Our Brother's Keeper
Glen Loury's The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
Nicholas Rowe
January 1, 2002
The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, by Glenn C. Loury (Harvard University Press, 2002), 160 pp.
During the battle to pass the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, a television journalist asked Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., whether the legislation would help blacks in the United States. Powell leveled his famous glare at the interviewer, and responded that the act was good for all Americans concerned with justice and fairness. Thanks to the growing pressure of the Civil Rights movement without, and to Powell's exceptional negotiating talents from within, the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 with the hope that it would finally put to death the longstanding effects of racial segregation and prejudice in the United States.
On the face of it, however, the results have been discouraging. A cursory glance at many quality-of-life indicators-such as median income, poverty levels, home ownership, births to unwed mothers, crime statistics, and college attendance-indicates that many people continue to struggle to live decently within the United States, and that a disproportionate number of these people are black. This reality is disturbing enough; the relative indifference of mainstream society to these indicators is more troubling still. At present, over one quarter of all black men have records in the criminal justice system. Were the rate similar for whites, our leaders would declare a national emergency.
When confronted with these statistics, the leaders who shape our contemporary political and public policy discourse tend to fall into in the same rhetorical rut. Some talk about the "failure" of affirmative action policies; others offer vague allusions to "racism"; still others talk of "black pathology." The collective national ...
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