of the African American experience in his life. I couldn’t accept the idea that he represented, in his very being, the ascension of black Americans from slavery to full citizenship to prosperity. His endless touting of his ties to Chicago, with the implication that he was a product of the very same South Side that made me, only drove home that, while he understood how to convey “authenticity” to the American public at large, there was almost nothing real about the persona that he presented for the TV cameras. My uncle Moonie, I was quite sure, would have been singularly unmoved by Barack Hussein Obama’s act.

I agree with virtually everything Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury have to say regarding the path for Black success. Their basic message is, “Pick yourself up, dammit, by the bootstraps.

The more difficult answer - the more courageous one - is to say yes, yes we should be concerned about the behavior of men trapped in ghetto communities, but the deep failure of morality is our own. Economist Glenn Loury once posed the question: 'are we willing to cast ourselves as a society that creates crimogenic conditions for some of its members, and then acts-out rituals of punishment against them as if engaged in some awful form of human sacrifice?' A similar question can be posed with respect to shaming those trapped in ghettos: are we willing to demonize a population, declare a war against them, and then stand back and heap shame and contempt upon them for failing to behave like model citizens while under attack?