Color schemes: can affirmative action be reconciled with liberal individualism? . - Culture and Reviews - The Anatomy of Racial Inequality - book review

Reason, July, 2002 by Richard A. Epstein

The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, by Glenn C. Loury, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 226 pages, $22.95

GLENN LOURY is an intelligent but angry man with a mission: to explain both the origins and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Loury, a professor of economics at Boston University, was once that rarest of beings, a black conservative intellectual, with a strong belief in self-reliance and a deep suspicion of affirmative action. In recent years his ideology has changed. His migration to the left has been marked by brushes with the law, attacked as "disingenuous" by Norman Podhoretz in Commentary, and chronicled in bemused detail by Adam Shatz in The New York Times Magazine.

Although The Anatomy of Racial Inequality sheds some light on his conspicuous change of heart, Loury, to his credit, does not dwell on his personal odyssey. He is much more intent on laying out his argument that the "analytic and the philosophical resources of liberal individualism" fail in addressing the situation of black Americans. "Succinctly stated," he writes, "my problem with liberal individualism is that it fails to comprehend how stigmainfluenced dynamics in the spheres of social interaction and self-image production can induce objective racial inequality, decoupled from contemporaneous discriminatory acts of individuals, carrying across generations, shaping political and social-cognitive sensibilities in the citizenry, making racial disparity appear natural and nondissonant, stymieing reform and locking in inequality."

Having concluded that the appeal to color blindness is a dangerous distraction from the lingering effects of prejudice; Loury calls for major structural remedies to speed up progress toward racial equality. Most prominently, he adamantly and impatiently defends the affirmative action programs widely used in American higher education. He sees affirmative action as a means of propelling blacks into positions of influence, thereby changing social attitudes ingrained by many years of private and institutionalized bigotry. "What is required," he says, "is a commitment on the part of the public, the political elite, the opinion-shaping media, and so on to take responsibility for such situations as the contemporary plight of the urban black poor, and to understand them in a general way as a consequence of an ethically indefensible past." While there is some merit to Loury's observations about the inadequacy of color blindness, his explanation of racial inequality is only partly successful, and his critique of libera l individualism misses the mark.

Loury finds the persistence of race-based social differences something of a mystery because in his view race is only a "marker" that is easy to observe and difficult to alter. In and of itself a racial marker contains no reliable information about important biological differences between individuals because, quite simply, there are none. Such markers are, however, frequently invested with a "social meaning," whereby individuals both within and outside the racial group attribute certain characteristics to its members. When individuals act based on these social meanings, they construct feedback loops that appear to validate the false assumption of natural differences that people tacitly accept in their everyday lives. When these global impressions recycle, they create a longstanding racial stigma that becomes nearly impossible to shake, even over the course of generations.

One of Loury's instructive examples of "self-confirming racial stereo-types" involves a group of employers who start out with the belief that blacks are less likely to work hard than their white peers. These employers are quicker to fire blacks, because they believe they need less evidence to confirm their original low estimation. Black workers in turn understand that they are under harsh scrutiny and thus invest less energy in doing a job they think they are unlikely to keep. The upshot, according to Loury, is that they exhibit a higher rate of failure, which appears to confirm the false initial assumption about their lesser capacities.

A similar feedback loop operates at night on the streets of any major city. Let cab drivers think that young black males are more likely to commit crimes than white ones, and these drivers (of both races) will gravitate to white customers. Honest black males therefore will exit this market, so that the black fares that remain will be in fact more dangerous than the white fares, even when the two overall populations are equally law-abiding.

In these and similar cases, Loury's critical insight is that mistakes in perception lead to mistakes in judgment that reinforce the initial social stigma. Because each actor occupies a small competitive niche, it does not pay him to correct his errors. He can do little to alter the larger, entrenched patterns of social behavior, and he has no incentive to do so, given that his filtered observations are consistent with his assumptions.