Author and economist Glenn Loury lost his wife, Dr. Linda Datcher Loury, in September 2011. “Around this time every year, I reflect on how lucky I was to know her at all,” he says. He wrote this tribute for a memorial service in November of that year.
You see, I suffered from the theorists’ disease of glossing too quickly over the facts in my rush to find an elegant, abstract formulation of some issue. “An idea so beautiful it must be true,” was my attitude. Linda, with feet planted firmly on the ground, would invariably say something like, “How could you possibly know that?”; “What evidence is there for this assumption?”; “How would you test that implication?”; “How could we, even in principle, take this to the data?” She helped keep me grounded. She had terrifically good commonsense. In matters of economic research, Linda was a wise woman.
Loury published a memoir earlier this year, entitled, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. Deseret News called it a book “about telling the truth, not just to readers, but to himself.“
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Professor Glenn Loury of Brown University writes about the ‘American Project’ and black Americans in this essay from earlier this year.
When we talk about race and American citizenship, we must ask whether the currently fashionable standoffishness characteristic of much elite thinking about blacks’ relationship to the “American project” — as exemplified, for example, by the New York Times’ 1619 Project — truly serves the interests, rightly understood, of black Americans. I think not. Indeed, I think a case can be made for unabashed black patriotism, for a forthright embrace of American nationalism by black people. The “America ain’t all it’s cracked-up to be” posture that one hears so much of these days is, in my view, a sophomoric indulgence for blacks at this late date. In fact, our birthright citizenship in what is arguably history’s greatest republic is an inheritance of immense value.
He makes these four points, which you can read on 1176unites.com.
- The founding of the United States (1776) was vastly more significant for world history than the first arrival in America of African slaves (1619).
- The Civil War has a significant freedom legacy.
- Black Americans have been transformed and marvelously transformed themselves in the 20th century.
- Consider what achieving “true equality” for black Americans actually entails, an immeasurable amount of work.
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