MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: The economist Glenn Loury was once one of the country's most prominent Black intellectuals, warmly embraced by neoconservatives for his emphasis on personal behavior versus discrimination as an explanation for inequality. But then it emerged that Loury was leading a double life. He's fathered a child outside of his marriage, was picking up women and developed a crack addiction. He writes about all of this in his memoir, published earlier this year. It's titled "Late Admissions: Confessions Of A Black Conservative," and he's on the line with me now from Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Loury, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
GLENN LOURY: Thank you, Michel. It's very good to be with you.
MARTIN: You know, the outlines of your story have been public, you know, at various points. I mean, you were arrested at one point for assaulting an ex-mistress. But what made you decide to put all of this on paper - I mean, the good, the bad and the ugly?
LOURY: Well, I'm in my 70s. I'm reflecting on my life, and the first order of business is to tell myself the truth about the very circuitous routes that I had followed. The skeptical reader is going to be reading between the lines and trying to figure out what this guy is really up to. And the unsympathetic reader - the one who says, ah, a Black conservative, bad man - is going to be looking for discrediting motives on my part. But I'm telling you the truth when I tell you I, in the first instance, needed to come clean with myself. What was going on with me when I was serially unfaithful to that wonderful woman, the late economist Linda Datcher Loury, whom I was blessed to have as my wife and the mother of our two sons. What was going on with me when I choked at Harvard, thinking I wasn't good enough to make it as the first Black tenured economist in the economics department at that great university, and changing my whole intellectual orientation toward more political and more controversial punditry rather than more technical economics. These transitions in my life, which I myself had not come fully to grips with, and I just had the need to pull the covers off of it.
MARTIN: I have to say - the memoir makes for some fascinating reading, for a couple of reasons. One is that it's a very exciting description of the life of the mind - you know, how the mind opens up to ideas and how ideas can change a person. But it's also kind of a tough read, 'cause you do come off as kind of a jerk.
LOURY: Yeah.
MARTIN: You know what I mean? You've got a chip on your shoulder.
LOURY: Yeah.
MARTIN: It's like on the one hand, you envy people who had the benefit of having, like, professional parents, who grew up in a two-parent household. On the other hand, you seem to resent them. And it seems like your kind of consciousness is animated by a constant duality, right?
LOURY: Yeah, I agree. And I do have a chip on my shoulder, and I'm mindful of it as I recount the events of my life. And I chastise myself about, why was I susceptible to the flirtations of the right-wingers whom I consorted with in the 1980s and '90s? Why did I break with them? What was going on with me when I tried to become a left progressive critic, but my heart wasn't really in it? And the fact that some of my worst misdeeds, so the running of the streets, the drug use, the hanging out in housing projects and the crack thing that I went through, the picking up women in the bars and - you know, what was the identity crisis that I was going through? I mean, I was searching for a certain kind of authenticity, but I was looking in all the wrong places. So yeah, I had puzzles and contradictions, and I'm trying to reckon with them as candidly as I can in the book.
MARTIN: The Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson, also seems to live a life of contradictions, and I asked Loury what he makes of that.
LOURY: I only know (laughter) that it's - undoubtedly, there's a story there. And I mean, I was a crack addict. I was robbed twice at gunpoint on the streets of Boston at 1 o'clock in the morning. I've been into environments where the degradation, the - you know, ugly, ugly, vicious kind of aspects of human behavior. So I know the dark corners of the human soul in my own instance. And I can only speculate about Mark Robinson, and I am loath to do so, but - I guess that's pretty much all I have to say. I don't know anything about Mr. Robinson, but the inkling that I'm getting from what I'm reading in the newspaper suggests to me a very complex, and dark and perhaps even tragic aspect to it. And, you know, that's something that I know about from firsthand experience.
MARTIN: Glenn Loury is a professor of economics at Brown University. He's also host of the podcast "The Glenn Show." We've been talking about his memoir "Late Admissions: Confessions Of A Black Conservative." Professor Loury, thanks so much for talking to us once again.
LOURY: It's been a great pleasure, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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