Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative

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Despite coming close to ruining his life on more than a few occasions, Glenn Loury, Professor of the Social Sciences and Economics at Brown University, has always managed to remain a “Player,” both as a professor and as a public intellectual. That dual accomplishment is a testimony to his drive and determination, as well as to his brilliance as a thinker and a writer.

Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, by Glenn C. Loury (428 pages, W.W. Norton, 2024)

The young man who was once himself a late admission is now a much older man who has finally decided that it’s time to make some very late, not to mention some very public, admissions. More than that, this once young and now much older man still thinks of himself as a game-playing man and a betting man. Or does he? Stay tuned on that one.

The game seemingly at hand in this memoir is spelled out in the preface. An invention of the author, Glenn Loury calls it “the problem of self-regard.” The reader’s task in this game is to search for and find the real Glenn Loury, as opposed to the “narrative-construct” of—and by—Glenn Loury.

And the author’s task? Put simply and directly, it is to get the reader to call off the search. In other words, he must convince the reader that the real Glenn Loury and the narrative construct of and by Glenn Loury are one and the same individual.

His strategy is remindful of George Orwell’s skepticism about the reliability of any memoir. According to Orwell, an autobiography could only be trusted if it revealed “something disgraceful” about its author. As far as Orwell was concerned, a memoirist who gives a “good account of himself was probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

Loury’s bet with this book is that, by revealing a great many disgraceful things about himself in these pages, he will be believed. In sum, his “self-discrediting disclosures” will achieve two purposes: 1) gone will be any need on the part of the game-playing reader to bother looking for “any cracks in the edifice of my self-presentation”; and 2) any and all readers will thereby be convinced that they are not being lied to. In other words, Loury’s bet is that the more (to borrow again from Orwell) disgraceful things that he reveals, the more credible he will become.

And with that bet—and hope—on the table he declares that the game is on.

Is there a winner here? Not really. On the one hand, thanks to Loury’s accounting of his lengthy and disgraceful past, it’s no contest. He wins, and not just hands down, but pants down as well. The potential reader doesn’t have a chance. Nor will an actual reader have to so much as break a sweat. The real Glenn Loury is on full display here. No searching or second guessing is necessary.

And yet, is Professor Loury really the winner? Yes, he has had a highly successful academic career. Yes, he is an acclaimed public intellectual. And yes, his story is entirely believable. What possible reason might he have had for sharing all of this dirty laundry, if his overarching goal was something other than convincing us of the believability of his life’s story?

And yet, the question still stands: Is Glenn Loury really the winner now that he has revealed the rest of his story? It’s a question every reader will likely be asking, whether during or after reading this book—or both.

Furthermore, the Loury strategy, by and large, doesn’t really conform to any Orwellian model. At issue in these pages are not the past defeats of this autobiographer, but his past conquests, many of which were sexual in nature. First one, then another and then yet another. And just when you think that there can’t possibly be one or two more, there are.

Along the way there are also two spouses. A father while still a teen, he will later marry the mother of his child, father a second daughter with her before fathering a son with a different woman before finally divorcing his wife. Did he do so in order to marry the mother of his son? No. Did he help raise his son? No.

His much later second marriage produces two more sons, and ends only with the death of his wife. By his own accounting, there was a good deal about this marriage that was positive, as well as loving and fulfilling. But apparently it was never quite enough for Glenn Loury.

There were repeated affairs, one of which was conducted from his own well-equipped bachelor pad. Glenn Loury was nothing if not a Player, and the capital “P” is his, not mine.

What his second wife knew or didn’t know about any of his extracurricular exploits is a bit uncertain, both to Loury and to his wife. But this much can be safely surmised: Anyone who reads this book will likely know more than his wife ever did.

Of course, Professor Loury was a Player in more ways than one. This Chicago south sider, began his college career belatedly at a local community college while working for a printing company. In fact, his description of the inner workings of that company readily captures the interest of the reader and comes close to matching his descriptions of pretty much anything else, whether lurid or non-lurid, in this book.

In any case, the trajectory for this obviously brilliant young fellow was immediately upward, first to Northwestern and finally to an MIT doctorate in economics. The same goes for his academic career, which included stops at Northwestern and Michigan, followed by becoming the first black economist to be tenured by Harvard—and at the age of thirty-three no less. Always on the move, Loury (who is now at Brown University) returned to MIT before being spirited away to Boston University by President John Silber so that he could play a major role in elevating the status of that university’s economic department.

And then there were this Player’s drugs, as well as the haunts of his choice, whether in Detroit or in Boston or elsewhere. Apparently, you could take Glenn Loury out of the south side of Chicago, but you couldn’t take the atmosphere of the south side out of him.

Of course, it all began with marijuana in the late 1960s and 1970s. (Loury was born in 1948.) Weed, however, is Loury’s preferred term. It has also been his preferred relaxant, both then and ever since then. But that is not quite that. Long ago one of his paramours introduced him to crack cocaine, and he introduces his readers not just to his compulsive search for it, but to the intricate details concerning the proper procedure for turning this substance into something usable, if not truly useful, let alone legal.

Along the way, Loury takes the reader on repeated forays into inner cities to buy crack, as well as on repeated visits to treatment centers to deal with the inevitable results. Once again, just when you think that he has put this problem behind him, you learn that he hasn’t. There always seems to be one more foray, followed by yet one more visit. Spoiler alert: Both ended a good while ago.

Amazingly enough, despite coming close to ruining his life on more than a few occasions, Glenn Loury always managed to remain a Player, both as a professor of economics and as a public intellectual. That dual accomplishment cannot be ignored or denied. It is also testimony to his drive and determination, as well as to his brilliance as a thinker and a writer.

To be sure, this is a personal, rather than a political or a professional, memoir. While not sparing the reader any details of his private failings, he does spare us anything approaching the weeds of arcane economic theorizing. Nonetheless, he wants his readers to know that he is justifiably proud of his professional accomplishments.

But a few more late admissions, as well as late withdrawals and late readmissions, must be noted as well. These “confessions of a black conservative” chart his disillusionment with the post-King generation of civil rights leaders, as well as his increasing skepticism about government programs that claimed to offer solutions to inner city problems.

If memory serves (there is no index probably because he has changed the names of many of his non-professional associates), Loury makes no mention of Thomas Sowell. But Glenn Loury was clearly on a path to become the next Tom Sowell, meaning a rising black economist who could produce first-rate scholarship and write solid and solidly conservative pieces for the informed public in such publications as Commentary and The New Republic. 

But there would be a few detours from this path, the most prominent of them being Loury’s concerns about the high incarceration rates of black males in our prisons. This issue led him to take a few left turns earlier in this still young century, as well as to serious ruptures with previous allies, including Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom of Harvard.

And yet over the course of the past decade or so he has returned to—or should that be “readmitted to”—his conservative roots, often in tandem with fellow podcaster John McWhorter. The subtitle, after all, is the “confessions of a black conservative.”

If Loury is to be believed, and I think he is, he places equal emphasis on “black” and “conservative,” since he wants it to be known that he has returned to his cultural roots as well.

There was a time during and after his recovery from crack cocaine that he had returned to his religious roots as well. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to state that he was, at least for a time, genuinely and independently establishing such roots. Such a move might also have been included among his late admissions. But at this even later point in his life his doubts seem to have triumphed over his belief; therefore, it must be listed among his late rejections.

How long that list might be is anyone’s guess, but I would guess that “weed” is nowhere on it. Glenn Loury may no longer be the Player that he once was, in the full sense of his frequent employment of that expansive term. In truth, he might not actually have been thinking in terms of being in a game when he wrote this book, much less of winning or losing it.

Maybe, just maybe, these days he might just be content enough with his life and his accomplishments, content enough to know that he has survived his mis-steps and misdeeds, content enough to claim his status as a Survivor and not assert himself as a Player, so that he might be excused if, on occasion, he still pulls out a joint.

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