Examining the Poison of Glenn Loury's Racial Rhetoric

Addressing him like I would any other person reinforcing racial hierarchy in their public speech and writing

I promise this isn’t going to become a

Glenn Loury

centered Substack, but I will write on him from time to time. The rhetoric he slings around on the subject of race is dangerous. I believe I have a responsibility to address the poison in his words and the emptiness of his so-called argument. Today, I watched a short 8.5 minute video of Glenn giving a talk at College of the Holy Cross. Let me break this down for y’all.

The first question Glenn posed to the audience was “if we institutionalize the process of using a different standard of selection, how can we keep people from taking on board the logical implications of that practice?” He was talking about college admissions.

“Nobody’s going to say it out loud. No one whose been around for a while and become socially adept at managing their way through American society is gonna explicitly state: ‘Well, I see a lot of Black faces in there, I wonder how many of them are really up to doing my calculus.’ No one’s gonna say that, but a lot of people are going to think it. If in fact the SAT quant scores for the Black students who are admitted to the university are a standard deviation below those of everybody else.”

First, I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people who will say it out loud. Glenn must never spend any time on social media with a critical eye if he believes there’s no one who would speak on this publicly. He must have missed Elon’s salute as well. Also, there’s likely a colleague of his, or two or three, who are candidates to introduce a conversation about assumed Black inferiority. He should take a poll.

It’s interesting that Glenn thinks being socially adept in American society means not discussing your racism out loud. I can confidently write that if you look at your Black students and wonder if they are up to doing the work of the class they are in — your class— because of an assumption about their mathematics acuity based on an assumption about their SAT score, then you are having racist thoughts. Glenn is going further than defending people having these thoughts, he’s defending the thoughts themselves.

I can’t imagine harboring and sharing publicly these thoughts has had any impact on Glenn’s own students. Right?

You know someone’s logic has become twisted when they’re making the case for their own counterargument unawares.

If Glenn believes many professors will be wondering if their Black students can hack it before they’ve even put pencil to paper just because they are Black, would that not be a significant confounding variable for any statistical measure of the relationship between Black student success rates and SAT score? The statistics Glenn believes bolster his reasoning for the end of affirmative action being a good thing? Especially given what we know about instructor impact on student learning?

Yes. Yes it would. And the reason Glenn has missed this fairly basic contradiction is because it implicates white supremacy. Glenn does not ever discuss racism for more than a few moments at a time. He almost exclusively mentions it to diminish its impact, to malign those who confront it, and/or to characterize it as largely a phenomenon of the past. Don’t take my word for it. Watch Glenn’s content. You won’t find him discussing racism outside of the narrow scope I’ve described. In any other context, Glenn dances around racism like it’s a camp fire ritual.

“Think about this. If you want to go to a good law school in America, and you’re white, or Asian, you had better have an A or an A- average for your GPA in college, you had better be scoring in the 90th percentile of test takers on the LSAT, otherwise you’re not going to be admitted to the University of Michigan, to Boalt Hall at Berkeley, not to mention Yale or Harvard or Stanford. You’re not going to be admitted, if you’re white. If you’re Black, and you’ve got an A- or a B+ average at a good feeder school, and you’re at the 70th percentile of the LSAT test takers, you’re almost guaranteed to get in most of these places.”

These are pure foundationless lies Glenn is passing off as the truth to bolster his argument and appeal to racist sensibilities. I find it disgusting to be honest. It is absurd to believe that affirmative action works this way for anyone who has done even the slightest bit of research into it. As if there is any unassailable pipeline for Black success in America. Laughable. Certainly not affirmative action now that a decades-long attempt to dismantle it has succeeded. Glenn works as a professor, so there’s no excuse for this.

He seems more concerned about negative incentives for student performance than anything else. Not only is Glenn excusing hypothetical racists’ thoughts, he’s creating an imaginary system of motivations whereby Black students work less hard due to alleged admissions advantages and white students work less hard because of systemic disadvantages. He has managed to erase racial hierarchy from his presentation and rework it, poorly, into a 180 degree monstrosity. He’s feeding white supremacy and white fear.

“This is Justice Scalia being depicted by a political cartoonist as a Klansman because he dared to ask from the bench of the Supreme Court a question of an attorney in an affirmative action litigation case about whether or not there couldn’t be a problem if you tried to bring African American students who weren’t up to doing the work to colleges just so you could fill out your form and say that you had a higher percentage of blacks amongst your student body. Might those kids have been better off, says Scalia,…if they had been allocated to a less rigorous intellectual environment more suitable to the level of a performance that they’re exhibiting.”

Again, Glenn is his own counterargument. He is making a good living giving talks like these and bashing antiracist activists on his YouTube channel and in writing. Yet he shows he cannot even recognize the implicit racism in suggesting one is able to glean the future intellectual rigor of a Black student via test score data and that matching them with “more suitable” “less rigorous” environments would be better them. I think he actually believes this is a reasonable question to ask, yet it is totally disconnected from the reality of affirmative action.

Here are some facts about the reality of affirmative action. It began in the context of a country rampant with a generations-long history of anti-black racial discrimination and dehumanization. That includes all institutions of higher learning. It was achieved through the efforts and heavy sacrifices of a largely Black-led movement. Black people are not the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action.

That Glenn is publicly proclaiming some of this stuff means to me that either he is ignorantly making a killing off of a poison he doesn’t understand, or he’s knowingly promoting white supremacist narratives for cash. I don’t care which is correct; I just want the poison to stop flowing.

We can’t afford to allow people reckless with racial truths like Glenn Loury and

Coleman Hughes

control the dialogue on the subject of race. If you agree and want to help support my efforts in discussing race critically, holistically, ethically, and with a revolutionary purpose, please consider subscribing for free or upgrading to a paid subscription, joining a free live or virtual Contraband Wagon event, joining my Patreon, or applying to be a guest on my livestream for a 2-hour conversation on race. Thank you for reading and for your consideration, and I look forward to sharing more conversations and insights with you here on Substack!