“Frankly, I felt exposed,” Loury told me. We were sitting by the fireplace of his living room on a chilly April afternoon in Providence, R.I., where he is a professor at Brown University. “I felt that my integrity could potentially be called into question.” He needed to “come clean.”
“I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true,” Loury wrote in a mea culpa for his Substack, calling his error egregious. That weekend, he had Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, who oversaw the prosecution of Chauvin in the Floyd case, on his podcast, to hear the other side of the story.
How had he made such a mistake?
“The real story is I hated what happened in the summer of 2020,” he told me. “I think these moral panics we have around these police killings are over the top and it’s bad for the country.” He had supported the filmmakers, he confessed, because they were attacking people he opposed. “I let that cloud my judgment.”
This is far from the first reversal, political or personal, for Loury, 75, one of the most celebrated and reviled Black intellectuals of the past half-century. While public debate has too often devolved into lobbing grenades from entrenched positions, Loury’s tumultuous life, his swings from the right to the left and back again, his remarkable, barrier-busting successes and his considerable frailties and failures, have taught him to always recognize that he could be wrong and to keep an open mind, no matter how vehement his opinions. He outlines this ragged road to wisdom in his remarkably candid memoir, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”
‘The Enemy Within’
The name Glenn Loury often appears on lists of prominent conservative Black figures like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele. He was a star Ph.D graduate in economics from M.I.T. and the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard. He was a darling of the neoconservative movement and was tapped to be deputy secretary of education during the Reagan administration.
