THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS:

On November 2nd, 2020, Brown professor of Economics and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Glenn Loury joined Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel's course "Justice" to discuss the ethics of affirmative action in American higher education. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

MICHAEL SANDEL: I wonder if I could begin with a provocative quotation from a lecture you've given. You've said that affirmative action is not about equality, it's about "covering ass." What did you mean by that and what do you think generally about the ethics of affirmative action?

GLENN LOURY: I was drawing the listener's attention to the difference between the institutional interest in having a diverse profile of participants and the interests, as I understand them, of the population which may be the beneficiary of this largesse. My point was: if you want genuine equality, this is distinct from titular equality. If you want substantive equality, this is distinct from optics equality. If you want equality of respect, of honor, of standing, of dignity, of achievement, of mastery, then you may want to think carefully about implementing systems of selection that prefer a population on a racial basis. Such a system may be inconsistent over the longer term in achieving what I call genuine equality; real equality; substantive equality; equality of standing, dignity, achievement, honor, and respect.

I set this within a historical context in which African Americans--beginning from exclusion, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, widespread discrimination--are actually diminished in terms of the development of our competitive and productive capacities. Education was not equal in 1930 for blacks and whites, nor in 1950, nor in 1970 for that matter. There are all kinds of negative consequences of discrimination in employment, residential location, segregation, and so on that impede development within the African American population of the latent potential capacities to perform. Given such a history, one can't expect at day one that there's going to be equality of, say, test scores because the background condition is one of unequal opportunity to develop human skills. So that's the status quo ante. That's the baseline from which we are attempting to move towards something that's more equal.

I see this as a difficult problem, not a simple one. I don't object to affirmative action in principle saying that it's racial discrimination in reverse, or that it's unfair to white people. That's not my argument. If I'm transitioning from a status quo ante of black exclusion, I may want to rely upon some preferential methods as a temporary, stop-gap mechanism. But, at the end of the day, I must address myself to the underlying fundamental developmental deficits that impede the ability of African Americans to compete.

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