Glenn Loury is still a Player

Even more than as I noted in my original Goodreads review, that's the bottom line of his autobiography.

Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative by Glenn C. Loury
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A Player is trying to play you. Period, bottom line and end of story.

Per a theme of Loury’s off and on throughout the book, I think that’s the best take on this. Yes, that's highly skeptical. It may even be a bit cynical, but it's skeptical far ahead of cynical. To Loury's fanbois and fangirrls who either loved or hated this book, I don't care if you think it's all cynicism, no skepticism.

Let's dive in, starting with stuff that presented itself right away.

First, per Loury’s hints in his intro that he thinks radical honesty will make him more likeable as well as more believable? Tosh. Ditto on implied claims that if he’s more believable on his personal story, then he’ll be more believable on his economic and political stances. Tosh again.

Second, per the front half of the inner dust cover flap, any swing to the left was relatively short and narrowly focused.

Third, no index.

Fourth, Hillsdale College early 1980s may not have been as big as today as far as conservative world imprint, but it wasn’t small. Writing for them? Loury had to know what he was doing. As far as his musings about a John Conyers and police brutality, he implies that Conyers was thinking about this to the exclusion of thinking about black family problems. With both this and Hillsdale, Loury had to know that white conservatives would use this as ammunition for “let’s move beyond affirmative action.” He either DID know this and decided to, early on, be a “Player,” or else he didn’t think about it and became a Sucker.

At this point, I am pretty sure the book won’t go above 3 stars. So, where within that will it land?

Well, next, we hit his cheap, caricatured and dishonest — to shove that word in his face — strawmanning of liberals on the 170s-180s pages. And, by the time I’m at 200, I am pretty sure this is no more than 2 stars. And, I'm thinking this is another part of being a Player.

And then, shortly after page 300, comes Charles Murray and The Bell Curve. Now, I know that Loury is no more a cognitive scientist or an evolutionary biologist than is, say, Andrew Sullivan, to cite another prominent personage who has both loathsome and stupid views on the book and the ideas behind it. And, contra Loury, it doesn’t matter that Herrnstein had died by the time the book came out. He was wrong, too. BOTH authors got money from the racist Pioneer Fund, like Frank Miele. Add in that Murray then moved from racism to sexism. Interestingly (perhaps in part because, reading between the lines in this book, Loury isn't very enlightened on feminism, either), he doesn't even mention this to try to explain it away. Surely, he knows this, too.

Contra Sully, though, Loury is an academic in a not totally distant field, and even less distant as far as some of his lectures and such. He’s surely read some of the material before, during and after The Bell Curve about the sociological influences on IQ even when not motivated by racism, the problems with “g” and more, problems detailed here. In addition, the fact that AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, simply threw aside his concerns, and basically just went on without him after he left, apparently opened no eyes in his soul.

To put it more bluntly than in my original review? Loury's lying to himself, lying to his readers, or lying to both. They're not mutually exclusive.

There’s also the fact that this connects to broader stupidity in Evolutionary Psychology, with some of its biggest stupidity detailed here.

There’s other lies by omission. Like overlooking that already by the late 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was ignoring LBJ’s dictum that you don’t ask someone to run, but just walk, after removing the chains. Or, talking about equity once or twice, then ignoring the multigenerational transfer effects of racial differences in equity.

As for the radical honesty, one more time? Tying his conclusion to his introduction, it seems like he’s selling the idea of being an intellectual Player. I think his puffed up move from the right to the left was part of being a Player. And, other than mass incarceration, was it really much of a move? Nowhere in the book does Loury dive into the intersection of race and class, other than his personal anecdotes revealing how part of his being a Player in various ways involved forms of intersectional class-shifting. In light of that, I note that he doesn’t mention Isabel Wilkerson or her book Caste.

That said, he’s not 100 percent wrong on everything. Nor is new bosom buddy McWhorter. I don’t have a lot of use for Ta-Nehisi Coates nor for the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones. I have about none for Ibrahim Kendi and even less for Robin DiAngelo as a white race hustler.

Oherwise, as for his alleged move to the “left”? There’s NO Black leftists he mentions. Yes, Black liberals. No Black leftists, like, say, an Adolph Reed.

There’s zero engagement with Critical Race Theory, like Derrick Bell and his "Silent Covenants." Loury mentions some other Bell in the book, but since no index, I can’t remember who. So, on his "pivot to the left," at least on the depth of his pivot, as with the Murray angle, Loury would again seem to be lying.

Again — and assuming the lying is conscious — to whom first? Himself? (Which makes the lying at some point subconscious.) Black conservatives? White conservatives? All of the above? Black and/or White liberals? Is he even trying to lie beyond liberals to leftists?

So, why? Is Loury trafficking in the idea of being a Player due to laws of supply and demand on black conservatives? Was his shift allegedly to the “left” to build up Black cred when he moved back right?

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