The Life of a Black Conservative w/Glenn Loury

Summary

Conversations With Coleman: The Life of a Black Conservative with Glenn Lowry

Released on August 9, 2024

In this enlightening episode of "Conversations With Coleman," host Coleman Hughes engages in a profound dialogue with Glenn Lowry, an accomplished economist at Brown University, podcaster, and author of the memoir Late Confessions of a Black Conservative. The conversation delves into Lowry’s personal journey, the evolution of the South Side of Chicago, the fragmentation of the Black family structure, and the intellectual influences that shaped his conservative stance. Below is a detailed summary capturing the essence of their discussion.

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1. Introduction to Glenn Lowry and His Memoir

Coleman Hughes opens the conversation by introducing Glenn Lowry, highlighting his role as an influential intellectual and the author of Late Confessions of a Black Conservative. He emphasizes the memoir's compelling nature by comparing it to other notable works, urging listeners to delve into Lowry's personal narrative.

Coleman Hughes [02:03]: "I cannot advise enough, even for people that are highly familiar with you, your life and your work, to go out and actually do yourself a favor of just getting the book read the whole thing."

2. Reflecting on Personal History and Writing a Memoir

Lowry discusses the emotional and introspective process of writing his memoir, which involved revisiting both triumphant and tumultuous moments of his life. He shares how recording conversations about his past helped him articulate his experiences.

Glenn Lowry [03:34]: "There were layers to it. I discovered things about myself. I exposed things to myself, about myself in going through the process."

3. The South Side of Chicago: Past and Present

The conversation shifts to Lowry’s upbringing on the South Side of Chicago during the 1950s and 60s, contrasting it with its contemporary reputation. Lowry paints a picture of a more stable and community-oriented environment in his youth, starkly different from the prevalent image of urban decay often associated with the area today.

Glenn Lowry [11:00]: "I slept on the couch, but I never heard gunshots. There were no drug vials or paraphernalia in the gutter."

4. The Unraveling of the Black Family: Historical Context

Lowry and Hughes explore the significant decline in two-parent households within the Black community over the past century. Lowry references historical data and personal anecdotes to argue that this fragmentation has deep cultural roots rather than being solely a product of contemporary challenges.

Glenn Lowry [15:20]: "I don't want to give the secrets of my book away for free... early signs of the kind of collapse of traditional living patterns that we've witnessed in a large part of black America."

5. Comparing Societal Changes: Race and Class

The discussion broadens to include comparisons between Black and White American societies, particularly regarding the resilience of family structures amidst cultural shifts. Lowry suggests that economic and social capital play crucial roles in how different communities navigate societal changes.

Glenn Lowry [27:12]: "If cultural elites... don't think much about marriage... it might be a lot harder for somebody who's living in a dying Midwestern town... to remedy the consequences of those behaviors."

6. Intellectual Influences: Thomas Sowell and Economic Thought

Lowry reflects on the impact of economist Thomas Sowell on his thinking. Initially skeptical due to prevailing academic attitudes, Lowry grew to deeply respect Sowell’s work on race, culture, and economic policies, acknowledging his own intellectual evolution.

Glenn Lowry [31:18]: "Thomas Sowell has continued to produce books, and he is a towering figure... his great book, Knowledge and Decisions, shows him to be a mind for the ages."

7. Personal Struggles with Addiction

Lowry candidly shares his battle with addiction in the late 1980s, detailing the personal and professional toll it took. He emphasizes the importance of perseverance and seeking support for those struggling with similar challenges.

Glenn Lowry [45:09]: "What you can say to somebody who might be confronting this awful challenge? Get help. Don't stop trying."

8. Crack vs. Powdered Cocaine: Policy and Perceptions

The duo discusses the notorious disparities in punishment between crack and powder cocaine. Lowry explains the physiological differences in drug consumption methods and the resultant societal impacts, arguing that differential policies, while discriminatory, may be justified based on the distinct social consequences.

Glenn Lowry [49:42]: "If you smoke it, it gets to the brain in a much more concentrated form... But it's a kind of discrimination, but it's justifiable discrimination."

9. Historical Debate: Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. Du Bois

Lowry articulates the foundational ideological split between Booker T. Washington's skills-first, self-improvement approach and W.E.B. Du Bois's rights-first, political activism stance. He examines how these philosophies have influenced modern Black liberal and conservative thought, advocating for a balance between self-development and advocacy for equal rights.

Glenn Lowry [54:22]: "Du Bois tradition... petitioning and advocacy for equal rights was an essential, fundamentally important project. But now... we need to focus on developing our capacities, compete effectively in the modern world."

10. Networking with Other Intellectuals: The Black Conservative Trench

Lowry shares insights into his connections with other Black intellectuals, including Thomas Sowell and John McWhorter. He highlights the challenges of forming cohesive groups among like-minded thinkers who often operate independently, yet find common ground in their iconoclastic approaches.

Glenn Lowry [64:55]: "I feel a certain fellowship with this collection of people... We're informally informed, linked together somehow."

11. Conclusion

Coleman Hughes wraps up the interview by expressing gratitude for Lowry's participation and reiterating the value of his memoir. The conversation underscores the importance of candid discussions about race, culture, and personal growth within the Black community.

Coleman Hughes [70:40]: "Glenn Lowry, thank you so much for doing my show."

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Notable Quotes:

• Glenn Lowry [03:34]: "The experience of trying to describe why I was so admiring of my father... was a powerfully galvanizing experience."

• Glenn Lowry [15:20]: "The root of the problem is cultural. The collapse of internal cohesion... how children get socialized."

• Glenn Lowry [27:12]: "This is Charles Murray's argument in his book Coming Apart... it's about class."

• Glenn Lowry [31:18]: "Thomas Sowell is a towering figure... his work on race and economics is invaluable."

• Glenn Lowry [49:42]: "Crack is a much more powerful thing going right to the brain... two different forms have different social consequences."

• Glenn Lowry [54:22]: "Du Bois tradition... petitioning and advocacy for equal rights was essential. But now, developing our capacities is more important."

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a deep dive into Glenn Lowry's life, beliefs, and the socio-economic dynamics affecting the Black community in America. Through personal anecdotes and intellectual discourse, Lowry provides a nuanced perspective on race, family, and resilience, challenging listeners to rethink commonly held narratives. For those seeking a thoughtful exploration of Black conservatism and cultural transformation, this conversation is both insightful and inspiring.

Transcript

[Glenn Lowry]

Sam.

[Coleman Hughes]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you live in Australia, I'm doing two live events with Josh Zepps at the end of August. The first one is in Sydney on August 25, and the second is in Melbourne on August 28. So if you live in Australia or you happen to be visiting, please grab a ticket at the links in the description. They're selling fast. Once again, that's August 25th in Sydney and August 28th in Melbourne. Okay, My guest today is Glenn Lowry. Glenn Lowry, as most of you will know, is one of my intellectual heroes, and, along with John McWhorter, one of the people indirectly responsible for my existence as a public intellectual. He is an economist at Brown University and a podcaster at the Glenn Show. His recently published memoir is called Late Confessions of a Black Conservative. In the episode, Glenn reflects on his early days growing up on the south side of Chicago. We talk about how the south side has changed since he was a kid. We talk about the causes and consequences of the unraveling of the black family throughout the 20th century. We talk about the foundational debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois and how their opposing philosophies have fared. With hindsight, Glenn talks about the influence of Thomas Sowell in his life and much more. So without further ado, Glenn Lowry. Okay, Glenn Lowry, thanks so much for doing my show.

[Glenn Lowry]

Good to be here, Coleman.

[Coleman Hughes]

You are someone who needs no introduction on this podcast, though, as a formality, I will.

[Glenn Lowry]

I'll.

[Coleman Hughes]

I'll record one later. But the occasion of this particular conversation is. Is your book, your memoir, Late Admissions Confessions of a Black Conservative by Glenn Cartman Lowry. It's an incredible book. I often feel that memoirs are much more compelling to read for me than books of argumentation. In particular, when someone has had a life that really defies. Defies expectations. You know, I felt this way reading Thomas Sowell's memoir. I felt this way reading Christopher Hitchens memoir. And I felt that way reading your memoir. And I cannot advise enough, even for people that are highly familiar with you, your life and your work, to go out and actually do yourself a favor of just getting the book read the whole thing. And so first, I want to just ask you what it was like for you as a person to actually reflect and try to recall even all the events of your life. What was the experience like of going back and remembering these scenes from early childhood, from adolescence, and so forth.

[Glenn Lowry]

It was very powerful. I had a series of conversations that I recorded in which I basically was being interviewed about my Life. I actually used those conversations in order to finally get words down on paper. But the experience, the experience of remembering my mother and all her glory. The experience of trying to describe why I was so admiring of my father, father as a disciplined man, as a man who had control. The reliving of my time in a mental hospital, being treated as an inpatient for drug addiction, or the humiliating embarrassment of being exposed as, you know, philandering, you know, keeping a mistress, you know, being accused of assaulting her. I mean, I know this is a lot to just be pouring out to your audience at one time, but you asked me what was it like to relive and going into my interior thoughts, you know, what was I thinking? What was I feeling? It was a powerfully galvanizing experience. There were layers to it. I discovered things about myself. I exposed things to myself, about myself in going through the process. It was a long time coming as well. I mean, it was. You know, I didn't sit down and just write this narrative in one gulp. I was on leave from Brown 201516 at the center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford as a fellow. And this book was my project, but it somehow didn't really come together for me. But, you know, I created drafts and sketches and notes and, you know, various theoretical flights of fancy, but I didn't actually have a book. So I've been. I've been at this for a while.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. You know, I'm curious. You know, there are so many moments in your life story that were clearly painful to live because they're painful to read. You know, it's painful to imagine at some of your lowest, low moments where, you know, as you mentioned, you're, you know, you're being discovered by your wife as having fathered a child by another woman. You know, you're answering for your drug addiction, you know, all along, this really inspiring story of, you know, starting out. Your first, like, real decent job was at a factory, really working basically a menial job that many people could do, in theory at least, to rising to the highest heights of prestige that are on offer in American society. So. And yet it's sort of punctuated with all of these moments of personal points of shame, in a way. I'm curious, like, at these points in your life, these low points, did it. Did it ever occur to you that you were living a life interesting enough to. Or that one day your life would be so interesting so as to be able to write a memoir and have tons of people interested in reading it?

[Glenn Lowry]

Now, as things were Developing. No, I didn't have that degree of distance from myself and kind of objectivity. I mean, the way you put it is apt. I was working in a factory, I was married, I had two children, and I was attending a community college before I got discovered by one of my professors there and sent out to Northwestern University. They took me in as an inner city scholarship kid and it was like night and day transformation for me intellectually and personally to discover. I was really good at math, I liked reading thick and hard to understand books, that I could express myself with precision and eloquence and that I, you know, in a modern library in a, a great university, could spend months just wandering in the stacks pulling stuff down and exposing myself to this or that great idea or whatever. And this was like a miraculous transformation for me. And I go from a community college student in 1970 with a wife and two kids to a PhD in economics from MIT in 1976 to a full professor at Harvard in 1982. In a little more than a decade I had, I had made that, that, that kind of a move. And no, I wasn't self aware enough to be thinking about myself. Man, that would make for a pretty good cinema script or something like that. I mean, no, in retrospect, you know, when I finally did get the idea that I'm going to write a book about my own life and start taking it seriously, and I would say that was 10, 12 years ago, I thought I had good material to work with. I thought it's a, you know, it's a rich tableau, but at the time, not so much.

[Coleman Hughes]

So, you know, you grew up on the south side of Chicago? I was, I was born in the mid-90s and by the time I was of age to pay attention, even passingly to the news or, you know, read commentary, that it became clear to me very quickly that the south side of Chicago was a kind of code word for everything that's fucked up about inner city, black inner cities in particular. It's a, it's a kind of shorthand for talking about every inner city in, in the country, because it is considered the quintessential example. It's the first place people list when they talk about the crime and the inner city problem, for example, south side of Chicago. And everyone knows what you mean by it. I'm curious, when you were growing up in the south side of Chicago in a very different era, really in the 60s and a little a little earlier, what was it like and how do you account for, you know, any transformation between the south side of Chicago that you knew as a kid, and the south side of Chicago that became the watchword for inner city, you know, degeneration.

[Glenn Lowry]

Yeah, that's a good thing to talk about because I know what you mean when you say the south side of Chicago is iconic in exemplifying the urban failure, black urban pathology, crime, carjackings, homicide, gangs and inner city decay. You say you were born in the 90s, and I think it probably already had advanced very much in that direction by then. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and that's a long time ago. And it was different. I mean, you had good neighborhoods and you had bad neighborhoods on the south side, you know, and good neighborhoods were quite okay. I mean, the street that I grew up on, in my mother's sister's house, that we lived upstairs in the back as a kid, slept on the living room couch. I didn't have a bed. It was a two bedroom apartment. My sister and I were too old to share a bedroom. She had the bedroom, I had the front room closet and the couch. And this was a small apartment upstairs in the back of my Auntie Lois's house, which was a grand house. They had carved out a little apartment upstairs, a kind of au pair suite upstairs in the back, and made a two bedroom apartment out of it. But you know, I slept on the couch, but I never heard gunshots. There were no drug vials or paraphernalia in the gutter. You could leave your bicycle on the lawn in the backyard and nobody would climb over the fence and take it and ride away with it. There were fruit trees. People kept their lawns nice on this street. The street had bungalows, little small single family detached houses and low intensity apartment buildings. 2 flats, 3 flats. There might be a 6 flat apartment building with a courtyard where 3 apartments on either side. That's as tenement like as it got in that neighborhood. Now you could go a mile to the west from Park Manor, the community that I lived in when I was a kid, across the Dan Ryan Expressway, an interstate divided limited access highway to another neighborhood still on the south side. And the, the architecture was different, the nature of life on the streets was different. The people were different. It was not a good neighborhood. There was more crime. There were hookers on the street. There was open drinking at the Honky Tonk Tavern, people spilling out onto the sidewalk with brown paper bags. There was louder music. It was rougher still. The south side. I have the impression my son still lives in Chicago on the south side. My son Alden. That most of the south side is like those bad neighborhoods where when I was coming up in the 1950s and 60s and worse. So I watched the TV show the Shy, you know, the Paramount series, and set in Chicago, I'm behind. I think the show was filmed in the late teens, you know, 2017, 18, 19 or whatever. But it's set in Chicago and on the south side. And I recognize the neighborhoods, the street signs, the elevated train tracks, the architecture that. What the buildings look like, but I don't recognize the society. I mean, it's a completely different world.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. This is a topic I've been interested in because of my interest in the issue of, you know, racial inequality. There is this literature on why it is the case that the black family broadly was, quote, unquote, intact, meaning most Black kids before 1950, 1940, were growing up in two parent households, which was very surprising to me when I first read it. I actually didn't believe it.

[Glenn Lowry]

Wow.

[Coleman Hughes]

Because it's. It's such a ubiquitous phenomenon my whole life that 60, 70% of black kids grow up in out of wedlock homes, it was difficult for me to imagine a reality in which that number was closer to 10 or 20%. As it is, you're born into the world. You assume things have always been the way that they are. So to read Herbert Gutman's book meticulously detailing the fact you look at black families right after the Civil war, you have 80%, you know, 80% of kids are in two parent households, not so far off from the number among. Among white Americans for something like 80 years. And the data actually looks pretty convincing.

[Glenn Lowry]

Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

It's like. And then you see, you know, I think I saw a video of a random street corner in Harlem in like 1920 or something, and every single black person walking on the street is like, actually just dressed like the Hollywood recreation of movies from that era. Like, everyone is dressed nicely. And having lived for four years in Harlem, that's like, that's impossible. I can see how a Hollywood producer would create that set because it's, oh, you know, people dress like this. But then to actually see video of it and to think that people actually like everyone dressed well to leave the house is really amazing to contemplate the cultural difference between that era in black America and today. On the other hand, I've also had this thought of what if there were similar issues of, you know, what if on paper people were married, but behind the scenes, there was all kinds of chaos as well. And the chaos was just not the Kind of chaos. It's easy to see in census figures. Right. And so maybe not as much is different than would meet the eye. I'm curious what you have to say about that issue, having lived kind of long enough to see different versions of black America.

[Glenn Lowry]

Yeah. So like I said, I came along in the 50s and 60s. It was a big deal in 1965 when Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published that infamous and well discussed report, the Negro Family the Case for National Action, in which he was alarmed to note that 20, 25% of kids born to a black woman were born to a woman without a husband. And based upon his own, that is Moynihan, the late Senator Moynihan, then a bureaucrat working in the labor department under President Johnson, producing a report that he thought was going to be for internal eyes only, but it ended up getting leaked and became cause celeb and a object of ridicule and denunciation because he talked candidly about what was going on in the black family. But he was 20, 25% is what he was looking at. And he was willing to conclude on the basis of that this is what made this thing so explosive that Johnson, Lyndon Johnson's great society, war on poverty, anti discriminating, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights act, the hope that the Negro, quote, unquote, would become free of full citizen, that that whole project was jeopardized. It wasn't clear that you could achieve the objectives of integrating the, the Negro, quote unquote, into the body politics, economic, if you didn't somehow address the family. He was willing to talk about putting on extra shifts at the post office so you would employ more Negro men. Again, quote, because at that time the idea that a man would be a more attractive partner if he had a good paying job and that that might help to heal whatever the breach was between men and women that was producing this alarming 25%. Okay. And as you know, looking today, you're talking 70%, 75%. And the best that people can say about it is, well, nuclear family is not the only way of raising kids. And you know, don't be a respectability politics prude, cultural argument itself. Is it respectable in our time? I mean, if I were to say this is the root of the problem and that to me that's a defensible sociological position. Sociological, historical position. The root of the problem is cultural. The collapse of internal cohesion, how children get socialized, how men and women deal with other reverence for tradition, concern for the opinion, the decent Opinion of your fellows. Dignity, These kind of things, I think they, or the lack thereof are the root of the problem. But to argue in that fashion in our time is to be laughed out of court. No one will take you seriously. They'll call you a. A Christian if you happen to have any kind of religious sensibility, a prude. You're not. With the most fashionable, latest postmodern abandonment of traditional institution. You think that has anything to do with the race problem? The propaganda of Black Lives Matter turns its complete back on the things that I'm affirming here. So I'm sorry to get exercised, but I think I've actually lost track of what your original question was.

[Coleman Hughes]

No, you're answering it obliquely. It's. What is your vantage point on the. The unraveling of. Of black family statistics over the past hundred years? Is it the crux of the issue? Is it re. Is it. Is it really the case that in 1920 the societies Gutman is looking at in his book are much health is a much healthier version of black America that we have lost? Or is it that those statistics weren't capturing all of the. The chaos. Chaos that was present at the time?

[Glenn Lowry]

I think it's the former, that something was lost, though I think it's a prudent cautionary reflex that you exhibit to say, don't take things at face value. Just because the form was a certain thing doesn't mean the substance was a certain thing. And I think the quote unquote collapse in the form that we've seen since 1950 might to a certain degree betray something that was already there, but that only with the promptings of the incentives from Great Society welfare programs or the liberation of women and the complete sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s, or the kind of sexual. I guess I'll be repeating myself, that it set loose something that was already there waiting to be set loose within black culture that then manifested itself. Everything wasn't peaches and cream. My own story kind of says that. I mean, here advocating traditional family and whatnot. And yet in my life, in my background, there was plenty of behavior and tendencies and orientations and so on, patterns that were contrary to that. I don't want to give the secrets of my book away. Confessions of a Black Conservative for free. I want people to actually read the book and be prompted to read it by being teased here with my oblique reference to early signs of the kind of collapse of traditional living patterns that we've witnessed in a large part of black America. I think those signs were there. So I think you're right to be alert to that, but I think there was something more wholesome. There's a book that I love by a guy called Scott Davis. The book is called the World of Patience Groans. G R O M E S she was a daughter of a landowning African American family in the Virginia Hill country in the late 19th century. And she grows up a princess, playing the piano, ballet lessons or whatever. She's a respectable Negro woman. And she marries and she moves to Richmond, Virginia, and she has children and the children grow up and the neighborhood is respectable. I keep using that word, but I mean, that was really an important part of the ethos. I mean, the reason that people are dressed so well on the streets of Harlem in those old clips that you're looking at is they had a sense of pride and they were. And a questing for dignity and respectability. But in any case, the World of Patience Groans chronicles the collapse of the Richmond, Virginia neighborhood. That this woman who comes to be an old woman, has children, has grandchildren living in exactly the same house. And it was a house that her husband built practically with his own hands, her husband who was working on the railroad as a porter. It was a very high quality job. This was a very classy family. But everything kind of collapses around them. So by the time you get to the 1950s, it's a completely different world. The world of patience grows is gone. That's just an anecdote. It's one case. But I. I think something was lost that. That was what you asked me. And yes, I. I think something was lost.

[Coleman Hughes]

So what. I mean, I. One model of what happened is.

[Glenn Lowry]

If.

[Coleman Hughes]

You consider black America and white America as two quasi separate societies that are living in close concert, sometimes you can model black America at the time as a society that was closer to chaos than white America was. In other words, when you pull the string, black American society was closer to unraveling than white American society at the time would have been. And so what you can see superficially as two pretty stable societies. One can be more vulnerable to the intervention of cultural, I don't know what you want to call it, libertine kind of philosophy, something a loosening of norms around sexuality and marriage and all of that. And so you get. You can get in the 60s and 70s, a dramatically different unraveling, where black America, the marriage rate simply goes from like, you know, 80% to like, you know, 30%. And you see a far more modest decline among white Americans and much less of the subsequent crime problems. With crime and addiction and so forth. I mean, does that model seem like it might be basically correct?

[Glenn Lowry]

I think that's clever. I think it is plausible. It rings true to me. In fact, the idea is you have common shocks, common external effects, like the presence of welfare programs where in the early days the woman was discouraged from having a stable relationship with the man in order to be eligible to get the support for her child. Moreover, before the child comes along, the woman could rely on the fact that even if the man doesn't come through and I'm saddled with the child, I know that the cost of that, to me will be underwritten to a certain degree by the public provision. That's a shock. The advent of that set of social policies through the 1950s, 60s and 70s is common to everybody. But the effects of that by demographic, by racial demographic, racial, class, demographic might be really very different. And the common shock could lead to the development of very different patterns of behavior within these subpopulations. I think that's more than plausible. I think there's a good case for it. I would emphasize not only the racial dimension of that. I would say that if cultural elites who are trendy and coastal and postmodern in their sensibility, they don't think much about marriage. They're libertines as far as sex and drugs and that kind of thing is concerned. They have whatever their most recent enthusiasms might be that are whatever they are. And they get projected because they have the megaphone. They control what's on the TV and the movie screens. The sensible responsibility of the elite journalists. The kind of tenor of the culture is set by them. And they do drugs when they're young. They have a lot of unprotected sex and a lot of come and go relationships. And they're free, they're liberated. That might cause them some problems early in life. But those are problems, perhaps, from which they and their children can recover. It might be a lot harder for somebody who's living in a dying Midwestern town Where the factory has closed or the mine is no longer functional. The whatever, whatever. Those same orientations might produce consequences in the lives of those people from which they don't recover. They don't have the human and social capital resources. They don't have the financial resources. They don't have the dexterity and the wherewithal to be able to take on the consequences of those behaviors and then remedy them. Then you get a bigger hit, a bigger negative hit at the bottom end. So I just modify your suggested model by saying I think it doesn't only apply to race. Right. I mean, this is. Isn't it Charles Murray's argument in that book Coming Apart. Isn't it Robert Putnam's argument in his book Our Kids? Putnam, the political scientist at Harvard, Murray, the famous author of the Bell Curve, who's a conservative social critic. But in his book Coming Apart, he's saying it's not about race at all, that book. It's about class. And it's about the very different lives lived by people in American society. White people, in his case, who are located in different positions in the class structure in terms of marriage, longevity, education, drug addiction, and other kinds of social pathology. I think in a way, it's also Robert Putnam's argument in Our Kids that the disparity in the ability to cope with the vicissitudes of the modern social world across different class locations in American society is a very important feature of. Of our. Of our time.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, I think that that rings true to me that, you know, if you grow up middle or upper middle class, you. You have much more leeway to experiment with drugs, with sex, with all of these kinds of. All of these phenomena without really paying lifelong consequences for doing so. I mean, I think of my own. My own parents, for instance. My dad grew up middle class, in a very stable neighborhood. My mom grew up in the South Bronx, which to our earlier point also, at a certain point, I think was before I was born, but was kind of like code was talked about very much how the south side of Chicago is talked about today, with good reason. And they had very different attitudes towards us growing up. So if me or one of my siblings was drinking in high school or smoking a little weed in high school, my mom would absolutely freak out. Because to her, drugs equaled the crackheads she grew up around, many of whom ended up dead or in prison. Whereas my dad, having grown up in a suburban location, had a certain knowledge that high school kids do these things and it's not the end of the world, actually. And in a way, they're both right. Because my mom had the proper attitude for someone that wanted to get out of the South Bronx successfully was you basically have to be a Nazi about avoiding every temptation. Right? And my dad had the proper attitude of being a relaxed but also ambitious suburban kid where you can experiment a little bit. And probably worst case scenario, okay, you'll get sent to the police station and you'll be there for an hour. But probably your dad knows someone who knows someone who's gonna talk to the cop and it's gonna be okay. So that definitely rings true to me. Let's talk about another aspect of your story I found interesting is that when you got to Northwestern, you were recommended as part of this program for sending bright inner city kids to really good schools out of your community college. And you found when you got there, the kind of black kids that were at Northwestern, these were black kids that came from more privilege than you did. They were not, you know, they were not really from mostly the working class side of Chicago that, that you knew. And, and they had a kind of entitlement and sense. Sense. They lacked a sense of wonder that you had with Northwestern with reading. You speak of reading Nietzsche and really, you know, breathing it in and, and loving every moment of it. And they sort of had this attitude, this blase attitude that it, you know, it wasn't such a big deal. So can you talk a little bit about what it was like, you know, what that experience did, did to you?

[Glenn Lowry]

Yeah. And in retrospect, you know, I might have had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. I might have been jealous of these kids. I was a little older, I was a transfer student. I had dropped out of college my first time through my girlfriend got pregnant, got pregnant again. We married, we had two kids now, and I'm working a full time job. We've discussed this. I'm at the community college and Professor Andres, the wonderful calculus teacher who was an alumnus of Northwestern, flagged me as a worthy recipient of one of their scholarships for inner city kids to come out to Northwestern. I end up at Northwestern. I'm on campus. I'm showing up at 8:30 in the morning with jeans, boots, flannel, with a pocket protector with the pin and whatnot and kind of a lunch pail, getting off of the public transit or walking a half mile from where I had to park my car because there's no parking right near the center of campus in order to get to my class on time. These kids and the kids I'm talking about are the black kids who are my peers. Maybe they're two or three years younger than me or four years younger than me, but they're my peers are rolling out of their dorm room or their frat house bed, you know, and kind of coming to class in their pajamas practically. And you know, on the weekend their dad is coming with a bins to pick them up and they're going, you know, wherever they're going. And they're carefree. They're mostly upper middle class. I mean, there were another Kids, some kids like, you know, from Chicago and whatnot, like me. But most of the black kids were. Their parents were doctors and lawyers and teachers and whatnot. And I chose in my memoir to highlight some dimensions of my contestation with them. And I'm sure they might have been oblivious to the contestation. It might have been a contestation going on largely within my own imagination. Yeah, I came there full of wonder. I came there discovering something about myself which was I had gifts and talents for certain kinds of intellectual work. And there was a vast unexplored territory for me in the political theory and history and literature, in politics and economics, in mathematics, which was my major. I was in awe of the place. And I was estranged from my co racialist on class grounds. And there was this thing that was going on. I mean everybody was a radical. Everybody, you know, it's black power. It was anti war. It was the early, early stirrings of identity politics. Ethnic studies was then a revolutionary. Demand, we demand a black center. We demand. We demand. We demand. I was going home to an apartment with a wife and kids in it. I was going to a job 40 hours a week while I was doing this. So maybe I didn't have the luxury of their politics. Maybe I didn't have the idealism of it. Maybe it was tempered by the daily grinding encounters that I had to endure with reality. I had a lot of sympathy for the attitude of the union member, mostly white ethnic working class people in the factory where I was a clerk. But I encountered these guys daily. They weren't Trump voters, although they might be Trump voters today if they were around today. They weren't what I'm saying is ideological conservatives, but they didn't like the privileged, entitled faux serious politics radicalism of the campus culture of that time. And neither did I. The black kids were playing Bidwiths in the student center. They were lounging on the beach over by Lake Michigan. They were blase. And when you put on top of that this kind of contempt for western culture, which I thought was like a wondrous thing that I was discovering, this kind of smugness about reading books by dead white men, which I thought was infantile. Seriously, I thought it was so anti intellectual as to be beneath contempt. Yeah, I used Nietzsche as an example, but there was a ton of stuff like that for me. I was doing real mathematics, I was doing real mathematical logic. I knew who Kurt Godel was when I was at Northwestern University in my senior year and taking a math logic course. The incompleteness theorem and whatnot. These were all new things for me. And I, I wanted to share that enthusiasm. I wanted to share it with some of my co racialists and I found myself frustrated time and again when I attempted to do so. But again, I did have a massive chip on my shoulder.

[Coleman Hughes]

It's interesting. I mean, your life and my life are so different in a million different ways. But I had a similar attitude when I was at Columbia in a couple different ways. One was that when it came to the other black kids on campus that would. I would read the newspaper and they would say they're suffering white supremacy. Every day on campus they would talk about the legacy of slavery, African American experience and all this stuff. There was a part of me that wanted to tell them, first of all, most of you are African immigrants. Your parents are Ghanaian and Nigerian. I can tell from your last name, like you may think that maybe you can fool like the white kids that you're somehow steeped in the African American experience and you know about the legacy of slavery firsthand or whatever, but you don't. You have an immigrant experience. Why not just be honest and speak to that? Because that's a very interesting and beautiful thing too. Whereas I, at least, you know, on my father's side, feel I do know something about the African American experience. I, you know, grew up playing black music, having lots of black friends, and at least as a comparative point, I felt that I felt no sense of insecurity vis a vis the kids writing in the newspaper about white supremacy and the black experience. I felt. And I also felt at some level, I know the private school you went to was just as white as the one I went to. So let's actually be honest here about what our particular experiences of privilege have been. Rather than perform, essentially perform a popular kind of performance for the white kids around us. And then on the, you know, on my Hispanic side, I felt that I grew up, you know, between the ages of 0 and 12, spending a lot of time with my Puerto Rican family in the Bronx. My parents would drop me off there sometimes for, you know, when they needed to do whatever it was that they were doing. And my grandma didn't speak English and I had to sit there with her all day and, you know, be with her and be with all the other Puerto Rican people from the neighborhood coming in and out of her house. She would cook for everybody, whatever. I wasn't there all the time, but I was there enough to feel like I had pretty good connection intuitively to at least Puerto Rican Bronx, Nuyorican culture. Let's call it. And so when I felt the Hispanic kids at Colombia were doing this Latinx thing, right?

[Glenn Lowry]

This.

[Coleman Hughes]

This kind of. This radical politics that I knew they would be made fun of if they went home, I knew that this was not a performance for fellow Hispanics. It was a performance that was only popular in the context of a white, progressive, upper class, Ivy League environment. So I felt like, can we be honest about that? Can we be honest about that's what this is. It's a performance of authenticity that would not do well, that would get booed in the authentic places that we all come from. And I knew that. And I don't know why I had such a chip on my shoulder about the whole thing. That might require some psychoanalysis of me, but I definitely related to, in a very different way what you felt.

[Glenn Lowry]

That's very interesting, Coleman.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. Okay. A couple of other questions I wanted to ask you. So it turns out just a few hours before we recorded this, I ran into a friend of mine completely randomly on the ferry. And I asked him how he's doing. And he comes up to me and he says. He breaks down in tears, says he's an alcoholic and he's struggling. He's three days sober. He just had a horrible situation. He has a kid. And. And so it's. And he. He broke down, you know, hugging me. And. And I. I didn't know what to tell him other than to give some words of encouragement. But I'm. I'm curious, you know, what is your vantage point on addiction and conquering it as. As someone who has been there and can speak to it and has lived on sort of both sides of sobriety? What is it that you've learned that, if anything, that you can offer to people struggling with it?

[Glenn Lowry]

Yeah, that's a tall order, that question. I do, of course, delve at length into my own struggles with addiction. I was using crack cocaine in the late 1980s and 1987. 1986. 1987, actually, I didn't start using crack until 1987, but I was, you know, walking on the wild side, and I got into trouble. I became obsessive. It almost destroyed my life. I was spending hundreds of dollars a day. I was going into godforsaken places. I was taking unimaginable risks, and I just wanted to get high. I just wanted another hit. I had a loving wife at home who stuck through this awful period in my life and stuck by me. My late wife, Linda Lowery, the economist who passed away in 2011, but who was with me through this ordeal. And I ended up. I ended up an inpatient in a middle hospital. When I came out, I relapsed and went back to using. You know, I could go on. The book is there. I've chronicled the struggle in detail. You ask me, what lessons do I draw or whatever. What can I say to somebody who might be confronting, like your friend, this. This awful challenge? Get help. I mean, these are going to be platitudes here. Don't stop trying. My friend, a great economist, Nobel laureate, now deceased. Thomas Schelling, whom I discuss at length in the book, was a student of, among other things, of smoking behavior. He had an Institute for the Study of Smoking Behavior at Harvard when he was interested in those questions and did empirical studies of, you know, efforts to stop smoking that were con. Confined to the time in the. This was. Been in the mid-1980s when he was doing this work, but that were. That were interesting. And one of the things they learned is that oftentimes the failure rate on people who try to quit is pretty high. I don't know if it's still the case, but it was then pretty high. First time you try to quit, you don't quit. You end up relapsing. But for people who keep trying, they relapse, they try again, they relapse, they try again. And who stick with it, eventually they quit. So you can quit, but you may not be able to quit on demand. Don't give up. Seek help. I mean, again, nostrums, it's a day at a time. The only thing that you have to do is not use today. Keep the focus on yourself. Again. I hate the way that these things sound like platitudes, but I think there's just an awful lot of truth in them. Keep the focus on yourself and AA na, Community support, treatment. Sorry I didn't have a formula, a magic formula for you there, Coleman.

[Coleman Hughes]

Well, there is no magic formula. Maybe that's. That's the wisdom. Okay, so one thing you learn reading literature on racial equality, on incarceration in particular on crime, is that every expert agrees that really crack and cocaine are the same thing and should therefore have been punished the same way because they're the same drug. Now, I don't.

[Glenn Lowry]

I'm sorry, were you asking me what I thought about that or.

[Coleman Hughes]

I'm going to ask you in a moment what you think about that as someone. I mean, this is a. So if you read the literature, that is essentially what comes back at you in pretty much one voice. But at the same time, you know, I've seen people on coke and I've seen videos and I think I've seen people, you know, on the street in New York that I, I'm pretty sure are on crack. And they look very, very different. And so I'm curious, you know, like, to what extent are crack and cocaine? Because they are chemically the same, therefore physiologically the same. And what do you make of the crack cocaine, the famous crack cocaine punishment disparity and so forth?

[Glenn Lowry]

I think taking the same amount of powder cocaine and on the one hand processing it into a crystalline form that you can crumble onto a pipe and smoke versus on the other hand snorting it, the physiological consequences of the one and the other are very different. And I think if you smoke it, it gets to the brain. I'm not an expert here, I'm not going to be able to give you chapter and verse. It gets to the brain in a much more concentrated form more quickly so that the effects on the body are going to be different than if you snorted the the same amount of cocaine consumed in two different ways. That's worth noting. On the other hand, if I'm making law about trafficking and I'm aware of the fact that the trafficker can take the powder cocaine and easily convert it into crack cocaine, it can't go back the other way. And I have a different penalty for the crack than the powder. That that's a kind of discrimination. It is a kind of discrimination, but I think it could conceivably be. You could argue that the markets for these substances in these two different forms are very different markets. That the deleterious social consequences of the violence that attends the trafficking in the substances in these Tiffany markets necessitates a market specific enforcement strategy that differs and is more severe in the case of the crack than the powder. You're acknowledging the fact that in effect those are the same substances, but in those different forms they attract different concomitant criminal behavioral patterns which have different, in the case of crack, weightier negative consequences for society and therefore necessitate a more punitive response. I think a person could try to make that argument. It is discrimination, but it's justifiable discrimination. But from a point of view of consuming the drug, there's really no comparison between the two in terms of what it feels like to take it into your body. Crack is a much more powerful thing going right to the brain. A couple of hits on the pipe and you've consumed as much cocaine as you might snort in a half an hour.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, okay, so I want to ask you about a few different thinkers and your thoughts on them. There's a longstanding opposition between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois. And this is, in some ways I view it as the foundation between. The foundation of the debate between black liberals and black conservatives where Booker T. Washington represents this, you might call it skills first or economics first approach that prioritizes, that looks at a population that is just in his lifetime been slaves and says, number one on our priority, number one on our priority should be to get our house in as top order as it can possibly be, to educate ourselves in skilled trades to. To make up for the human capital deficit that was caused by hundreds of years of enslavement and by the fact that white Americans have a huge head start. And then further down the list, we will worry about the fact that we can't vote yet, the fact that we're not allowed in certain places in society. That will come. But the really hard thing is number one on the list, and therefore that should be the main focus. Whereas W.E.B. du Bois. I'm probably oversimplifying this somewhat, but has the opposite view that politics first, approach first. We've got to worry about the fact that we can't vote. We have no say in a democratic society, and therefore policy is going to be inevitably bent against us until we have a say first. We've got to do that, and then the rest will follow. I'm curious, do you view that, as I do, as kind of in some way the crux of the debate between black conservatives and liberals? And how do you think history has been to those two philosophies and those two figures?

[Glenn Lowry]

I do. I think you put it very well. When Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court by George Herbert Walker Bush in 1991, Thurgood Marshall had stepped down from the court. I wrote an essay that was published in First Things and reprinted in my collection One by One from the Inside Out. The essay was called Two Paths to Black Progress. And I was moved to recall the debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois in the early part of the 20th century, late 19th, early 20th century. Of course, Du Bois was only one of a whole class of educated Negroes who were powerfully offended by Booker T. Washington's willingness to compromise with segregation and to focus on development. I think he put it very well, that that was what he was about. He was about the fact that slavery was slavery and we have to come. What was this book called Up From Slavery. We have to Make Ourselves Fit for Equal Citizenship. I Mean, that's a whole. You can't even enunciate the sentence today without cringing because it accepted to some degree the racist narrative that blacks were unfit, that we were untermenschen, that we were doomed to perish in the competition of the social Darwinistic competition of modernizing society because unfit. And Booker T. Was saying, man, if you don't know how to read, you don't know how to read. If you don't know how to hoe and grow a crop in the land, you don't know how to do that. You had better get your stuff together. Your behavior, your values, the institutions within your own community. Stand up straight with your shoulders back. That's an anachronism. But that's because that's Jordan Peterson. But that's what he was saying. And Du Bois was saying that that was contemptible because the first question should be equal rights. And they definitely were not subject to equal rights when Booker T. Was preaching his development strategy. But I'm sorry, I wonder. I ramble a little bit. You ask me whether or not I affirm that as a central opposition in black political history, and I do. And how do I think that they have fared? Well, the naacp, the Howard Law crew, the Brown decision, the success of the civil rights movement culminating in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr. Who stands, doesn't he, in that tradition that Du Bois was championing of petitioning for equal citizenship? They got a lot to their credit. You could even argue that's a necessary condition to the full, satisfactory culmination of Booker T. Washington's program. You can make yourself fit, but if you don't have a place at the table, it doesn't do you nearly as much good as if you did have a place at the table. You could say those are complementary strategies. I'm not sure it's productive for us to, in an anachronistic fashion, project backwards. What if. What if I do think that Du Bois tradition is noble? I mean, Du Bois himself evolved in his own intellectual and political and philosophical posture. He was a Marxist at the end of his life and an expatriate. And I'm not sure I follow him all the way, but I would follow him far enough to think that petitioning and advocacy for equal rights was an essential, fundamentally important project. But I think now, it may seem funny to say so, but I think now, good old Booker T. Washington's sensibility. We need to focus on developing our capacities, compete effectively in the modern world. That's much More important than further petitioning for equal rights, in part because we have equal rights. As a matter of fact, you're one of the people, the young writers of our time, who has, I think, been most effective in making that point clear.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. Okay, so a few more questions before I let you go. How important was Thomas Sowell in your intellectual development? And were you aware of him when he was, you know, writing papers in the 70s? Did you meet him? Did you mingle with him, so forth?

[Glenn Lowry]

I did. I was aware of him and I did read him, and he was very important. Now, the way I came up, my teachers were all Keynesian, Democrat, left of center, economist. When I was at Northwestern, and when I got to mit, they were a little bit less political, but the political sensibility was basically center left, the center left of the Democratic Party kind of thing. And both the tradition that Sowell was steeped in the Chicago School and the particular things that Sowell was writing which were very much in keeping with what he wrote over the course of his entire life, which is that, you know, basically the government is not the answer and that the equal rights problem has largely been solved and that you can't expect equal outcomes when you have groups with different cultures and histories and that the world is full of examples of multiracial societies and then none of them. Do you see what it is that people seem to take as an appropriate goal for policy in this society when they talk about race and racial discriminations and so forth, Those ideas were at play. But when I encountered those ideas, I encountered them under the direction of people who were hostile to Sowell's politics and hostile to the intellectual tradition that he exemplified. The Chicago school of belief in free markets and capitalism in Gary Becker, the great Gary Becker, Nobel laureate economist, now deceased. His book in the 1950s, the Economics of Discrimination, which basically argued free markets, open trade, competition unfettered, without government interference, could be counted upon to work and whittle away at and ultimately undermine structures of racial discrimination and ought to be given an opportunity to do so. This kind of idea, and that was an anathema to the people who were teaching me, and therefore I looked askance at Seoul. I'm sorry. It took a long time to get around to saying Seoul was a guy. Bad soul, bad soul. He was the Negro. You did not want to be. You don't want to be that kind of guy. You know, he's a black economist, but he's not really black. I mean, that's literally what people were saying. And I'm afraid to have to report, if I'm honest with you, that I bought into that for a long time and I. And, you know, Soul's books were pouring out and I would glance at them. I can remember in 1982, I think it was his book Ethnic A History, where he has chapters on the Irish and on the Italians and on the blacks and on the. Whatever, whatever. And he goes through. And the sneer from the historians at Harvard. I had just come to Harvard in 1982. That's not real history, and I bought into that. But Brother Soule has continued to produce the books, and Brother Lowry has continued to be attentive. And over the fullness of time, Seoul is ahead of the pack by a substantial margin. His great book, Knowledge and Decisions, shows him to be a mind for the ages. He's Hayekian and he's in conversation with the greats in that book. His Affirmative Action A Worldwide Disaster or something like that. I can't remember exactly what the title of this book is, but where he surveys, he goes to Malaysia, he goes to India. But, you know, he looks at what has been wrought by affirmative action, where it's been tried all over the world, and he adds value to the conversation and more migration and culture. I mean, you know, they're these books. I mean, Soul is, you know, a towering figure at the end of the day, Du Boisian in his intellectual impact, literally. So I sold him short, but I.

[Coleman Hughes]

Came around and did you have actual interactions with him?

[Glenn Lowry]

Not much. I've met Thompson once. I was out at Stanford for something. He was at the Hoover Institution. And I mean, he's, you know, well into his 90s now. He was. This would have been 25 or 30 years ago. He was much more nimble. And he invited me to coffee and. And we had a chat. I mean, I had gotten his attention, and I was impressed. I was, you know, flattered, in fact. And we talked about this and that. I don't remember the subsequent conversation. It was a long time ago. It was entertaining and interesting. But I can say this. He has a recent book on charter schools, and he sent me a signed copy of it. And then a couple of weeks later, in the mail at my office arrived one of these tubular packaging, which, when I opened and unfurled, I found a photograph of the Tribune Building, which is one of these. The Wrigley Building. The Wrigley Building, which is one of these great architectural sites in Chicago that Thomas Sowell had taken himself with a note. And the note said, I wanted to give you this. I'm going through my things. I'm getting old. I'm going through my things. And I decided that I need to give away some stuff. And some of it is I'm a photographer, I love taking photographs and whatnot. And so I'm giving away some of my photos and I want you to have this one. And I thought, even though we don't really have a relationship, we kind of do have a relationship because we're laboring in the same vineyard in terms of our writing and our thinking. And that was his way of telling me that he had some respect for what I had been doing and he wanted to share something with me. And I really, really appreciated it.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right. There's this thing where you can end up feeling close to people that you haven't actually spent any time with because you've read them and they've read you and you're fighting from the same trench, you know, in different locations and in different ways. And I feel that with you, I feel that with John McWhorter, Camille Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, many other people. Sometimes this is described as heterodox, which I don't think is necessarily the best word to capture it. It's kind of vague. I'm never quite sure what that that word means. But I think it was John who said he was at some kind of conference with Shelby Steele and maybe you were there and the idea was floated to kind of form some kind of formal group. But he knew it would never happen because what selects for being this kind of black person is precisely a kind of non joining mentality that, you know, It's a catch 22. It's, you know, the same people that didn't join, that resisted all the pressures to join. The dominant culture of black intellectual thinking are not likely to become cohesive club creators and joiners when they all find each other. So it's kind of a paradox of why, you know, why it's difficult to organize around the kind of ideas that we share in common.

[Glenn Lowry]

Yeah, I've heard John tell that, make that argument. And no, I was not at that particular meeting and I would prefer iconoclast to heterodox. I think that suggests what John is getting at here. The iconoclast is the person who is willing to smash the icon, who's willing to go against the normative orientation of right thinking people and ask the question that, you know, raise the forbidden fact, point out the elephant in the room, kind of, you know, show me, you know, demand that an argument be made for something that's been taken as a. As a given. And maybe that does militate against. Against the club. We. But. But I feel a certain fellowship with this collection of people whom you just got through naming. So we're. We're informally informed, linked together somehow, and we should argue with each other, by the way. Yeah, that could be productive.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, for sure. Okay. Finally, John McWhorter. What is it that brought you and John together? I mean, your collaboration going back. What is it, 20 years now?

[Glenn Lowry]

Oh, it goes back to 2007. So it's like 17 years.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah.

[Glenn Lowry]

Coming up on 17 years. I first became aware of John from his book Losing the Race, which was published in 2000. I didn't like it. At that time in my life, I was kind of drifting left, and John was a cannon blast of clarity and defiance in the race conversation. And everybody was taking shots at him, and I was one of the people who had taken shots. He came through Harvard. I was at Boston University at the time, but Harvard was right across the street. I'd go over and listen to some of his lectures, and I was unconvinced with his various arguments and thought him, however, a worthy conversation antagonist or counterpart. So when Robert Wright, the blogginheads TV proprietor, invited me to develop a show for his platform, which has become the Glen show, my podcast now at Substack and YouTube. But when Bob Wright invited me, I thought John would be a good person to have as a. As a interlocutor for some conversations. Not perhaps every other week, which is what we've evolved to, but from time to time. And we developed the habit during the 2007. 08 presidential election cycle, when Obama. Obama emerged and defeated Hillary Clinton first for the Democratic nomination and then went on to defeat John McCain, that, you know, we began to have these conversations. They took off. We had chemistry. We bounced off of each other very well. I started out to his left, but I think I've ended up with to his right. He's probably the same guy. I've just probably been coming to my senses and drifting right over the years or whatever. But we had this chemistry and we developed this kind of shtick. We're the black guys. We're the black guys at Bloggingheads tv. Race is our beat. We're talking about race. And notwithstanding the initial differences in our political orientations, there was this common commitment to iconoclasm, what I'm saying, to cutting through the grift and the nonsense and as it were, calling a spade a spade. And while we have bobbed and weaved in terms of where we come out on this or that issue, that quality of conversation and commitment to challenging nostrums that we have in common has sustained us. So here we are.

[Coleman Hughes]

All right, so with that, thank you so much, Glenn. This was a great interview. The book is even better, Late Admissions Confessions of a Black Conservative. Glenn Lowry, thank you so much for doing my show.

[Glenn Lowry]

My pleasure. Coleman. Good to be with you.