Adultery and addiction: the searing memoir of an African American academic

Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
by Glenn Loury | WW Norton & Co, 2024, 448 pages

The English tyrant Oliver Cromwell is said to have told the artist painting his portrait to include “roughness, pimples, warts, and everything.”

Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, written by the African-American economist and social commentator Glenn Loury, is a memoir created in a similar spirit.

“I am going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them,” Loury announces in his preface.

Along the way to becoming one of America’s foremost intellectuals exploring racial and other issues, Loury has made many missteps, and he is remarkably candid when describing them.

Throughout the fast-moving narrative, the author’s use of the present tense helps bring the reader into this often sordid world.

Philanderer

After impregnating his teenage girlfriend for the second time, the young Glenn seeks out a backstreet abortionist who “was said to do good work” and gives the mother of his children $200 to go to him (she chooses not to).

Very shortly thereafter, an affair with a work colleague results in another pregnancy and the birth of a son whom Glenn refuses to acknowledge for decades.

After growing up together, Loury has a passionate affair with his best friend’s wife.

Happily married for a second time to a fellow economist, Loury engages in multiple affairs, even bringing one lover to conferences alongside him and thus making his wife’s humiliation public.

When a legal case brought by an aggrieved ex-mistress brings the priapic academic down, he turns to crack cocaine and develops a new dependency. While housed in a drug treatment facility, he smokes crack in his room despite the risk that this may jeopardise the recoveries of other patients exposed to the smell.

As his wife fights the cancer that will kill her, Loury resumes his adulterous habits, and tells his son that he is “bored” with his family life.

Born in the late 1940s in Chicago’s South Side, Loury is shaped by his roots.

His outstanding intellectual abilities and the encouragement of his extended family allowed him to enter the academic world at a time when doors were finally being opened to black Americans.

As Loury writes, the circumstances of his upbringing gave him a sense that he had to transcend his origins. The required self-belief came with a cost though in the form of an “all-consuming egotism that distorts my moral judgement.”

Loury makes clear that he benefitted in some ways from his ethnic background, with some colleges being especially eager to hire such a promising young black social scientist.

Though his professional accomplishments — including groundbreaking work on the role of social capital in accounting for racial income differences — speak for themselves, Loury’s unique life story itself offers profound lessons when it comes to the black experience in America.

“When the music stops, everyone has somewhere to go, whether it be Ireland or Italy or Israel or wherever else, an ancestral homeland to which they can retreat, if only in their mind and in their soul, to find succour and to honour the memory of their forebears… The black South Side was where I went in my mind’s eye when I reflected on what made me who I am,” he writes.

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Race has been a crucial part of what has guided his complex political trajectory. Unhappiness with racial opportunists and a recognition of the cultural problems in his own community helped to persuade him to initially move to the Right in the Reagan era.

This was followed by a leftward shift in the 1990s, in response to what he felt was an indifference by conservatives to the plight of disadvantaged blacks. Since then, his politics have taken another turn in an era where questions of racial identity and racial disparities are at the forefront of American discourse.

Microcosm of misery

One of the most shocking aspects of this book is Loury’s account of the social dysfunction of his own family (and, by extension, much of the black community as well) in what was, for many, the fabled era of social stability and traditionalist mores in the 1950s and 1960s.

Much of this is already known to some extent — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on ‘The Negro Family’ showed that around one-in-four black children were born out of wedlock at that point.

The Loury family is a case in point.

Loury’s uncle Alfred fathered 22 children by four different women, and was very proud of this.

Both of Glenn’s parents had been abandoned by their fathers and carried scars as a result, divorcing when Glenn was a small child.

One legacy of his mother’s constant infidelity was the fact that Glenn’s sister bore no resemblance to their father, who nonetheless ignored cruel remarks from onlookers and insisted on supporting the little girl as if she really were his own.

Adultery was common in the community, Loury writes, although his mother’s example was an extreme one. One evening, Loury met his mother in a Chicago pool hall while socialising.

She was in the company of a lover, rather than her then-husband, and did not appear self-conscious about this. This normalisation of betrayal appears to have left a lasting mark on her son’s psyche.

Those who posit that economic factors lead to social dysfunction will find little to reinforce that belief in these pages. While racial discrimination certainly hindered the progress of black Americans during Glenn Loury’s youth, this was also a time of great material prosperity.

As a teenage college dropout, Loury was able to quickly find work as a timekeeper in a large company: a job which paid him around $55,000 in today’s money.

Generational sins

There is something very tragic about the environment described here.

The suffering is intergenerational and perhaps never-ending. The same mother who failed Glenn in important ways during his youth would later succumb to alcoholism. Seeking to retire early, she looks to her now prosperous son to provide for her financially, telling him that “God takes care of babies and fools.”

Loury’s religious journey has also been a winding route. Given his broader assessment of what ails black America, it is worth looking at his experience of the black Christianity which he was raised in.

Although his saintly aunt Eloise played a crucial role in his childhood, what he saw as the hypocrisy of other churchgoers alienated him from religion.

When he came to faith, it was an emotional rekindling of a childhood feeling which occurred while he was battling drug addiction.

The charismatic form of praise and worship which is described will not surprise any reader who has attended a black church in America.

Oddly for a man who is known for his deep and open-minded study of political and social questions, even during his most religious years, Loury never appears to have delved into theological questions to a satisfactory degree.

He felt there was a God. He then had doubts. Those doubts then undermined that feeling.

“How does a rational man, a man otherwise devoted to the most worldly of disciplines, stand for such a thing?” he writes. “How could I surrender my reason — however temporarily — to that which requires faith above all?”

An experience of being asked to speak in tongues — “I opened my mouth and babbled gibberish for maybe ten seconds in a forced effort” — and a justifiable scepticism about supernatural healing stand out from his memories of life as a committed member of a small church community.

Overall, the dilemmas which he faced in the pews suggest that he saw faith and reason as mutually exclusive.

He also freely acknowledges that a key reason for his decision to cease attending church was the fact that he was once again having affairs.

An immature attraction to social transgression for its own sake seems to have underpinned many of his life choices, including his decision to risk ostracisation by becoming one of the few prominent black Americans to embrace the Republican Party.

This is significant given the nature of his fondness for Donald Trump.

“I got visceral pleasure out of watching Trump standing on stage and hurling insults at smug, self-satisfied liberals and conservatives who had lost touch with the people whose support they relied upon,” he writes.

In and of itself, it is hard to argue with any of this; many social conservatives feel the same way about the 45th president.

What makes this problematic is that this attitude reflects the same lack of moral seriousness which the author has exhibited throughout so much of his life, and which he has now chosen to reveal with admirable honesty.

The Glenn Loury who has done so much good work in recent years, host of The Glenn Show podcast, is a sensible and sympathetic figure.

His great gifts should help the reader to overlook his great flaws. Foremost among those gifts are his skills as a wordsmith. While relaying what often appears to be a nightmare, he always writes like a dream.

This is a memoir like no other, of an American intellectual like no other. It should certainly stand the test of time.


Did these revelations surprise you? Leave your comments below.


James Bradshaw writes from Ireland on topics including politics, history, culture, film and literature.

Image credit: Glenn Loury


 

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  • mrscracker
    That was very interesting to read about. Thank you.
  • Michael Cook
    followed this page 2024-07-18 17:48:36 +1000
  • James Bradshaw
    published this page in The Latest 2024-07-18 17:47:03 +1000