Remembrance of Glenns Past

The Glenn Show

Glenn Loury

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As many of you know, I’m in the midst of writing a memoir. I’m now calling it The Enemy Within, but its earlier title was Changing My Mind, an allusion both to my intellectual development and to my shifting political orientations. In the course of thinking through my past, I’ve wondered how much the new, more conservative Glenn would have to say to the more liberal Glenn of the ‘90s and ‘00s.

So I decided to stage a little “debate” between us. Mark Sussman, my editor here at the newsletter, went through a lecture I delivered at Baruch College in 2000 where I laid out the argument that would become The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. He picked a few clips emblematic of the Old Glenn’s positions, where he thought there might be room for some interesting agreement and disagreement (you can watch the whole lecture here). We then recorded my reactions, with Mark “moderating” between me and my prior self.

It turns out that the Old Glenn and the New Glenn agree about a lot of things (though not, of course, everything). If present-day progressives approached problems of racial inequality in the way I recommended then, I still might not sign onto their program today, but there would be much more shared ground where compromise between opposing sides could be reached. Certainly the Old and New Glenns agree about a great deal. It all makes me wonder: Is it too late to abandon the hectoring tone of racial discourse today and have a serious discussion about history, outcomes, and incentives? Despite my own pessimism, I have to hope that it isn’t, and that, at the very least, the Old Glenn still has some allies out there.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit glennloury.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello there, everybody. Viewers of the Glen Show. This is Glen Lowry Brown University.
0:07.8	And I am with Mark Susman. Mark is the editor of the newsletter at the Glen Show and is
0:14.0	a lecturer in literature at the City University of New York Hunter College. And we're doing
0:21.1	something a little bit unusual today. We are having an encounter between Glen Lowry 2022.
0:29.9	That's me. And the old Glen Lowry of two decades ago, who is going to be represented as it
0:38.9	where, by Mark, we're going to engage in a little back and forth between the old and the
0:45.7	new Glen. Mark will explain further how we're going to proceed. But I hope you enjoy this
0:52.1	encounter between the old and the new Glen.
0:58.0	Yeah, so this project has sort of developed over the last year or so. Where Glen, you were looking
1:11.9	at some of your older lectures. And of course, the reissue of the anatomy of racial inequality.
1:19.4	I think probably occasion for you, like looking back over your older work and kind of
1:25.5	considering the difference between where you were, maybe around like, you know, 20 years or
1:30.9	so ago. And now, so we started going through some of that old material. And we thought it would
1:37.5	be interesting to kind of see how the new Glen reacts to the old Glen in real time. So what I've
1:46.1	done is I've taken some clips, or I've cut up some clips from a talk that you gave at Baruch College.
1:54.8	I think 2000, where you lay out, it seems like a lot of what would become the anatomy of racial
2:04.0	inequality, if I'm not mistaken. Let me just explain that, Mark, because indeed it is what would
2:11.3	become the anatomy of racial inequality. So my book, the anatomy of racial inequality, Harvard
2:16.5	University Press initially published 2002 based on lectures I gave at Harvard in 2000. The
2:23.5	Du Bois lectures at the African American Studies Department in Harvard in 2000. That was in April.
2:31.9	And I think the fall of 2000, I was invited to reprise those lectures at Baruch College City
2:40.0	University of New York, which I did do. Harvard has decided to issue a second edition now 20 years
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Glenn Loury, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Glenn Loury and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.