Notes From D.R. | Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

Twenty years ago, Glenn Loury had it all.

He was a tenured professor of economics at Harvard. His essays on race and responsibility were widely read and admired. He was heralded alongside Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams as a courageous scholar challenging left-wing orthodoxy on the status of blacks in American society. Ronald Reagan even nominated him to be William Bennett’s second-in-command at the Department of Education.

In the late-1980s, however, Loury was busted on drug-possession charges, tarnishing a brilliant career. The arrest occurred around the same time that Loury was beginning to silently buckle under the pressure generated by ceaseless accusations of racial disloyalty; perhaps he resorted to drugs to soothe an unjustifiably "guilty conscience." Nevertheless, the post-arrest Loury, in an apparent attempt to court the favor of blacks who had scorned him as an "Uncle Tom," began distancing himself from the right, first by making unsubstantiated allegations of bigotry against the authors of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve and later by leaving the American Enterprise Institute after Dinesh D’Souza, an AEI-affiliated writer, published The End of Racism, a 1995 book that echoed Loury’s 1980s criticism of the left’s vision of race in America. In 1998, he renounced his previous opposition to racial quotas.

Loury’s 2001 book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality finalized his divorce from the right: the book was filled to the brim with shopworn, pessimistic lamentations about racism in America, and came across as a more scholarly version of Derrick Jackson’s tirades about whitey in the Boston Globe. For those who once admired Loury, the book’s publication was depressing–how else could they describe the sight of a man who was once one of the true intellectual titans of the right throwing it all away for the modern-day equivalent of thirty pieces of gold (i.e., hosannas from the moonbat left)?

Since Loury "threw it all away," it has remained in the trash, rotting. Loury’s influence has waned, his once-compelling voice virtually silenced. Once he was bold and vibrant; now he’s just another leftist singing the same old song about Negro victims and Caucasian oppressors. It’s been a decade since Glenn Loury decided he couldn’t take the heat and left the conservative kitchen. Now the man is starving.