Glenn Loury is a professor of economics and social sciences at Brown University, and a prominent podcaster and social critic who speaks and writes about race, inequality, and social policy. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:10 - Martin Luther King Jr.
9:58 - History of slavery
24:36 - Equality of outcome
40:59 - Math and economics
57:15 - Racial groups
1:10:31 - Black patriotism
1:20:24 - MLK and Malcolm X
1:34:04 - Joe Rogan controversy
1:53:21 - Accusation of racism
2:01:05 - Elon Musk and Twitter
2:06:39 - Universities
2:15:16 - Cognitive inequality
2:27:42 - Politics
2:47:08 - Ketanji Brown Jackson
2:53:11 - Thomas Sowell
2:58:26 - Barack Obama
3:17:03 - Mortality
3:29:17 - Meaning of life

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I don't just think it's against the 14th Amendment.

The hatred comes from an understanding that it is a band-aid, that it is a substitute for the actual development of the capacities of our people to compete.

They want to tell African-Americans, pat us on the head.

We're going to have a separate program for you.

We're going to give you a side door that you can come into.

And it doesn't make us any more fit for the actual competition that's unfolding before us.

The following is a conversation with Glenn Lowry, professor of economics and social sciences at Brown University.

He is 1 of the great minds and communicators of our time, writing and speaking about race and inequality.

I highly encourage you to listen to his show on YouTube and Substack, simply called The Glenn Show.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Glenn Lowry.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech, I think is the greatest speech in American history.

If I may, I'd like to read a few words of it.

I have a dream that 1 day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that 1 day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that 1 day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my 4 little children will 1 day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

First of all, damn, I mentioned to you offline, I immigrated to America, and this is why I love this country.

This is 1 of the great species that represents what this country is about.

So what is this ideal of equality that we should strive for as a nation?

What does that mean to you, this equality?

Well, if we put this in historical context, King is speaking in 1963 when he gives that speech.

It's exactly 100 years after Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation declaring the enslaved people to be free.

They're not yet citizens in 1863, but the end of slavery has become the position of the federal government when Lincoln issues that Emancipation Proclamation.

So putting it in context, enslaved people, 4 million or so African-descended enslaved people, how do they become citizens?

How do they become in this status of subjugation and domination and stigma and exclusion, how do they become citizens?

It seems to me that that's the that's the heart of it.

The equality that King is talking about is an equality of status as members of the nation, as free and equal citizens within the republic.

Now, I think it's really important to understand that slavery was not merely a legal order, but it was also a social system that had the symbolism attached to it.

They had a big journey to make from their subjugated status as serfs, as landless people, as uneducated, unfit for citizenship really in the minds of many.

So I think that's what in 1963, 100 years later, that King is appealing to this idea that when Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence writes these words, all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, he didn't, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, didn't have in mind when he wrote those words the people who were slaves.

But by the time you get to 1963, King is invoking this idea, all men, and of course he means all persons, he doesn't only mean men, he means men and women are created equal, he wants this idea to be embraced by the country in reference to the descendants of the African slaves.

That the position of African Americans would be equalized within the political community, which is the United States of America.

So on a very basic level, the worth of a human being is equal.

It's just literally the worth of a human being.

So I mentioned to you offline that I came from the Soviet Union.

And for Hitler, the worth of a Slavic person as they were captured, there's different numbers, but it's in the hundreds to 1 German in terms of the value of the person to the great Germany.

So he wanted Germany to expand and conquer a large part of the world and within that future world that Third Reich the worth of a Russian or a Slavic person is 100 or 1000s of a German person of a pure German person So that has to do with not some kind of public policy or politics or all that kind of stuff, it has to do with the basic worth of a human being.

King is speaking to, that all people on some kind of deep level are worth the same.

If you're somehow weighing the value of a person, we're equal in that basic fundamental worth.

I don't know that he had in mind the position of Slavic people in Central Europe in the middle of the 20th century or the first part of the 20th century.

King, I don't know that he had that in mind.

He might well have done, but certainly that's the idea.

So you don't think he was really thinking about this particular civil rights struggle and the particular struggle against the backdrop of the history of slavery in America and thinking about African Americans.

He wasn't thinking about the basic, he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of all human beings.

In 1963 at that march was within the context of the United States and it was within the context of the United States, and it was within the context of the Civil Rights Movement.

He was an actor in a political drama that was American, that had to do with the fight over equal rights for voting, for housing, for employment, for citizenship of blacks in America.

But King was informed, I think, by a much broader Christian ethic of the equality of all persons.

The 5 years after that speech in Washington, he spends developing his worldview and the things that he had to say, for example, about the war in Southeast Asia that was going on at that time, made appeals to universal principles of equality.

He was a pacifist to some degree, he was against war, He was a socialist to some degree.

He might not have worn that label publicly, but he believed in a decent society where the poor would not go untended, where healthcare would be available to people who needed it and this kind of thing.

A humanitarian who saw that the value of a life was not dependent upon the color of the skin, upon the native mother tongue that might be spoken, upon whether male or female.

This is very much the ethic of Martin Luther King on my understanding.

what do you learn about human nature by looking at the history of slavery in America?

Well, I think of 2 things right off the top of my head.

1 is about the capacity of people for looking the other way in the face of unethical and morally profoundly problematic practice.

It was controversial going all the way back to the founding of the United States of America.

The country was founded on a compromise where half of the country thought that slavery was abhorrent and would not have had it countenanced in the Constitution.

The other half of the country were steeped in the dependence on the labor of these African captives and their descendants.

Their wealth was invested to some degree in the value of these human beings.

And in order for the United States to come together as a confederation of the several colonies, there had to be a compromise made.

And it was made where slavery was allowed to persist and the people who were against it or who thought it morally problematic were able to countenance the practice in the Southern states where slavery flourished.

And that went on for 75 years after the founding of the country until the crisis of the late 1850s that led to the Civil War and ultimately to the emancipation.

So 1 thing I think about human nature from the fact of slavery is that the ability of people to live with terrible, morally questionable practices and have that as a part of their institutions.

It took a movement, a massive movement of abolitionists struggling against slavery for the better part of a century before that practice could be eradicated.

But The other thing about human nature that I see is the ability of people to sustain their humanity under the most awful oppressive conditions.

The enslaved persons, the slaves and their children, I mean, they were chattel, they were bought and sold like horses or cattle.

And yet, their humanity was not destroyed by that.

And they were able to sustain their dignity to some degree in such a manner that once emancipation finally did arrive, the freedmen and women, the persons who had been enslaved and who were set free, were able to, over the following decades, build a foundation for the development of African-Americans within the context of American society that eventually culminated in the Civil Rights Movement of the middle of the 20th century and has led us into the present day.

So, you know, human nature can countenance awful evil, but human nature can also survive in the face of terrible evil.

That survival, that flame can burn even when the world around it tries to put it out.

There's still a little flame of human consciousness, of spirit, of culture, of whatever the hell that is that makes humans flourish and makes humans beautiful, that lives on.

That's very well said, yeah, I think you put it very well.

There's gotta be some poetic way of expressing that.

What about the people that look the other way?

How many people do you think, just regular people, knew that something is, this is wrong?

Or do people through generations convince themselves, most people, most regular people, convince themselves that there's nothing wrong.

I ask this question because I wonder what we're looking the other way on today also.

Because you have to kind of, if we're, you have to ask yourself these difficult questions of assuming we're the same people we were back then, then we can be flawed in that same kind of way.

We can look the other way just as others have in history.

Yeah, you spoke of the European context and of the Nazis and certainly a lot of people had to be looking the other way when the massive crimes that were committed by that regime were being undertaken.

I mean railroad cars full of human beings being taken off to be slaughtered or to be worked to death and labor camps or to be gassed etc.

A lot of people had to know about what was going on and look the other way, or enthusiastically supported the persecution of the Jews and the gypsies and so on.

And I don't know, I wasn't around in 1840.

My sense of the matter is that like many practices that are unjust, most people thought that's just the way it is.

I mean, that's the world that they inherited.

They were not moralists, they were not revolutionaries, they just wanted to go along.

Some people might have been troubled by it but thought there's nothing that can be done.

Some people might have thought, well they're these black Africans, they're not really like us, and you know, they are lucky to be here.

If they were in Africa they'd be worse off still some people might have thought that some people might have been disturbed but not been able to see what it is that they could do about it they they might have thought oh this is you know this is disgusting this is you know not something I wouldn't want to have anything to do with, but not knowing whether there's any practical way of opposing it.

You need for the people who are troubled by the practice to know that there are others like themselves equally troubled, and as they gather together, collectively, they can exert their influence.

I mean, debates about the wrongness of slavery, as I say, go all the way back to the founding of the country.

There were abolitionists, and there were people who opposed the compromise that led to the framing documents and institutions that created the United States of America, opposed the countenancing of slavery in that situation.

But it took a while before that could come to a head and produce the crisis which ultimately led to the eradication of slavery.

I would note that slavery is not unique to the United States, it's not unique to the Western hemisphere, that enslavement of people, the trafficking in human chattel is something that 1 sees on a global basis, 1 sees it going all the way back to antiquity.

So we might ask, how is it that people finally came to turn their backs and eradicate the practice?

That might be the thing worth really trying to understand because the practice itself is, you know, there's a wonderful book by the sociologist Orlando Patterson called Slavery and Social Death that was published in 1982, which is a comprehensive history and social analysis of the institution of slavery over 2,500 years, going back to the classical Greek and Roman civilizations.

Finding slavery in Africa amongst Africans, finding slavery in the Middle East, finding slavery in the Far East, finding slavery in South Asia.

The enslavement of people, the practice of taking someone as a captive in war and then instead of killing them, which you could do, making them into your property, was very, very widespread in human culture.

So I mean, I like to make this point sometimes when people are talking about how wrong slavery was, and I agree without any question that the practice was profoundly morally problematic, But I like to make the point that given how wrong it was, think about how impressive was the accomplishment of the eradication of slavery.

That was something, I mean, there were 600,000 dead in the war between the states 1861 to 1865 in a country of 30 million people.

That's a lot of dead people who gave their lives, not to eradicate slavery in every instance, probably most of them were just fighting for, you know, they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces and they fought and they died, but the net effect of their having fought and died was to push along a process that led to the eradication of slavery.

The slaves themselves were largely uneducated and backward in their, of course, what else could they have been?

They were kept in captivity, they were prevented from developing their human potential, and yet after the end of slavery, that population, that 4000000 plus African descended people, became the foundation for what a century later leads to Martin Luther King standing in the Washington Mall and giving that great speech.

And now here we are 150 years down the road, and Barack Obama is president of the United States.

I think we must not lose track of that, but he identified as an African American and was a part of the population that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves.

And we are, we African Americans are, for all practical purposes, fully equal citizens of this great republic.

That has happened within a century and a half, and I don't know that you can find any parallel to that kind of transformation in the status of people, from human chattel to full citizens of the republic.

Anywhere in human history, it's certainly worth celebrating the achievement of the eradication of slavery, I would say.

And it probably started with a few people that inside their mind dared to rebel.

You know, it's interesting to think about how it all started.

How in the state of injustice, the revolution percolates, like where it starts.

You said people that see something is wrong find each other.

It's in the ideas of charismatic individuals that not only know that something is wrong, but are able to tell others about it and be convincing and then together gather and rise up.

It's interesting to make this kind of incredible progress from slavery to where we are today, to live out the ideal of this all men are created equal.

The power of individual, because I don't know what you think about it, but I tend to think that a few small individuals probably originated this.

Because sometimes we think there's injustice in the world, what can I possibly do?

I tend to think 1 person can be the seed of starting to fix the injustice.

1 thinks of course of Frederick Douglass, the massively significant figure who was born in slavery, who stole his freedom, and because he was property, and he decided he was not gonna be property anymore, and he took it unto himself to emancipate himself personally, and who became an educated, a powerfully articulate, massively influential person in the United States and in England, going around, presenting himself as an embodiment of human dignity and commitment to ideals of equality.

And, you know, I mean, he's just 1 person, but there were others

On this topic of equality in the 21st century.

If you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome or the injustice of inequality, at which point does equality of outcome is just, at which point is it unjust?

Sort of looking at our world today and looking at inequality, how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice and some is the way of life?

So what does equality mean when we look at the world today?

I don't think King's speech, I have a dream that 1 day my 4 little children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, requires equality of outcome.

He says his children will be judged by the content of their character.

That is, the judgment will depend upon the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

But it doesn't follow from that that the outcomes, whatever outcomes we consider wealth and economic power, position within the society, representation in the various professions, the various measures of social achievement, doesn't follow from judging by the content of character and not color of skin, that when we look at the end of the day at the social outcomes, that they will be equal across the different groups.

In fact, I think there's a contradiction in the idea that groups will be equal in all the various social outcomes, that they will be equally successful in business, that they will be proportionately represented in the various professions, that they will have the same educational achievement, that the occupational profiles will look the same.

If they are, in fact, distinct groups with their own cultural traditions and practices, with their own ideals and norms, Various immigrant populations, people coming to the United States of America from all corners of the world, the descendants of the African slaves, the Black Americans here today, who are ourselves various with different origins and so on.

The different religious practices and commitments that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever, however we parcel up the total population into the various groups, these groups are themselves different from 1 another.

They have different norms within their own cultural practice.

How would we expect if, in fact, we recognize that the groups are different from 1 another, that in a world that is fair, they would all come out equally represented in every undertaking?

They're not equally represented, And that fact, I'm arguing, is in and of itself insufficient to justify the conclusion that they're not somehow being fairly treated.

Fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes in a world in which the populations in question are themselves different with respect to their culture, their practices, their norms, their traditions, their beliefs, their ideals, and so on.

The fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs, cultural orientations, and ideals will have consequences in terms of their different social outcomes.

So I just think it's a mistake that people are making when they think fairness of treatment implies equality of outcomes.

Is the process by which we're speaking now in the midst of the National Basketball Association's playoffs.

I mean, I'm just, it's a very good team and I'm excited about my Celtics.

I mean, we defeated Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and company, okay, in a playoff series.

We whipped them and we're on our way to, you know, the Eastern Conference Finals And we're on our way to the Eastern Conference finals, and we're on our way to the NBA finals, and if I were a betting man, I'd put down a few bucks that the Boston Celtics, underrated as we are, have a very good chance of winning the NBA Finals.

Okay, so that's the NBA, that's the National Basketball Association.

All I'm saying is, if you take a look at who the star players are in the National Basketball Association, you're gonna find that there's some Eastern Europeans.

You know, there's some really good basketball players coming out of Eastern Europe, you know, and more power to them.

And there are a lot of African Americans.

There are not that many Jews, as far as I know.

But I mean, the NBA is not equally representative of all of the different populations in the United States.

Now, we could go into the reasons why, but I'm just saying the process by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair.

If you can play, you can get on the court.

All they're looking for is people who can play.

I think something like that is true in many different venues.

I expect if you're a really good technical engineer, companies are going to employ you.

And if you can make money, they're going to advance you.

And you will be able to rise to the top of that profession.

I expect that the people who are engaged in financial transactions who are actually making bets on the market, by and large, are the people who are good at that activity.

And if you're good at that activity in this world, in this modern world, you're gonna rise to the top.

I'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination.

Of course there are of many different sorts.

But I'm saying that to expect that there would be, okay, I mean, let's look at who's actually writing code.

Let's look at who's actually trading bonds, let's look at who's actually starting businesses, and so on.

To say that in a fair world, I would expect that if blacks are 10% of the population, they'd be 10% of every 1 of those things, is to ignore the reality that the differences in the culture and practices and norms of the various population groups will lead to differences in their representation amongst people who are outstanding performers in 1 or another activity.

if the difference in culture accounts for the difference in outcomes, or it's the existence of barriers, especially barriers early on in life, of discrimination that are racially based?

So if you think about affirmative action, in which ways is affirmative action empowering, in which way is it limiting for these early development of the different groups, but let's just speak to African Americans.

We should say that you went to some no-name Northwestern University at first, but then you ended up with the great University of MIT.

So that's your, not early, but middle development.

So speaking of the development, the opportunities, the equality of opportunity, how do we know we got that equality right?

We were talking about results, now we're talking about opportunity.

I was taking the position that when King says, I have a dream and he envisions a world where his children will not be barred from the good things in life because of the color of their skin.

We're talking about opportunity, not about results.

But opportunity is not just something that depends upon what the law is and what public policies are.

Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions in which people are raised, the social and economic conditions.

So the child of a poor family that has no resources, it doesn't have the same opportunity as a child of a wealthy family to realize their full human potential.

You asked me how can we tell whether or not a difference in outcomes is a reflection of unequal opportunity, or it's a reflection of differences in culture and interest and practice?

And I don't know that there's a single answer to that question, but I think 1 wants to look at the data.

1 wants to try to measure, you know, as a social scientist, I would say, what you want to do is you want to estimate the significance of various factors for determining the outcome.

If the outcome is how much money does a person make when they work in the labor market, so you look at their wages and you think, well, that depends upon a number of things.

It depends upon how educated they are, what kind of skills they have, what kind of work experience they have, and so on.

And those things are all legitimate factors that might determine how much they end up making in the labor market.

But you also want to perhaps, controlling for those things, see whether or not the fact that they are black or they are Latino or whatever, fact that they are male or that they are female, the fact that they do or do not speak English as their native language, this kind of thing, whether those factors also are implicated in determining how successful they are in the labor market.

And if you find that after you have control for the things that are legitimately determining success and failure in the labor market, like skills and education and experience, having controlled for those things, the fact that a person is black or is a woman or is an immigrant or is of Latino background, also affects their earnings, then you might conclude that to that extent, they're not getting equal opportunity in the labor market, that kind of idea.

But I want to focus a little bit more here on what we mean by opportunity, because it's not just whether employers treat the worker on a fair and even basis, irregardless of the worker's racial or ethnic background.

That's 1 opportunity issue, but that's at the end of the development process.

They are now presenting themselves to the market, trying to find work, and being employed at this or that wage.

What about the developmental opportunity, the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place?

The mother carrying the infant in the womb, she has certain nutritional practices.

She might be smoking or drinking alcohol or something like that.

I'm not saying she is, I'm not saying she isn't.

I'm just saying whether she is, she is gonna affect the development of the fetus, the newborn.

There's a question of the development of their neurological potential.

Verbally, how many words have they heard spoken?

Are they being nurtured in a home environment so as to maximize the possibility of them achieving their human potential?

What about the values and norms of the surrounding human communities in which they're embedded?

Do they encourage the young person to apply themselves in a systematic way to their studies and to their focus on their acquisition of language command and of their educational potential.

So development is not only something that is controlled by the society's practices, it's also something that is influenced by the cultural background of the individual.

Those things vary across groups in a very significant way.

And that too will be a factor determining disparities of outcome.

So when I see outcomes that are different, I see wealth holding that's different, I see educational achievement that's different, I see representation in the professional schools and law school and medical school that's different between groups.

1 question is, are the institutions treating people fairly?

But another question is, do the background in social and cultural influences equip people in the same way?

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Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture | Lex Fridman Podcast #285