Loury describes himself as formerly "a man of the left" who has become much more conservative as a result of the harmful and tendentious public racial discourse promoted by the left over the past decade.
The article is a bit long, but I'd like to highlight some of what Loury says. If more people, both black and white, felt as he does we'd be a lot better off as a society and a country. Here are some representative excerpts:
The “America ain’t so great, and never was” posture, popular on campuses and in liberal newsrooms, [e.g. the 1619 Project] is a sophomoric indulgence for blacks in the twenty-first century. Our birthright citizenship in this great republic is an inheritance of immense value. Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness.Very wise, it seems to me. First Things may allow non-subscribers a few free articles, so try the link to see if you can read the whole thing.
Those who make their living by focusing on our differences believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with America. They’re wrong. We should resist their divisive rhetoric. It is easy to overstate the racial problems facing our country, and to understate what we’ve achieved.
My conservative prescription for the problem of persistent racial inequality in the twenty-first century is as follows. First, fortify the mediating institutions—families, churches, civil associations—through which citizens, especially the most vulnerable, develop the competencies to enjoy the fruits of liberty that our constitutional framework can deliver. Second, the state can supplement, but it cannot substitute for, those mediating institutions. There are times when the state needs to step in; but solutions to problems in our communities can and should come from those communities.
Anti-racism activists on the left claim that “white supremacy,” “implicit bias,” and old-fashioned “anti-black racism” are sufficient to account for black disadvantage. Those who make such arguments are daring you to disagree with them. If you do not attribute pathological behavior to systemic injustice, you must be a “racist,” one who thinks that black people are intrinsically inferior.
What are these folks saying when they declare that “mass incarceration” is “racism”—that the high number of blacks in American prisons is evidence of racial antipathy? To respond, “No. It’s mainly a sign of antisocial behavior by criminals who happen to be black,” is to risk “cancellation” as a moral reprobate. This is so even if the speaker is black.
Common sense and much evidence suggest that those in prison are mainly those who have hurt somebody, stolen something, or otherwise violated the basic behavioral norms that make civil society possible. ... Moreover, those who bear the cost of such pathology are almost exclusively other blacks. An ideology that ascribes this violent behavior to a racist conspiracy against black people is simply not credible.
Academic skills are acquired through effort; no one is born with them. So why are some youngsters acquiring them and others not? ....The simple answer, “Racism,” is laughable—as if such disparities had nothing to do with behavior, cultural patterns, what peer groups value, how people spend their time, or what they identify as being critical to their self-respect. Anyone who actually believes such nonsense is a fool.
Another unspeakable truth: We need to put the police killings of black Americans into perspective. There are about a thousand fatal shootings of people by the police in the United States each year .... Roughly three hundred (about one-fourth) of those killed are African Americans, while blacks represent about 13 percent of the American population. Black people are overrepresented among these fatalities, though they still make up far less than a majority. (Twice as many whites as blacks are killed by police in this country every year. You wouldn’t know that from the activists’ rhetoric.)
There were roughly 20,000 homicides in the United States last year; nearly half of them involved black perpetrators. The vast majority of these perpetrators took other blacks as victims. For every black person killed by the police, more than twenty-five others meet their ends because of homicides committed by other blacks. We must hold the police accountable for the way they exercise their power over citizens. But it is very easy to overstate the significance and extent of the abuses, as Black Lives Matter activists have done.
Let me speak plainly: The idea that I, as a black person, dare not leave my house for fear that the police will round me up, gun me down, or bludgeon me to death because of my race is ridiculous.
Police killings are regrettable regardless of the race of the people involved. To emphasize race—an officer’s whiteness, a victim’s blackness—is to presume that the officer acted as he did because the young man was black. This assumption is seldom tested against the facts. Moreover, once we begin to racialize these events, we may not be able to limit the racialization to cases of white police officers killing black citizens. We may find that cases of black criminals killing unarmed white victims are viewed through a racial lens, as well. Since there are a great many such cases, this is a development no thoughtful person should welcome.
An ideology dominated by the terms “white guilt,” “white fragility,” and “white privilege” cannot exist except also to give birth to a “white-pride” backlash, even if the latter is seldom expressed overtly—its expression being politically incorrect.
If I were one of these “white oppressors”—constantly bludgeoned about the evils of colonialism, urged to tear down statues of “dead white men,” commanded to apologize for what my white forebears did to “peoples of color” in years past, ordered to settle my historical indebtedness by means of racial reparations—I might well ask myself: On what foundation does human civilization in the twenty-first century stand? I might enumerate the works of philosophy, mathematics, and science that ushered in the Enlightenment, that allowed modern medicine to exist, that gave us the beginnings of what we know about the origins of the species and the universe. I might tick off the great artistic achievements of European culture: the books, the paintings, the symphonies. And then, were I particularly agitated, I might ask these “people of color,” who think they can bully me into a state of guilt-ridden self-loathing: “Where is ‘your’ civilization?”
The only way to address the legacy of historical racism without setting off a reactionary racial chauvinism is to march, even if fitfully and by degrees, toward a world in which no person’s worth is contingent upon racial inheritance—a world in which racial identity loses significance, as we learn how to “unlearn race,” as Thomas Chatterton Williams puts it. By contrast, those who promote anti-whiteness (as Black Lives Matter activists do) will reap what they sow, in a backlash of pro-whiteness.
The folks who think they can insist on spelling “Black” with a capital “B” while keeping “white” in the lower case are likely in for a rude awakening.
Is this a good country, one affording opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of American citizenship? Or is it a venal, immoral, and rapacious bandit-society of plundering racists, founded in genocide and slavery, propelled by capitalist greed and anti-black antipathy? The evidence overwhelmingly favors the former.
On our shores, we have witnessed since the end of the Civil War the greatest transformation in the status of an enserfed people that is to be found anywhere in world history. Some 46 million strong, we black Americans have become by far the richest and most powerful large population of African descent on this planet. The question, then, is one of narrative. Will we blacks regard the United States as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or will we see our nation for what it has become over the last three centuries: the greatest force for human liberty on the planet?
Emancipation, the freeing of slaves en masse as the result of a movement for abolition—that was a new idea. It was a Western idea, brought to fruition in our own United States of America. It would not have been possible without the philosophical insights and moral commitments cultivated in the Enlightenment—ideas about the essential dignity of human persons and about what legitimates a government’s exercise of power over its people. Slavery was a holocaust, out of which emerged something that advanced the morality and the dignity of humankind: emancipation.
The abolition of slavery and the incorporation of African-descended people into the body politic of the United States of America were monumental, unprecedented achievements for human freedom. Look at what has happened in the last seventy-five years. A huge black middle class has developed. There are black billionaires. The influence of black people on American culture is vast and has global resonance. Black Americans are rich and powerful, comparatively speaking.
[We must reject] the notion that the American Dream doesn’t apply to blacks. It most certainly and emphatically applies. To deny this is to tell our children a lie, a lie that robs black people of agency and self-determination. It is a patronizing lie that betrays a profound lack of faith in the capacities of black Americans to rise to the challenges, face the responsibilities, and bear the burdens of freedom.
