The Anatomy of Racial Inequality

The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures) I purchased this book from Usabookexchange and as advertised was in excellent condition. The shipping was fast as promised. Upon checking the site found it to represent a company that I will purchase books from again.

The classic collision of teleological (emphasizing the result) and deontological (empahsizing the procedure) philosophy applied to race relations in the United States. More than mere economic consquentialism, or sociological stucturalism, Loury rails against racial stigmatism, and posits powerfully in favor of "racial egalitarianism," by use of moral suasion. Any right thinking, moral minded human being will be disturbed by his polemics, and cannot help but be swayed by his appeal. I will, however, leave it to you, the reader, to discover for yourself which side of the philosophical divide, mentioned above, Loury favors. Very highly recommended.

Glen is an accomplished economist, and you can tell in the style of his writing: He is organized and sets up axioms and bullet points to clarify his arguments. I had the opportunity to hear him speak in 2002, and he is quite persuasive. In this book, Loury makes a case against liberal individualism, the popular assumption that liberalized, free market, "race-blind" policies will naturally dissolve unjust inequalities over time. In this discussion, Loury avoids the topic of overt "racial discrimination", which is easier to spot and has more obvious effects, and focuses instead on the strong, persistent, and self-replicating patterns caused by more subtle forces, which he terms "racial stigma". Stigma refers to bodily markings that are automatically cognitively perceived in all social interaction and which have strong social associations that affect perception and behavior of observers. This stigma, and the associations and stereotypes that are cognitively linked with it, acts to rationalize and sustain systematic racial inequality, perpetuating factors that drive formation of stigma. I believe that these arguments appear more compelling if the reader has previous knowledge of theories in cognitive psychology suggesting that mental associational categorization based on observed statistical tendencies applied to readily observable stimuli may form the basis of all thought and learning Glen's arguments are not airtight, and he relies primarily on philosophical thought experiments for illustration; however, his explorations are useful, and a perspective of racial inequality that did not consider and respond to these perspectives would be naive and incomplete.http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com

The current issue of the Journal of Economic Literature (December 2002) has a review of Loury's book by Steven Raphael (Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California at Berkely) on pages 1202 - 1214. The JEL is a peer reviewed journal; the article is very thoughtful and well written. Raphael's article ends with the following sentences: "While many may take issue with Loury's analysis of racial inequality in the United States, a careful study of this book is sure to challenge one's assumptions and to force the reader to think more deeply about the stubbornly and profoundly persistent and profound social disadvantage of African-American. On this basis alone, the book is a must-read." (page 1213)The JEL arrived this morning and I ordered a copy today.

I found in this book a refreshingly different take on the current issue of racial inequality in the US. I had heard Loury say on the radio something to the effect of that if you accept the premise that there is no fundamental difference between the races, then how can you not be outraged by the percentage of blacks in jail versus the number of whites (or outraged about many other very telling statistics included in the book). The reason we are not outraged, is that somehow it has become 'reasonable' for this outcome to occur, and we don't see it as out of the ordinary. He describes the mechanism for this as a racial stigma associated with blacks. The book describes how this is different that the more commonly discussed discrimination, and how it is a systematic / cultural mindset bias more than just a behavioral one. He develops this thesis of a racial stigma well, in a readable and convincing fashion.