Confessions Of A Contrarian Black Thinker Who Despises Glenn Loury

Late Admissions makes a unintentionally compelling case that Loury is the most personally vile public intellectual in African American History.

When reviewing Glenn Loury’s Late Admissions, a repetition of remarkably dark pathologies posed as a memoir, a contrarian black critic ( in this case, me) is posed with two problems. The first being the anecdotal evidence of my own life, and how it counters Loury’s generalities about Black America tied to his own experience.

I first knew of Loury via his picture in Jet, when he was arraigned for beating up his mistress, and the debate at Sam and Terry’s barber shop around it. The issue was June 29th 1987, Page 24. On the right side, a picture of Loury, preeminent black conservative, with sunken, darkened rungs around his eyes. On the right, Pamela Foster with a neck brace, flattened nose, puffed lips and right side of her face grotesquely swollen. The article juxtaposed his history of publicly chastising lower class black America’s problems with his domestic violence charge, something that even the men in the shop didn’t believe was worth the charges getting dismissed( once they saw the picture).

Loury wasn’t a foreign figure on black print media: he had been on black issues programs, and Jet-treated him favorably before his domestic…