Christopher A. Bracey on Glenn C. Loury’s “The Anatomy of Racial Inequality“:

ABSTRACT

Download article here [PDF]  “Thinking Race, Making Nation: Reviewing Glenn C. Loury, ‘The Anatomy of Racial Inequality”

Professor Glenn C. Loury’s “The Anatomy of Racial Inequality” is a thoroughgoing attempt to ascertain the root causes of racial inequality and provide insight into the thought process that causes us to view racial disparity with complacency and indifference. However, Loury’s project is not merely descriptive. His structural account of racial inequality provides the staging ground from which he launches a deep critique of prevailing views on American race relations. Racial inequity is not the product of some inherent deficiency in the minds and hearts of African Americans. Rather, it is a social pathology “deeply rooted in American history” – a pathology that “evolved in tandem with American political and economic institutions, and with cultural practices that supported and legitimated those institutions . . . that were often deeply biased against blacks.” Loury therefore rejects the conservative policy of indifference toward racial disparities, and declares emphatically that racial inequality is “an American tragedy [and] a national, not merely a communal disgrace.”

In a very real sense, Loury’s free and extended meditation on racial inequality and the prospects of racial reform provides us with an insightful theoretical and discursive structure through which we can engage the struggle for racial justice anew. In this review essay, I offer an extended examination and critique of the major arguments presented in the book. In the course of connecting Loury’s work with historic and contemporary literature on racial disparities in American life, I offer some thoughts on the impact his project may have upon the shape of American race relations to come.