Glenn Loury On Being A Minority Within A Minority (Re-Aired)

In our last summer-break podcast two-fer, we’re re-running two very different conversations on sex and race, with two very different characters: Glenn Loury and Louise Perry. Next Friday we’ll be back with fresh Dish as the new season of Dishness kicks off after Labor Day with some great guests lined up for the fall.

We’ll also be introducing Weekly Dish 3.0! Stay tuned.

Glenn is an academic, writer, and podcaster. At the age of 33, he became the first African-American professor of economics at Harvard to get tenure. He’s currently the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University, a columnist for UnHerd, and co-host of The Glenn Show, alongside John McWhorter. In this early 2023 episode, we talked about Glenn’s incredibly colorful life, and he subsequently published his memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. So in this conversation we got a preview of the book: the product of a remarkable American life.

Read a polished transcript here. You can hear two clips on YouTube — how the insistence on the permanence of “white supremacy” hurts African-Americans, and how we are all “hypocrites” to some extent. Other topics covered: Glenn’s parents dealing with him as a prodigy; dropping out of college with a newborn; rebounding to MIT and Harvard; being ostracized by the black cognoscenti; his drug addiction; his conversion to Christianity; his loss of faith; falling out with the neocon right; the racial wealth gap; and affirmative action.

See you next Friday.

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