Glenn Loury: evaluation

Transcript context

…Thank you. All I need is a list of 20 questions, and we could talk on forever. I have this ongoing conversation with my friend John McWhorter at The Glenn Show where we talk about Omar. Omar is a type. He’s just a stand-in representation of dysfunctional — probably on the wrong side of the line in terms of law enforcement, bragging about having babies by three different women, can’t keep a job, dropped out of school, et cetera. Problematic kid in the ghetto. John says, “Omar makes me sad, and Omar makes you mad.” He says this to me. This is one of our things. How do we react to the fact of this dysfunction that is so prevalent in low-income black communities, that creates such problems for others who share those communities with them, and for society more broadly, that redounds to the discredit of African American society? You can’t be proud of a “thug,” can you? Our reaction to this dysfunction — he makes me mad. I don’t understand him. I don’t understand how you take a pistol, fire it out the window of a vehicle in a residential area where you know people are sitting on the front porches — you have no idea where that bullet is going to land — and then crow about it. I don’t understand. I don’t know what those frustrations are. I don’t know Omar’s story, not really. I know stereotypes about the story, cartoon representations of the story. Is he angry? Is he disconsolate? Does he have hope? What does he believe in? I’m saying, “he,” and I’m saying “Omar,” but of course, it doesn’t just apply to the guys. I don’t really know what’s going on, and when I meet people — social workers, cops, nurses, religious people — who are working on the ground in these communities, they’re trying to tell me a little bit about what life is like and so on. I wish I knew more about it. I wish I could have more factually grounded empathy for the people who I am so quick to castigate for creating the problems, but whose genuine life stories I don’t know so much about. I wish that the creative arts and the journalistic practice would get grittier, wouldn’t be so much in the service of a “progressive political program” but would just tell me what’s going on. I want to go inside those housing projects and find out what people are actually saying to each other and doing to each other, and how they feel about it. I don’t trust the reportage that I get because it’s all too tendentious and in the service of making sure that Donald Trump doesn’t get any more votes than he might otherwise get, or that Black Lives Matter comes out smelling like roses. I want to know the real story, which — if I flatter myself with this, forgive me — I think would allow me to be less mad and more sad when I encounter the mischief that Omar is creating throughout the country. We’ve had John McWhorter on this show, and I know you and he have had many, many dialogues. If you had to boil down the differences between you and him and your views to the smallest, most abstract number of dimensions possible, to what would you attribute those differences? What’s the key difference and where does it come from?…

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