I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Glenn Loury. Many readers may remember his rise in the 1980s as a “black conservative,” a brilliant economist whose free-market arguments about race issues were music to Reagan Republicans’ ears. Others may know him from his more recent appearances with John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute, whose work also sometimes focuses on race. Loury has been a public intellectual for decades and has been at the center of big debates about welfare, civil rights, crime, and other pressing issues of American life.

But the Glenn Loury I keep thinking about is the broken, redeemed man of extraordinary moral courage who wrote Late Admissions, his 2024 memoir about his life in and out of academia. It’s a powerful book. Loury’s honesty brought tears to my eyes and set my hair on end. His bona fides as a writer, and as a man of substance, are beyond question. What I keep wondering is how much of Loury’s history is accessible to me, and how much of it is interwoven with an aspect of America that will probably always lie beyond my circle of familiarity.

How much of American history is universal, in other words, and how much is specific to those who have borne the brunt of it? The limits of interpersonal knowability and of historical belonging are stretched, tested, and redefined in the most compelling way in Late Admissions. Whether those limits are ever overcome is a separate matter. I believe that they are not.

Hailing from a big, loving, but in many ways struggling family on Chicago’s South Side — alcohol and infidelity tore the same holes in Loury’s upbringing that one finds in so many other American family histories — Loury’s off-the-charts intelligence took him to Northwestern, MIT, Harvard, Brown, and many of the best schools in Europe and the Asia-Pacific as professor, lecturer, and expert on race and economics. For much of this journey, Loury battled demons. He strayed from several wives, had run-ins with the law, and went through a hellish season of addiction to crack cocaine.

Loury is black. He cherishes his roots in a black community. This is his cultural context in part, the richness of a place and a people that make one who one is. Blackness provides the suchness of Loury’s human life, the anchoring in particularities that guides the child as he grows into a man, and grows old in the joys and sorrows of our shared world. Along the way Loury finds Jesus, but even redemption is communal and cultural. The church Loury and his (now deceased) wife attended is AME, and most of the other members were black.

This is the line that my wondering follows. Loury is a St. Augustine of sorts. Late Admissions is a Confessions kind of book. Loury’s redemption is the work of God, Author of all. But the theme of this redemption is African American. Not every corner of Loury’s soul lies open to me. Where the border is between the universal and the thematic is what I find puzzling. There is only so much of a man’s earthly journey that any other man may ever know, and that frontier is in part determined by history, by the shadows of the past never really finished passing. Not so much with St. Augustine, as Christendom became the world into which I was born. But with Loury things are a little different. Loury is much closer in time and nationality. By that same measure, he is much farther away.

I once believed the past was behind us. The twentieth century as I knew it in America was one of, I thought, healing and forgiveness. America has a black history. Genocide, human trafficking, slave driving, structural exclusion, wanton foreign wars, abortion on demand. One can’t undo the horrors done, but one can, at least, not hate the men and women born into the same predicament. I imagined, or perhaps I had grown smug in the assurance, that all was getting better, that the racial divides were scarring over and growing together into a whole organism. Looking back, though, and at times through the eyes of guides like Glenn Loury, I’ve come to see that I was a bit too eager to put the past behind me. Racism is over, I came to insist. I didn’t want to hear complaints about it any longer. In Late Admissions, Loury takes to task pundits who have insisted on the end of racism the loudest. I reflect now, with shame, that what I called the end of racism was the triumph of “white” as the default mode of existence. Black history was to be a part of American history, which was predominantly white history, I subliminally believed. Black and brown and red and yellow were to be subcultures. I think this is what I must have meant by healing, by forgiveness, by harmony. It all sounds far too pat to me now.

The next step after smugness is dismissiveness, and the step after that is disdain. I hope I didn’t take that third step, but reading Loury’s book I shudder to realize that I probably came close. I kept wanting to read his story as a universal one, of a man who is lost, who flails, who curses the darkness, who is found by a merciful God. There is no black or white in this saga, I want to believe. It’s the progress of a pilgrim, the story of a soul. Yes, this is true. But Glenn Loury is not just a soul. He’s a man. A black man. And, for him, being black, coming from a black family in a black neighborhood, is important, the bedrock of his earthly existence. As Loury tells it, being black isn’t everything. But it is something.

By contrast, I never really cared about race. It didn’t enter the equations of my identity. Whatever my mutt-like make-up is, I never thought that it defined me.

But that is the prerogative of those not relegated to subcultures, is it not? Not seeing race, not caring about genetics — this is easy to proclaim when one’s life has not already, in a thousand ways, been touched by them. I can slip out of racial categories because those categories are enshrined to my benefit in invisible ways in patterns of thought and regimes of culture and law. Glenn Loury doesn’t have that luxury. He doesn’t get to be post-racial. Not yet, at least, and maybe not ever. And maybe he wouldn’t want to anyway. What I had thought was American healing amounted to the erasure of a lot of American people. Reading Late Admissions I realize that I am back where I started, or, more accurately, back where I never began in the first place.

Black history is mankind’s history, I still want to believe. Black American history is American history, by the same token, and everyone, in America and elsewhere, ought to learn it. But it is not *my* history, in either register, and I can’t deracinate it to make it so. Glenn Loury’s fight for his soul’s dignity and his life’s meaning is now, thanks to Late Admissions, an open book. But I didn’t write it, and couldn’t if I tried.